Australian Walks: Flinders Island - rugged mountain ranges full of wildlife and flora

- rugged mountain ranges full of wildlife and flora

It was while we were walking in Queensland with Hugh as a guide that we learned from him about the island where he had farmed for much of his life.

This was an encouragement to join the next trip there that Auswalk had planned. So that’s how we happened to set off on an adventure to an island we’d only learnt about a few months ago, and that most of our friends professed to have never heard of!

The one hour flight in the 20-seater plane from Essendon Airport in Melbourne was noisy but smooth. We flew south-east over Wilson’s Promontory and Bass Strait to our destination, the largest of the approximately100 islands forming the Furneaux group lying directly north of the East coast of Tasmania.

They form a barrier to Bass Strait, so that although seen in 1773 by the British navigator Tobias Furneaux from HMS Adventure on his way north to rejoin James Cook on his second Pacific voyage, the identity of the strait was not established until George Bass and Matthew Flinders sailed through it in 1798.

As for today, for people in the area over 10,000 years ago this island was also a good place to walk.

With lower sea levels, they could walk with no trouble from Wilson’s Promontory to Tasmania, with islands of the Furneaux group as part of the land bridge. Melting of the polar ice sheets put paid to 25,000 years of foot traffic and isolated the Tasmanians until the arrival of ships from Europe.

Our Auswalk guides, Marie and Hugh, assembled our group of 14 at Above right: Striding over vast slabs of granite beneath Old Man’s Head on our second day of walking. Opposite page below left: Mobs of Bennetts wallabies come out to graze in the evening. Below right: The sharp eyes of our guide Marie found this juvenile Strzelecki burrowing crayfish, a species unique to the high mountains of the Furneaux group.