The Forgotten Islands

by Michael Veitch

  Flaps down, the speed of the aircraft washed away and Geoff eased back the throttle. The motor sounded like an old man going off to sleep with a last grumble, and we bumped along the ground. With a final snarl of power, we swung the tail around and sidled up to the white four-wheel drive I had seen for a surreal instant earlier, but which could have easily passed for a vision in a dream. This time, two very real and smiling figures stood beside it.

  ‘Er, how did you go?’ enquired Geoff, reacting perhaps to the pallor of my face. ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Good. You prefer … low flying?’ He rubbed his stubble. ‘Yes, I don’t like going too high,’ he added with consideration. ‘I like to see what’s underneath me. I get a little … uh … scared way up there,’ he said, pointing upwards. I looked at him hard to see if he was pulling my leg, but I suspect he wasn’t.

  ‘Welcome. Welcome to the island!’ said Robert, stepping down from the aircraft and holding onto a strut for support. For a moment I thought that, pontiff-like, he was about to kiss the ground. ‘Beautiful. She’s just beautiful,’ he said, looking around. And as the fog in my head began to clear, I could see that he was right.

  ‘The house! To the house!’ he called, directing like a stockman on a horse. I fell in behind Kate and Chris – the current caretakers and the island’s only inhabitants – and followed.

  Over the course of the next few months, I found there to be a very particular stillness to Bass Strait’s islands, and it struck me first on this walk from the landing strip on Three Hummock. It’s a small and very particular stillness, quite unlike the vast, noiseless blanket of the Outback, which in its way can be almost deafening. This island quiet is softer, more intimate, almost cosy. The sound of conversation drifted ahead as I slowed my pace along the track, which ran beside an impossibly dense copse of low eucalypts. I listened to my footfalls make a gentle thudding in the moist earth. Yes, this was a silence that demanded my attention, a travelling partner which, I would discover, would accompany me almost everywhere I set foot on this wonderful place.

  6

  THE BIG DUNE

  The tree branch seemed to be hovering just above my head. At least, I thought that’s what it was. My vision had not yet come into full focus, and, lying in the small bed on an old mattress that dipped alarmingly in the middle, there were too many contradictory sensations, confounding my ability to place time or space. I’ve always found this disconnected awakening rather pleasant; lost but secure, the brief seconds before the brain kicks in to calibrate one’s surroundings. This morning, however, it did not want to compute. What was this I was looking up at from my perch on the bottom bunk? A plank? No, definitely a piece of wood, a tree branch in fact, raw with crude axe marks and dovetailed roughly into another.

  I became aware again of that comforting wash of silence, more a sense than a sound, enveloping everything. Still, I had no idea where I was. Then the shuffle of some boots and the sound of a blowfly, an enormous thing entering from somewhere and bashing repeatedly against one of the windows, which I noticed were old and sealed shut.

  ‘Good morning,’ said Robert, poking his head into my room clutching a mug. ‘Tea?’

  It had been the deepest sleep I could remember, and I could barely recall the night before. It was a sleep that was almost solid, leaving me with the sensation of having been on a journey to a destination I could barely remember.

  Tea in hand, I looked around the room properly. It was full of bunks, homemade from bits of trees and branches, rough-sawn by the looks of them when still green, in true ‘bush carpentry’ fashion. On one wall, three were stacked on top of each other, reaching nearly to the ceiling, connected by a homemade ladder. There was no safety barrier, and the drop to the floor was awful to contemplate.

  ‘A Frenchman made them,’ said Robert through the open door into the small kitchen where he was standing over something on the bench. ‘Bashed them together from branches he found around the place. Not bad actually. Pretty solid.’

  ‘They’d hold up an elephant,’ I concurred.

  ‘Thought we’d walk to the beach again today,’ he said. A sudden realisation made me slump back into the pillow, then I winced as the aching in my legs returned. Now it came back to me in a rush: yesterday’s expedition. Despite the sleep, the residue of exhaustion washed over me and I shut my eyes again.

  Half an hour after having arrived the previous morning, the entire population of the island – i.e. the four of us – had set off in a northerly direction from the small group of houses spread out near the landing strip.

  One of these was the caretaker’s cottage, a brick place at the top of a large paddock permanently garrisoned by Cape Barren geese and kangaroos. There’s also a renovated guesthouse, and a peculiar three-roomed shack where Robert and I were staying.

  It was an odd-looking place; as if it had been dropped here as a fully intact weatherboard house, then chopped into pieces. Despite its age, it had a curious, unfinished look, utterly incongruous with its surrounds. The kitchen and bathroom were rudimentary but functional, and a ludicrously large brick fireplace that appeared about to collapse swamped the small living room, adding to the sense that the whole house had been truncated.

  But no, Robert assured me. It had been like this for as long as he could remember, and that was a long time.

  The two books written by Robert’s mother, Eleanor, of her family’s several decades on Three Hummock Island after the Second World War have become minor classics, written in the style of an indomitable ingenue, an adventurous young woman from a well-to-do middle-class family and her war-hero Royal Navy officer husband embarking on an impulsive, possibly insane notion of running a farm on a remote island off the Tasmanian coast.

  In Eleanor’s deft hand, the stories of wide-eyed adventure and mishap, triumph and failure are all laid out against the ever-present backdrop of the island, which is really the books’ main character. Her four children spent the summers of childhood here until leaving for boarding school, no doubt being thought of as something akin to wild animals by the refined private school society into which they were thrown. Robert, my guide, now in his sixties and living with Parkinson’s disease, was the second-eldest.

  ‘Right, settled in are we?’ Chris had asked, appearing at the door soon after I had put down my bag. Kate, his partner, stood slightly behind. ‘Telegraph Beach then, is it?’ he asked in a friendly tone that didn’t really invite debate. It was the first decent look I had had at these two intrepid people. Chris I would have placed in his fifties, tall and upright with startling pale eyes and a perfect, snow-white head of hair and trimmed beard. With his sharp features and commanding chin, he was the very image of an old sea captain. I could picture him at home at the helm of a windjammer, guiding his tall ship through a gale in an oilskin sou’wester and white Aran sweater. Even his voice was perfect for the part: deep and softly spoken with a hint of faraway accent.

  Kate I would have placed at perhaps forty, small in stature with a pleasant face, short straight brown hair and skin that made me think of pale honey. As they prepared to go, I used the bathroom but could hear their conversation easily. ‘So, how are we for provisions?’ someone said. Provisions. I had been supposed to contribute something to this adventure on this all-but-deserted island, but had not allowed for the early closing times of remote Tasmanian supermarkets. As I washed my hands in the small sink with a squeaky tap, I knew that for the next four days, I would have to wear the title of ‘freeloader’. Not a piece of bread, not an apple or biscuit or a tube of sweetened condensed milk. For me it was to be charity or starvation. I swore under my breath, washing the sweat of the morning’s flight from the back of my neck with a facewasher. At least I had managed to stuff one of those into the ridiculous child’s backpack – decorated with a large smiling bumblebee – that I had grabbed from an op shop the previous week for two dollars. But a compass would have come in handy, or perhaps a torch?

  At the door, the four of us had formed a loose huddle to consi
der a route, about which I had no opinion whatsoever. Weather was discussed. Clouds threatened on the horizon, but a calculation of prevailing winds satisfied everyone that they would stay away, at least till the evening. Then we were off to explore the wonders of Three Hummock Island – Robert, who knew every inch of the place, in the lead. Looking at him, though, I couldn’t for the life of me see how he was going to keep it up. His gait was a quick, shuffling motion, the Parkinson’s making it necessary for him to regularly hold his chin with his hand to support his head, all of which made him appear extremely fragile. But as I was to discover, it was I who would struggle to keep up with him.

  In his mother’s books, Robert’s childhood reads as idyllic, worthy of any Boy’s Own Annual. His domain was an entire island, and he conquered it with the vigour of an old-world explorer. Later, as an adult, long after his parents had left and relinquished the lease, he returned to set up his own ecotourism business. It was for Robert a second childhood, a renaissance cut short only by the onset of his illness. This trip was his first in a number of years, but as we walked, I could see the tonic of the place working on him, reviving him, instilling in him an energy that became irresistible.

  He led us over a rise away from the houses and the long sloping paddock kept permanently manicured by the appetites of dozens of kangaroos. In single file we walked for a kilometre or more along a well-maintained track. Even the footfalls of four people could not break this spell of silence that fell upon everything, muting the sounds of conversations, birds – even the ocean – into one all-enveloping hush. I was last in line, and preferred it that way. Sometimes I slowed up, turned around and took in the views over the paddocks and forests to our rear, stretching back a distance I could not tell, but knowing that not a soul was to be found anywhere among it.

  If anything, the pace seemed to quicken as we went. My kiddie backpack, good for little more than a camera, raincoat and tube of sunscreen, had a faulty clip on the left side and kept slipping, making me wear it uncomfortably over one shoulder. Then, after twenty minutes or so, a twinge that had been nagging at my legs grew to an irritation, then a burning that ran into the lower part of my back, particularly excruciating when making any movement where I was forced to restrain my weight, the same motion with which I had descended The Nut down that suicidal path the night before. Making a small leap from one rock to another, I emitted an audible wince that I tried to disguise as a kind of cough. Kate turned back and came to my side. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Fine, fine. Might have twinged a muscle when I…’

  ‘Everybody, Michael’s hurt!’ she trumpeted up ahead. Instantly, a posse of carers was poring over me in deep sympathy. ‘Where’s the pain?’ ‘Can you go on?’ ‘How bad is it?’ ‘Would you like us to take you home?’ The embarrassment fell like an avalanche. I insisted I’d be fine with a brief massage and began ploughing my thumbs along the furrows of my upper thighs, an action which, to my amazement, actually started to deliver some relief.

  My ailing health, to my further chagrin, now became the focal point of the afternoon’s conversation. As we proceeded, albeit more cautiously, I caught snippets of talk about muscle strain and other associated ailments as well as various suggested remedies – medicinal and homeopathic – that could with a little searching be found among the copious and varied vegetation of the island. I, of course, was not included in any of this and vanished into the third person like a patient in a hospital surrounded by student doctors on their morning rounds.

  I attempted to explain the probable cause of the injury, the previous day’s encounter with The Nut at Stanley. They listened respectfully, smiled, before discussing, amongst themselves, the inherent vulnerability of the rectus femoris muscle to a forward weight-bearing situation. I resumed my status as the voiceless patient as a nagging inner voice urged me to head back to the house and rest up. But I was determined not to be the runt of the litter, at least not on the very first day. Besides, the harder I walked, the less the pain seemed to bother me.

  At last my medical emergency was eclipsed by our emergence onto one end of a magnificent ribbon of sand that stretched away to the north-east, a beach Robert described as ‘West Telegraph’, so named for the mainland-to-Stanley telegraph cable which ran along it in 1859. It was a short-lived venture, as the cable broke early in the piece and was lost in the sea.

  We walked and walked, seemingly for ages. Here and there, odd selections of flotsam gathered in colourful clumps at the high water mark. Bright orange plastic balls – Japanese fishing floats, said Robert disgustedly – myriad bottles of different shapes, and odd, heavy-looking things that one could not imagine floating at all.

  ‘It comes straight off the Indian Ocean, you see,’ said Robert, picking up something then dropping it back down on the unmarked sand. ‘Terrible stuff. Clean-up groups come over now and then to take it away but there’s always more of it on the next tide.’ And everywhere, driftwood: all manner of planks and boards and odd pieces, sometimes lined up as if they’d been stacked by hand, rough-cut or smoothly finished and of many different timbers. ‘More and more of it all the time,’ said Robert. ‘When we get back, I’ll show you a shed made entirely out of this stuff. It’s as solid as a rock,’ then, calling past me to the others who were examining a deceased sea creature on the shoreline, ‘We go in here,’ he said, and pointed to a bush at the base of a small rise. My legs were killing me. ‘Come on,’ said Robert, jauntily. ‘Just like Garibaldi!’ The others laughed knowingly, but I had no inkling of what he meant, not then at any rate.

  At the beginning of the 1970s the city of Devonport on Tasmania’s northern coast was gripped by a controversy involving, of all people, Giuseppe Garibaldi, the legendary founder of modern Italy. The local Italian community, it transpires, was keen to erect a memorial to the great man, at a cost to the public purse of $1500 – not exactly a king’s ransom, even in 1970. But the public outcry was immediate. ‘Who needs Garibaldi?’ screamed the headline of the Saturday Evening Mercury. A flood of letters to the editor dragged the row out for nearly two years until the site was eventually relegated to a quiet corner of King Park in Stanley, and the project reduced to a concrete plinth upon which was mounted a simple bronze plaque.

  Why the people of northern Tasmania should be so averse to a memorial to one of the great figures of nineteenth-century European history is itself a mystery. But few know, however, that Garibaldi himself actually visited this very island, and the impression it left on him remained till the end of his days. How do we know this? Because he said so in his autobiography:

  How often has that lonely island in Bass’s Strait deliciously excited my imagination, when, sick of this civilized society so well supplied with priests and police-agents, I returned in thought to that pleasant bay, where my first landing startled a fine covey of partridges, and where, amid lofty trees of a century’s growth, murmured the clearest, the most poetical of brooks, where we quenched our thirst with delight, and found an abundant supply of water for the voyage.

  As the story goes, during one his many exiles between uprisings and revolutions, Garibaldi, a superb seaman, was given command of a little ship called the Carmen. On a trade run between China and Peru, he passed through Bass Strait in late 1852 and, running low on food and water, made a landing on none other than Three Hummock Island, on whose sand I was now walking.

  Touching at one of the Hunter Islands, to take in water, we found a small farm, lately deserted by an Englishman and his wife, on the death of his partner … we also found a garden – a most useful discovery, as it enabled us to take on board an abundant supply of fresh potatoes and other vegetables.

  Sadly, no trace of any such dwelling has ever been found, nor is there any record of an English couple living on Three Hummock around the time Garibaldi dropped by, but historians generally agree that this had to be the place of his landing, although some argue it may have been one of the Furneaux Group to the north-east. Robert, of course, is in no doubt and in
her books, his mother Eleanor suggests a couple of places where such a settlement might have taken place. In any case, it’s a tantalising notion that a true giant of modern history once visited this humble little place and remembered it so fondly many years later.

  Robert had turned suddenly off the beach and, hardly breaking step, scaled a steep, sandy embankment he had picked out as if it were a set of carpeted stairs. The others lost their footing once or twice but made it up with no real effort. I fell back three times before doing a run at it, then, legs flailing, grappled sharp dry grass roots to haul myself over the lip. My muscle-tortured thighs screamed silently.

  Off the beach the ground was at least firmer and allowed me to quicken my pace a little. We marched over clumps of tussock grass and earth decorated with polished, sand-dried branches, bleached white and light as balsa. A thick wall of trees lay ahead and I expected our leader – who seemed to know exactly where he was going at all times – to skirt around it. Instead, Robert walked up to a wall of foliage, glanced momentarily over his shoulder at us, then disappeared. The three of us exchanged a glance and, with little choice in the matter, followed. I was last in line and as the others entered the forest, I found myself quite alone. I glanced once more over the long stretch of empty beach, and, likewise, pushed into the leaves.

  I now entered a long green tunnel walled on all sides by trees. At first it was a metre or two high but, like the room in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, seemed to shrink towards one end. This is what Robert had been looking for, this secret passage through the bush. Ahead of me I caught sight of a set of legs close to the ground. Everyone, I realised, was reduced to crawling as the roof of branches lowered. I was behind Kate and followed her rhythmical cat-like pace, one solid movement after another. Where was he leading us?