The Forgotten Islands

by Michael Veitch

  He pushed the balls aside and unrolled a nautical chart of Port Phillip Bay across the billiard table. He was keen to show me the depth markings of the main shipping lane, backing up what he’d told me about how the route in fact followed the ancient line of the old Yarra River bed, which once cut its way across the floor of the bay before being drowned thousands of years ago when the sea rose after the last ice age. Hence the curious tendency of modern vessels to ignore the most direct route down the middle of the bay, instead following a line south-east, then turning abruptly at an acute angle towards the heads. It was an idea I found strangely romantic: a drowned riverbed carved into the floor of the sea. Using some of the red billiard balls as weights, his large hands moved back and forth across the paper, explaining detail after detail.

  As we discussed the map, I could hear my parents muttering upstairs in low tones as the light from the television flickered on the wall of the stairwell above our heads. My mother, in particular, approved less and less of the time Ron and I spent together, regarding him as unfit company.

  There was, this night, a melancholy in Ron’s voice I had not heard before, and although he never breathed a word to me about his personal life, I sensed he knew the game was up, and that everything was about to change drastically and forever. But for the moment, he could, like the Roman emperor oblivious to the barbarian hordes crashing their way through the palace towards his throne, still pretend, with me at least, that his domain was still inviolable.

  I remember asking him something about the waters outside the bay, prompting him to tell me once again about the spectacular change of tides at the heads. He told me that only once had he seen the waters of Bass Strait close up, on a visit he had made several years previously – I can no longer recall the reason or how he said he’d managed to get there – to Deal Island. Here, in a kind of impromptu museum in one of the run-down cottages, hidden amid the cabinets of salt-eroded remnants of Victorian-era memorabilia, he’d discovered a long-forgotten ledger detailing, in meticulous handwriting, all the comings and goings of the island at around the turn of the twentieth century. He’d sat and read, he said, for hours, until the light faded. He related the story of the boy and the sea monster slowly and without emotion. I listened in silence, gripped by a delicious, terrifying sensation, a slow oozing of mystery and unease that filled me from inside and quickened my breath. I was grateful, not merely for the tale itself, but for the fact that he had chosen me to hear it. It sealed a kind of pact between us, strengthened in some silent, macabre way by the gradual realisation of his sins, and his creeping ostracism from the adult world, a world that I, this night, for the first time, began to feel a part of.

  It was the last conversation I ever had with Ron. My parents, to their credit, extricated me – and themselves – from the hysteria of the holiday house a day or so later, and our Christmas was, for once, spent quietly at home. In the following months, Ron’s personal life, as well as his flimsy business and financial structures, propped up with lies and other people’s money, began to fall apart. After he forged his wife’s signature on legal documents, the whole house of cards came crashing down. Divorce ensued, criminal proceedings were mentioned, and the seaside palace was lost to all of us forever.

  But the story he told me of the boy and the lighthouse remained, preserved in my head – a strange, dark tale that decades ago fed my boyish mind. Whether it was true or not, I have no idea.

  FOR MARYJEANNE

  1

  FIRST ISLANDS

  Like a reclining woman, Three Hummock Island lay off on the western horizon, a series of soft, bluish undulations shrouded in a cool, late-afternoon haze. It was hard to tell how far away it was. From my vantage point atop the geological curiosity known as The Nut, I could see several landforms, all cloaked in this odd blue Tasmanian light which made distances almost impossible to gauge. Besides, I didn’t quite have my breath back, my vision was blurry and the sweat that had soaked my clothes was quickly starting to cool. But at least I had made it to the top. On one side of this grassy oasis stretched the sea; on the other, far below, the roofs and little streets of the seaside village of Stanley, on Tasmania’s north-west coast. Despite my windpipe feeling like someone had been scraping it from the inside with a carpenter’s tool used to make fancy embellishments on a wooden lathe, I was conscious I had to keep moving.

  I’d come to climb The Nut because someone had told me it offered the best mainland view of a collection of Bass Strait islands known as the Hunter Group. It was just as well the view from up here was so good, because the climb had nearly exhausted me. Standing on shores or cliff tops, gazing out towards distant islands, seems to have been a familiar pastime of mine, at least since my youth, and if I were to be honest, probably from around the time Ron told me about the Bass Strait Islands. Without knowing it, he managed to plant a seed in my twelve-year-old mind. Then, as now, being an escapist by nature, a virtual only child, prone to fantasies involving long periods of solitude in remote and inhospitable locations, and in youth regularly gripped with that emboldening conviction of being something of an outsider, islands held for me a particular esteem.

  For a couple of years after he had exited our lives in such high drama, I missed Ron, despite his sins. I would never have admitted this to my parents – by this time he had well and truly evolved into a pariah – but the particular gap his departure left in my young and voracious curiosity was never quite filled. Unknowingly, Ron had been responsible for propelling a small part of my brain in a certain direction, sending it on a journey on which it was still travelling nearly four decades later.

  The first time I can remember being mesmerised by islands was just a couple of years after that last summer at the beach house. Parents of a childhood friend had taken me along on their summer holiday to Wilson’s Promontory, a large and complex peninsula of national park that juts into Bass Strait, dangling beneath Australia’s south-east coast like an appendage. Its most popular spot is a magnificent beach named Tidal River, a camping resort where melaleuca forests and giant boulders frame pristine beaches of firm pale sand. For what seemed like hours every day, we kids bobbed and splashed in the waves of that beach over a summer spent with random groups of children that came and went. By the end of the first week, a loose collection of twenty of us had clumped together, fighting, shouting and cavorting in the water from first light till dusk. I played my own part in the social permutations, but only half-heartedly, because my overriding memory of that summer was of hours and hours spent staring out to sea.

  I noticed them on our first day. A series of islands, huge and green, lying what seemed a long way off the shore. Sometimes white plumes of spray could be seen rising up from the rocks at one end, silently absorbing the breakers that would otherwise make our on-shore paddlings impossible. These islands seemed to change from day to day: grey one morning, blue and green the next, and every afternoon wobbling gently back and forth in a jelly of translucent summer haze.

  I became obsessed with those islands, but to my endless frustration, no one seemed to know a thing about them. My enquiries as to their name, history and, most urgent, how to get onto them, wore thin with my friends who, initially amused at my dogged curiosity, eventually thought me stand-offish and despaired at my waning interest in their watery games. My idea of fun was instead to climb around the rocky headland to get a better view of the treasures offshore. I managed to coax one or two followers into an expedition or two, but they quickly tired of it, and it soon became a solitary affair.

  One evening, my friend’s father, always a kind man, put an old pair of binoculars he’d found into my hands. ‘You might find a use for these,’ he said. I was beyond gratitude and could hardly wait for the next morning to use them. At first light, I beat everyone down to the water and set myself up on a large, lichen-covered rock above a cove. They were hard to focus, and the left side was slightly out of alignment, making concentrated viewing a little nauseating, but there they were – my islands
– green, magnificent and apparently deserted. Through the glasses, I saw that there were several of them, varying in size from mere rocks to places of substantial hills, gullies and beaches, an entire other world, perfect and aloof, and I desperately wanted to be there.

  I returned the glasses, even more restless than before. On one of the last evenings before returning home, sunburnt and exhausted, we sat waiting at Tidal River’s single shop for fish and chips on a sweltering night as our salty bathers fused to a row of grimy plastic seats. My friend’s father was standing on the lino floor, engaged in conversation with a man I’d seen him talking to earlier on the beach. He glanced in my direction, then beckoned. ‘This gentleman can tell you about your islands,' he said. I lit up. He was a former park ranger and knew every inch of the place. What I’d been looking at with such interest, he told me, was in fact the Glennie Group, four islands in all, the main one being ‘Great Glennie’. Another, ‘Citadel Island', had a lighthouse, but nobody had lived on any of them for years. They were all now part of the national park, and were about 7 kilometres away. He’d been out there several times, although not for years, and in his words they were ‘magic places’. I’ll never forget the way he said it. ‘Magic places. Just magic.’ He repeated it with a faraway look.

  Our fish and chips were ready, and barely had the conversation started than I was being dragged away. ‘Do boats go there?’ I managed to ask, to which he just laughed. ‘No, hardly ever now. Hard to land. Too many rocks. One of the universities has a research shed out there, but that’s about it. Oh, and there’s a nice cave there too …’ and at that point, having made everyone’s dinner start to go cold, the conversation ended, and that was that. But I now had a name. ‘Great Glennie’. I swore that one day, I would walk along its perfect ridges and explore the treasures of its cave.

  I felt the same childlike rush of excitement ten years later when in Britain, contemplating the map of ferry routes which spider across the Western Isles of Scotland, adjacent to the Highlands. Here, it appeared, there were boats going everywhere, and I was determined to get on as many as I could. I gave it a pretty good shake, spending a fortune on ferry tickets to the most remote islands I could find, even the ones where there was nowhere to stay, limiting my sojourn to the ten minutes it took to off-load a handful of locals at the tiny jetty. Skye, Rum, Eigg, Muck, St Kilda, a weekend stranded on one called Canna, North and South Uist and even Harris, where the eponymous tweed was still being spun in the early 1980s: I made sorties to them all and many more besides.

  Most were bleak places with endless stretches of lush but treeless hills. I would hitchhike around some of them, being picked up by quiet farmers in small trucks who smiled but said almost nothing, keeping their eyes fixed on the road ahead, so narrow in parts that every hundred metres or so, a ‘passing place’ widened just enough to allow two small vehicles to pass carefully by.

  One of them – I can no longer remember which – I attempted to circumnavigate in a single day by any means possible: walking, hitching, even via the unreliable local bus network. A large and friendly woman with a basket of fresh eggs waiting at a stop was amazed anyone would want to do such a thing, thought it impossible anyway, and proved to be right. I set out early and followed the tiny roads and walking tracks as best I could through single-house villages of unpronounceable names, over hills of rich, almost dark-green grass and deserted rocky shorlines. Out of nowhere, ruined villages would appear as tumbled stone walls with only the ancient fire hearths still intact, ghostly remnants of a time when these islands were far more populated than today.

  With my Ordnance Survey map in hand, I left paths and trekked out across hills and valleys, the sea always on my left, attempting shortcuts when I could. There was no rain about and the day was even sunny in parts, but water still soaked through the thin desert boots I had brought from home, making my feet cold and heavy.

  They were the starkest hills I had ever seen. In parts the green gave way to stretches of ancient, treeless basalt, almost a moonscape.

  For most of the day, I shadowed a party of fellow ramblers – four of five in number – who remained in the distance, a kilometre or so ahead. I remember their sensible walking sticks and distinct red and yellow rain jackets rolled into the top of their sturdy packs. All day, we floated in and out of each other’s vision, up and down on a sea of alternating green and stony hills. Several times I put on the pace a little and was sure I would catch them up at the next bend or over a rise, but they somehow managed to always keep the same distance ahead of me. Late in the day, they vanished behind one particularly deep fold in a hill, but this time failed to emerge up the other side, and I lost them for good.

  Eventually, overwhelmed by the deceptive scale of the place and its atmosphere of unconquerable loneliness, I abandoned my attempt, found what passed for a main road, waited an hour for the next vehicle and hitched a ride back to the island’s little port, where the ferry took me away.

  Later, in the south-west of Ireland, I handed a wary-looking fisherman five pounds to sit me on his nets and take me out in a six-metre swell to the Blasket Islands off Dingle Bay. After my first night, a storm came in and I was a captive of this bleak emerald rock for four days with nothing to do but wander from one end to the other watching the slate green sea sucking back and forth at the black basalt rocks. Four days of heaven.

  It was a similar trip to the island of Heligoland off the German coast in a southern corner of the North Sea. Three stunned young German students stared at me when I told them of my intentions to take the three-hour ferry trip from Cuxhaven in the mouth of the Elbe River. ‘But… there’s nothing to do out there,’ they said, disbelieving. ‘Nothing.’ They were completely right, of course, but also wrong. The ferry was virtually empty, but then again so was the island. Situated away from the mainland, Heligoland is a geological oddity, famous for its pollen-free air, warm weather and having been bombed a great deal during the Second World War. Despite its higher than average number of sunny days due to its position in the Gulf Stream, I arrived in the middle of pouring rain, which did not let up for the entire three days of my trip. I also seemed to be the youngest person on the place by about sixty years. But I loved it. Walking along its massive red-coloured bluff overlooking the wild North Sea, scrambling over the remains of bombed concrete gun emplacements and U-boat pens, the locals in the pub, which shut outrageously early every night, could not quite understand what I was doing there, but were impressed by my enthusiasm nonetheless.

  Every trip was an adventure, every landing a conquest. I fell in love with islands, though never the popular ones, never the bright or the warm ones: the resorts, the magnets for tourists seeking beaches and bars and bikinis. For me, it was the forgotten places – the cold, the bleak, the rocky and the windswept isles – and the less inhabited the better. If only I had known back then that some of the most lonely and windswept of all were to be found just a stone’s throw from my own home town, in the blustery waters of Bass Strait.

  2

  ‘THE CHEESE ONE, AND THE OTHER ONE’

  Bass Strait. The shallow strip of water between the Australian mainland and its island state of Tasmania that gradually emerged 10000 to 12 000 years ago after the last ice age ended and the waters rose to drown the low-lying Bassian Plain. Two hundred and fifty kilometres of changeable winds, furious swells and illogical tides; a blustery passage which funnels the southern gales that race unimpeded around the globe at latitude 40 degrees – the so-called ‘roaring forties’ – and where two great oceans hurl their mighty currents back and forth in an endless tug of war, defying set laws of the sea, and challenging all but those who respect her endlessly changeable moods. Living in the nearby southern city of Melbourne, I had always been aware of Bass Strait’s reputation, that she was to be respected, and if possible avoided, but beyond that, I knew little.

  And what of her islands? How many are there in Bass Strait? After discovering the answer for myself, I conducted a straw poll am
ong various people who, like me, had grown up just a couple of hours’ drive from Bass Strait’s northern shore. ‘How many islands in Bass Strait?’ I would ask them.

  ‘No idea,' they would say.

  ‘Well, how many would you think there are?’ I teased. Their response was invariably something like, ‘Well … let’s see. There’s the cheese one … and the other one.’

  Not a bad start, that. Everyone knew of substantial King Island in the west of the strait – its name emblazons an array of high-end, expensive dairy products that fill delicatessen fridges across the country. Its bookend twin, Flinders, guards the strait’s eastern approach and could be named by a few, but by no means many, and the fact that there are well over a hundred islands scattered across this rough little stretch of water astounded everyone, not least myself.

  Three Hummock Island. Standing atop The Nut, I rolled the name around in my mouth. It seemed huge, standing aloof off the coast like a ship waiting to come in, cloaked in that odd, diffused light. Strange, I thought, that I had sought out places like this on the other side of the world, yet this one, just half an hour’s flying time from my home, I had never heard of.

  And what about Bass Strait’s other islands? Somewhere out there were places with wonderful names like Tin Kettle Island, Trefoil, Guncarriage, Black Pyramid Rock, Rodondo, the thrillingly titled Devil’s Tower and even one called Skull Island. Robert Louis Stevenson would be impressed.

  Prompted into a little research, I learned that only King and Flinders are significantly populated these days, others have a handful of caretakers and farmers, and many are empty outcrops that hug larger places or jut suddenly from the water by themselves. One I learned of is Boundary Islet, just 85 metres in length and providing the only land border between Victoria and Tasmania, the state line running clean across its rocky backbone in Bass Strait’s north.