The more I learned, the more I realised this was an Australia I hardly knew. This was stormy weather Australia, an Australia of shipwrecks and sealers; of brutality and extermination; of folly and heroism; of wild weather and explorers in flimsy boats; of thousand-foot cliffs and amazing birds and strange vegetation; of places well-trodden and others believed never to have felt the impact of a human foot. This was a truly gothic Australia, as real and as valid as the gold and the drovers and the deserts, yet known to almost no one. Here was an Australia far removed from the warm lapping of the Pacific, this was a cold-water Australian story, with Bass Strait starring as its North Atlantic.
Perhaps that’s why the story of the boy and the creature rattled around in my head for so many years: a single jewelled detail about Bass Strait that I could from time to time pull out and retell, choosing my audience, adding an embellishment here and there, impressing some, unnerving others. But whatever the reaction, be it wide-eyed astonishment or derisive laughter, the questions that followed were more or less the same: ‘Where is this place?’ people would ask, their curiosity piqued, expecting me to tell them more about this romantic locale, so close to their home. Then, alas, I would have to confess to never having been there. I was never again able to ask Ron about the story he told me that night when I was a boy. He died, I heard, suffering dementia, a decade or so ago in another state, taking its truth with him. In forty years, I have never heard it again, never had it recalled nor even remembered by anyone who knew him. Nor have I come across it, or anything quite like it, in any form, told by any individual, anywhere else. Yet, it is a story that has stayed with me, swishing around the rear of my mind, appearing now and again like a shadow flitting behind distant trees but never stopping, and never quite going away. Perhaps it is one of those stories so fused to a particular place that one must actually go there to discover it.
Ron was the only person I knew who had been to the place where it happened, Deal Island. I determined that I would attempt to be the second. I would also explore Bass Strait and its islands and the people who live there, and what they do on their rocky, sea-sprayed homes in these opening years of the twenty-first century. I would climb the hills and walk the beaches and drive the roads of some of these islands, see what grows there, what burrows there, watch the sea and the wind pound the rocks and the treetops. I would seek out the stories of the shipwrecks and the sealers and the Indigenous people and hopefully, along the way, discover the truth of that other story, told to me by an ominous figure from my childhood many years ago, and decide for myself whether it might be true. Perhaps I would also find the answer to the most curious question of all: how such an intriguing place, so close to home, had managed to elude me for so long.
3
STANLEY
The little village of Stanley is so absurdly charming that one feels it can’t possibly be real. Surely it is just a set for one of those well-produced historical BBC television dramas set in the 1870s? An old fishing village on Tasmania’s north-west tip, Stanley seems to have side-stepped the waves of urban renewal that have left their mark on neighbouring communities, and survives as a true nineteenth-century seaside village time capsule. However, despite a dawning awareness among its genial inhabitants that what they have is a yet-to-be-plundered tourist Mecca, Stanley’s time in the sun has yet to arrive.
‘Lovely town you have here,’ I remarked to the affable bloke serving me coffee in one of three such establishments along the road stretching down to the old dock, where a blue-painted timber fishing boat was out of the water on stilts being repaired. ‘Yes,’ he said, looking out a window, as if struck by the notion for the first time. ‘It is, isn’t it?’
I strolled along a row of old and brightly painted wooden houses with neat picket fences, and cottage gardens with foxgloves and marigolds and decorated nameplates like ‘Limanda’ and ‘Gull Cottage’. I was later told, and well believe, that American Express chose Stanley as the ideal location to film a series of commercials – set in Ireland! But for the spelling of a few street signs and the incongruous bright red Australia Post letterbox, this little place could indeed pass for a quiet corner of Kerry or Donegal.
It was a Saturday morning and I’d already been up for ages. Later that day I was to finally meet Robert, who had heard through a friend of a friend that I was wanting to visit the Bass Strait Islands. He had offered to take me out to Three Hummock Island – his childhood home – in a light plane. We were to meet our pilot at the little aerodrome at nearby Smithton the following morning, make the short flight and be met by the current caretakers, then stay on the island for several days. In the meantime, I had most of the day to kill in Stanley. I was excited and anxious about the impending trip, and walked around the sleepy town impatiently.
It being early, a woman was placing a sandwich board outside a former Masonic Lodge advertising local craft. I followed her in. ‘Oh. Coming in are you?’ she said in a resigned sort of way and, manoeuvring past her, I started to delve into a tray of hand-knitted toys that looked like things people had made for themselves during the Great Depression, only slightly newer. A rather smart brown monkey caught my eye and I brought it up to her. ‘How much for this handsome fellow?’ I asked jauntily. She gave it a disappointed look, joining in my cheery banter not one bit. ‘Oh … ten dollars … I suppose.’ It was obvious that I was more impressed with the local handiwork than was she. ‘I have a second cousin on the way,’ I told her without a grain of truth. No matter, its smiley, knitted dial would be just the thing for some tot or other. She wasn’t so sure. ‘Well … I suppose he’ll like it,’ was as generous as she was prepared to be, assuming, oddly, that my imaginary new relative was to be a boy.
‘So, what is there to do in Stanley?’ I asked. She took off her glasses to let them dangle on a long plastic chain, then scrutinised both windowless walls, as if an answer would be found suddenly inscribed there. ‘Climbed The Nut?’ she said. I told her I hadn’t, and asked if she did so much herself. ‘God no!’ she exclaimed. ‘I get tired just looking at the bloody thing.’
Pondering whether this woman had at some stage been treated unfairly by Tourism Tasmania and was now exacting her revenge, I retreated towards the sunny entrance, clutching my jolly new friend. ‘You can try the museum if you like,’ she said and waved in a vague direction.
Across the road, the woman in charge of the museum resembled her colleague at the craft shop almost identically, but their attitudes could not have been more different. Inside the former church hall that now functioned as the Stanley Folk Museum and Genealogical Society, Jill (I quickly found out her name) nearly fell off her comfortable chair with excitement as I ambled in and coughed up the modest entrance fee. She was a jolly kind of woman with attractive eyes and in a few minutes most of her life story had been spilled before me.
She seemed rather anxious and not particularly confident in the job but, new to the position as she was, she was keen to make a good impression. Was there anything, perhaps, she could help me with? The room was a rather splendid if chaotic collection of strange local memorabilia juxtaposed with items of natural history. Unrecognisable things that had been dug up or badly corroded in the sea were displayed next to immaculate Coalport dinner sets from the 1880s, and a large, deteriorating cash register with several rows of heavy metal buttons of unimaginable function.
I explained I was on my way to an outlying island and was interested in ‘acquiring (why I said it like this I’ll never know) local knowledge of maritime folklore’. She let out a squeal, and I was immediately ushered into a small back room where a library had been set up, which she was most anxious for me to peruse. In fact, the last thing I wanted to do on that sunny morning was to sit reading, but her enthusiasm was irresistible.
Having placed a cup of brown tea down next to me and unscrewed the lid of a gigantic jar filled with biscuits, she left me to it, gently closing the door of the little room on her way out. I listened with trepidation for the sound of a slidin
g lock, but thankfully none came. I pulled out a chair and tried to settle into Patsy Adam-Smith’s account of her days on the Bass Strait mail run, which I had pulled off a shelf, but my heart wasn’t really in it, and I wanted to leave pretty much straightaway.
Despite the fact that I was clutching a toy monkey, the woman obviously saw me as a serious scholar, and was anxious to assist me on my march towards a Pulitzer Prize. I paced the little room for a bit, then detected a muffled conversation through the door. ‘Oh no, you can’t go in there,’ I heard her say. ‘It’s currently being occupied for academic purposes.’ There was nothing in her voice to indicate she was being anything but deadly serious. Recalling the kidnap-by-zealous-fan movie genre, I sat down again and decided that another fifteen minutes would surely do no harm, after which I would execute a respectable, scholarly exit.
I ran my fingers over the spines of the books on their grey metal, hardware-shop shelving, picking the odd one out here and there. It certainly was an odd collection, ranging from tomes about knitting patterns (evidently a major Stanley activity) and locally published reminiscences from old-time fishermen who, in good old plain-speaking language, told of their decades spent ravaging the surrounding sea of its once-abundant life, accompanied by generally blurry photographs of indistinct people, places and events. I could barely manage a page without drowsiness. Giving my ruse another ten minutes just for good measure, I grabbed the monkey and, feigning the kind of neck strain always brought on by intense study, re-entered the museum, rolling straight into a spiel of praise for this fine collection, only to find myself completely alone, the heater off and the front door shut. I stood in the awkward silence. How long had I been in there? ‘Hello?’ I called, before making my way to the front door, which, in a moment of dread, I feared might be locked. There was no sign of the woman, or anyone else. I closed the door, pondering for a moment what I could have stolen from the place had I a mind to, and felt it click. I decided there was now little else left to do but climb The Nut.
4
CLIMBING THE NUT
Matthew Flinders was a brilliant navigator, a superb cartographer and an explorer almost without peer. But when it came to naming some of the many places he discovered on his several voyages of exploration, he could occasionally lapse into, well, the pedestrian. In the late eighteenth century, no one actually knew that Bass Strait even existed. From the First Fleet onwards, ships arriving from England travelled 700 miles out of their way around the southern coast of Tasmania, before turning north and slogging it up to Sydney Cove.
Despite no one ever having seen such a thing, many believed Tasmania, or Van Diemen’s Land, to be connected to the mainland via a long isthmus. Captain Tobias Furneaux came close to exposing this myth when he accompanied Cook on his second voyage in 1773. After his ship, the Adventure, became separated from Cook, a squall blew Furneaux into the strait. He came as far as spying, even mapping, part of Flinders Island before deciding not to risk his ship and turned west again back to the Indian Ocean. He reported to Cook that ‘… it is my opinion that there is no strait between New Holland and Van Diemen’s Land, but it is a very deep bay.’ Had he shown a little more daring, he may have beaten Flinders to the punch by thirty years and the strait could now bear his name instead of that of Flinders’ fellow explorer, and the man he deemed worthy of the naming rights, George Bass. For his troubles, Cook allowed Furneaux to put his moniker on its eastern archipelago, still today called the Furneaux Group.
The young naval lieutenant Flinders and surgeon George Bass met on board the ship which took them out from England in 1795, the Reliance, and got on like a house on fire, even discovering themselves to have been born just a few miles from each other in Lincolnshire. Both expressed a passion for discovery, and an ambition to put it into practice in the blank sheet of the new colony. On board Reliance was another gentleman who could do them absolutely no harm at all in furthering their ambitions, the newly appointed Governor of New South Wales, John Hunter, also on his way out to take up the job.
Once in New South Wales, Bass and Flinders spent as much time as they could exploring, using an absurdly small boat Bass had brought out in the ship’s hold, a virtual dinghy, and aptly named Tom Thumb. After discovering various rivers and inlets along the New South Wales coast (Bass even made an early but unsuccessful attempt to cross the Blue Mountains), the colony was set abuzz by the incredible arrival of three survivors from the Sydney Cove, on her way from India carrying a load of rum, which had been wrecked on an island in the Furneaux Group months before. Eighteen survivors had set out overland after their long boat foundered on Victoria’s Ninety Mile beach, and all but three had perished in the terrible journey north.
Flinders was sent down in a rescue vessel, the Francis, and reached those survivors who were still hanging on to the tiny island, soon to be aptly named ‘Preservation’. Bass, meanwhile, had set off independently with just six sturdy oarsmen to explore part of what was to become the Victorian coast, discovering, among other things, Western Port Bay.
What both Bass and Flinders had seen of the strong westerly tidal swells led them to suspect an opening did in fact exist all the way to the southern Indian Ocean, and they petitioned Governor Hunter for the chance to prove it. Alive to the prospect of a greatly shortened shipping route, as well as harvesting the swarms of seals Flinders had reported seeing on the islands down there, Hunter coughed up the Norfolk, a cramped and rather leaky sloop of 21 tons, reportedly put together on Norfolk Island from timbers salvaged from the wreck of the First Fleet’s Sirius in 1790. So, the two young explorers, still in their twenties, set out in their recycled ship in October 1798 to cross a strip of water they very much hoped to be there, and write themselves into the history books.
The two men set off and plodded along the northern Tasmanian coastline, took a detour up the Tamar River, and noted all sorts of hitherto unknown geographical features. One rock-strewn cape that caught Flinders’ eye was duly named ‘Rocky Cape’; a flat-topped promontory he saw and which reminded him a little of a table was noted down as ‘Table Cape’, and a small island swarming with albatross was named, in a flurry of inspiration, ‘Albatross Island’.
But what really impressed Flinders on this, one of the first of his many famous voyages, was a magnificent circular rock thrusting dramatically out of the sea, which he correctly assumed to be the remains of an ancient volcano. ‘A cliffy, round lump, in form much resembling a Christmas cake,’ he recorded. Here, surely, was the chance to inject a little flair into the map of this fascinating new coastline. Indeed, how easy would it be today to sell tourists the idea of, say, a ‘Christmas Cake Mountain’, or ‘Pudding Rock’? But no, ‘Circular Head’ was the eminently sensible name Flinders gave it, and Circular Head it is today. Or if you’re a local, it’s ‘The Nut’, and on a sunny afternoon in spring, I set out to climb it.
There’s a chairlift on it these days, the construction of which many locals fought on the grounds that it would ruin The Nut’s dramatic appearance, rising as it does out of the ocean like a coastal Uluru, a natural cathedral of rock, dominating the town of Stanley, which it also protects from the elements in its mighty lee. They really needn’t have worried. From any distance, the chairlift is completely swallowed up by the enormous mass of stone and can hardly be seen at all. The only way to spoil The Nut would be to either blow it up or paint it bright orange, and believe me, you’d never find the dynamite. Nor, for that matter, the paint.
I considered forking out the ten dollars for the chairlift ride to the top, but elected instead to follow the sign that read ‘summit path’.
The term ‘path’ was used here, I discovered, somewhat laterally. This ‘path’ proved more like a rungless ladder, far and away the steepest and nastiest short walk I have ever taken. It starts innocently enough, somewhere near a harmless little clearing on the ocean side (oddly, the only place where you can view the sea, as The Nut blocks Stanley’s ocean aspect entirely). There’s a sign saying somethi
ng about ‘steep climb’, but the initial gentleness of the slope seems to belie the warning. Then one turns a corner to encounter the first of several sections, craftily concealed.
After only a few metres, the cracking concrete ribbon seems to take off and rise in front of you till it’s more a wall than a path. An old iron safety railing is the only way of progressing, one rung at a time up to infinity. With every step the air seemed to be sucked out of my unfit, middle-aged lungs. At one brief nearly horizontal respite before the next assault, the path passes close under the leisurely chairlift riders with their dangling feet, who looked down on me pityingly, their decision to fork out for the ride vindicated by the agonised expression on my face.
At last, the short but incredibly steep path flattens out onto several square kilometres of grassland and bush, and a truly exhilarating view. The steepness of the track at least allows the climber the thrill of having achieved a great height in a very short time. I collapsed onto my back for a moment on the soft, lush turf, as a group of sixty-somethings, alighting from the comfort of their chairlift, stepped over me. As the blood rush careered through my brain, white spots streaked across my vision and the clouds appeared to be being sucked back and forth down an invisible plughole in the sky. ‘Bid of a shdeep vork, eh?’ said some old bloke standing over me in a thick Dutch accent, his USS Missouri baseball cap blocking out the sun. I refused to dignify him with an answer but got up, grunted and walked away to explore the delightful, rooftop world of Circular Head.
A series of paths splayed out in several directions. I chose one that took me to the edge of the cliff to treat myself to my first real view of Bass Strait. The panorama of the Hunter Group lay before me over to the west: flat-looking Robbins Island, then the long thin form of Hunter Island itself, the lumpy stack of Trefoil Island, and, unquestionably, the noblest-looking of them all with its three distinct equidistant summits, Three Hummock Island (Flinders named that one too).
The Forgotten Islands Page 3
