The Forgotten Islands

by Michael Veitch

  I listened to them, not really taking much in, but basking in their knowledge as they casually unlocked the secrets of the island around us. Tomorrow I would make the trip back to the mainland, which at that moment seemed a quite incomprehensible notion. Just a brief flight, I thought to myself, and I would be all but home.

  12

  FAREWELL, THREE HUMMOCK

  A lifelong coward when it comes to goodbyes, I stood, the following morning, once again on the island’s makeshift airstrip, waiting for the sound of the plane and passing bland utterances about catching up some time in the indeterminate future, but knowing it would most likely never happen. The others talked about the last few days, but, suspended in the moment of goodbye, the awkwardness became almost physical as we gazed out towards King Island, just visible to the north, and the long, slow reach of Hunter to the west, craning our eyes and ears for the first sounds of the aeroplane’s engine. Then, with barely a sound, Geoff’s sturdy, ageing Cessna simply appeared just above the tree line and was down and beside us in seconds.

  I made light of the handshakes, all the while suppressing a desire to embrace, long and hard, these people I still barely knew.

  I thanked everyone, ‘for everything’, looked at the ground, and bit the inside of my mouth to stifle a rising well of emotion before cursing myself quietly and wandering over to the aircraft, finding comfort in running my hand along the edge of the rough and pitted three-blade propeller.

  Robert, less inhibited in every way, did not hold back, and was embraced by Chris and Kate with equal warmth. A pang of loneliness seared me briefly. I felt only the barest connection to this place, but just enough, I was certain, for it to have changed some small part of me forever.

  First into the cabin, I reclaimed my seat in the front of the big old Cessna as Geoff, our pilot once again, stowed the gear.

  ‘How did you go?’ he asked with his large and welcoming face.

  Through the window, Chris and Kate framed themselves next to the big white truck in a tableau identical to that of our arrival just a few days before. Robert waved vigorously. Kate blew back a kiss.

  The kangaroos, their grazing only briefly interrupted by the landing a few minutes earlier, had begun to reclaim the runway once more but scattered at the sound of the big engine turning over. I too was startled by the noise, the loudest I’d heard in a week. Geoff held the aircraft on its brakes and conducted his pre-flight checks: mixture rich, switches flicked, check for mag-drop, as the throbbing motor bucked like an impatient stallion.

  Plugged into the headphones, Robert muttered his own farewell to his beloved island. ‘Ah … goodbye Three Hummock.’ Then, as an afterthought to our pilot, ‘Our friend here was keen to take a look at some other islands. Any chance?’ He glanced across at me. I nodded. I couldn’t see his reaction, as at that moment the aircraft leapt forward, making us feel every lump and tussock as we gathered speed across the bumpy surface before, as if flung from a catapult, we were in the air.

  ‘Albatross?’ enquired Geoff.

  ‘Good idea,’ chimed Robert, and with another of those familiar, terrifying lurches, the aircraft turned away from the land, heading due west.

  In his journal, George Bass spoke of wading through ‘a sea of white’ when finding Albatross Island on his famous trip through Bass Strait with Flinders in 1798. By the time the little sloop Norfolk had reached the western extremity of the strait, food was running low. In fine weather, Flinders anchored off a tall, rocky escarpment ‘almost white with birds’, and sent Bass ashore to gather something for the larder. In standard nineteenth-century style, he proceeded to club his way up the steep slope to the summit, carving a path through fur seals and thousands of nesting seabirds. ‘Being unacquainted with the power and disposition of man,’ quipped Flinders in his journal, ‘they did not fear him. We taught them their first lesson of experience.’

  This was nothing, however, compared with how the poor albatrosses would fare when the sealer gangs got hold of them a couple of years later. As with every part the strait, hunters seemed bent on taking as much as possible in the shortest possible time, and on this little rock, they came close to taking everything.

  The birds seems to have been spared the initial carnage of the early 1800s, but after the ready supply of seals on the islands of the Hunter Group and King were exhausted, the attention turned to the delicate down and white plumage of the albatross, which could fetch up to a shilling per pound in Launceston and Hobart.

  By the time George Augustus Robinson made a trip there in 1832 on one of his expeditions to persuade the Aborigines of northern Tasmania to relocate to Flinders Island, he found it to be ‘a pestilent place strewed with the putrid carcasses of the albatross’. Sealers had told him the stories of earlier times when nesting birds covered the entire surface of the place, but by the time he got there, ‘destruction had been very great among them’.

  Nor were the birds quick to recover. As late as 1894, a party of naturalists from Victoria counted barely 300 shy albatrosses in the largest colony, with the smallest comprising just six. A sad contrast to the countless thousands Bass and Flinders had recorded on their way through a century earlier. Today, according to Nigel Brothers, there are currently 5000 pairs breeding on the island, recovering from ‘near extermination’.

  The word ‘extermination’ was rattling around in my head also as I hurtled towards this very same island in the passenger seat of a small and ageing aeroplane, seated next to a pilot who I was quite certain possessed no concept of physical fear.

  After leaving Three Hummock, we passed over the thin northern tip of adjacent Hunter Island, and an empty, slate-grey carpet of ocean opened up before us. The daunting monotony was broken only by the hunchbacked outline, 10 kilometres away, of Albatross Island, a fused jumble of rocks of different shapes and sizes, as if a gigantic handful of pebbles had been hurled into the sea. Low to the water, we powered towards it. Geoff slowed for the first pass. It looked a wild place of broken ridges and deep crags, the black rock surface crisscrossed everywhere like cracked glaze. Only the barest patches of greenery showed in the topmost ridges, and an extensive internal cave complex had in parts collapsed, forming gaps and holes in its profile. One of these, named ‘The Trap’ occurs in its centre and is so named for the albatrosses which become caught in the eddies of air formed inside it, making them stall and fall.

  In summer, its north end is covered in pink swathes of brilliantly blooming pigface, visible for miles as a pink smudge on the ocean. Little penguins and mutton-birds have also made a home for themselves, but it is the albatrosses that make this remote place on the far western extremity of Bass Strait truly spectacular.

  Being something of a birdwatcher (a pastime I inherited, as it were, in reverse, from my son Thomas), I had long hankered for a glimpse of one of these magnificent birds, but so far they had eluded me. The odd one can sometimes be spotted straying unusually close to the Australian mainland, but in general a boat trip to the continental shelf or a distant island is required for a decent sighting. But if a boat’s not on the cards, an old and slow-going Cessna is the next best thing.

  ‘There they are. Albatross,’ said Geoff in my headphones. Virtually at our eye level, the birds were spread across the island’s few flat surfaces. Not carpeting it by any means, as described by Flinders, but in the patches where they nested, packed tight in what looked to be their hundreds, perhaps thousands. They seemed unperturbed by our aircraft as we made a series of tighter and tighter circuits, Geoff flying as close as he dared. Any one of those formidable birds connecting with the prop, he assured me, would leave us no better off than it.

  After indulging me in this aerial survey, Geoff executed another of his Battle of Britain turns towards another of Bass Strait’s hidden treasures, one of the strangest and most alien-looking places I’ve ever seen, the spectacular Steep Island, or Steep Head as it is also known. I had only just seen it in the distance from my magical vantage point near Eleanor’s Beac
h the day before, but this was to be as close-up a look as I could get.

  If the people who construct the landscapes of distant and imaginary planets for Hollywood movies need some inspiration, a visit to Steep Island should be at top of their list (indeed, one of its two strangely bulbous peninsulas on the north side immediately reminded me of the gigantic crashed spaceship containing the eponymous monster in the film Alien).

  Reaching behind my seat for my new but inexpensive camera was the cue for Geoff to reduce our altitude even further to facilitate my prodigious photographic skills.

  As has been described, Steep Island’s two great headlands reach out from the north side like giant arms embracing a vast circular harbour, which could indeed have been carved by a recently crashed meteor. This harbour was the only place, it seems, one could get in by boat. From every other approach a vessel would be met with almost sheer cliffs. Despite this, a few mutton-birding huts perilously hug the tiniest of rocky shelves on the aptly named Steep Island’s south-westerly side.

  In the back seat, Robert was also enjoying the view. ‘Wow … look at that,’ he kept repeating, and ‘Not many people get to see this …’ We did a couple more loops before I noticed, under one of the headlands, a gigantic natural archway forced open by mille-nia of pounding seas. The size of a cathedral, this natural chamber connected the watery crater of the harbour to the open sea, which surged through, glowing with a vivid blue beneath the intense darkness of the rock. I considered asking our intrepid pilot for a closer look but, suspecting he may be tempted to fly through it, refrained.

  I was starting to relax now, and Robert was quietly having a ball too. Geoff, I realised as we banked again and headed back towards Tasmania, was a wonderful pilot, one of those who melded into every nuance of his aircraft, flying it like an extension of himself. He would glance at me occasionally, possibly recalling my pallor during our first flight. I gave him a smile to let him know that this time, I was quite all right. Perhaps, in retrospect, it was a little too much reassurance.

  We peeled away from Steep Island and tracked south, Geoff, as ever, happy to stay low to the water. The sun was beginning to break through a gloomy morning and suddenly, Trefoil Island, the setting of the Kay family’s tragedy, lit up as if in a spotlight in front of us.

  Set just off Tasmania’s wild and lonely north-west tip, Trefoil appeared far wilder than I had imagined. The Kay family, and presumably others, had run sheep here, but exactly where confounded me. Nearly 2 kilometres long and just under half that at its widest point, Trefoil’s dramatic cliffs rise more than 80 metres straight out of the water. There are, I am told, a couple of mutton-birding shacks on its grassy pancake-flat summit, but how sheep would have fared here, let alone a group of stranded children a century and a half ago, is quite unimaginable.

  Matthew Flinders named Trefoil after the three-clover shape he detected in its outline, but I could see none of that from my angle. Dead ahead, it resembled more a stationary aircraft carrier, a tall flat stack of vertical rock becoming ever larger as Geoff steadfastly approached. I could see various seabirds, albatross and diving gannets cartwheeling in the air before a long plunge, then leaving tiny white specks on the surface before disappearing in the morbid shadow of the island’s lee.

  I glanced surreptitiously at Geoff as we approached as slowly as the aircraft would allow without stalling. My eye line was now directly level with the lush topping of grass that crowned it. From where I sat it seemed that unless he had plans to increase our height, we would, in all probability, fly into it. I reminded myself of my earlier opinion of his flying skills and that he was indeed a first-class pilot. Below us, a small powerboat made a white streak in the water, cutting across a gentle, glassy swell. Ahead the great wall of rock loomed closer.

  Geoff, his right hand on the stick, was looking hard at it too, leaning forward a little in his seat. His eyes were focused – concentrated – mesmerised perhaps? In a trance? Had he lost his mind? Was he planning a spectacular suicide to which Robert and I would be briefly witness?

  I looked back to Robert, but he was taken with something out his own window on the far side. The top lip of Trefoil was now just a few hundred metres ahead. Still Geoff held the wheel firmly where it was, and an involuntary bead of sweat broke through my hairline. I lifted my feet off the aeroplane’s floor, an idiotic gesture of protection against impact. All I could muster was a slight, ‘Uh … mm …’ too inaudible to be heard above the engine, even in the headphones. The altitude of the plane seemed, to me at least, dead level with the top of the cliff and we were on an unmistakeable beeline towards it. Then, almost imperceptibly, Geoff made the slightest of moves, the barest inhaling of the control column, and in the most elegant of arcs, the aircraft’s nose lifted as, out the window, visible tufts of brilliant green grass passed under my feet.

  I fumbled for my camera, having forgotten it momentarily, then managed to snap some blurry images of the pale-blue walls of one or two scattered huts, which, in a feat of engineering worthy of Brunel, had been constructed atop Trefoil Island’s high plateau.

  In an instant, it was behind us, and Geoff relaxed his posture. He checked me again and his face fell. ‘Oh. You okay?’ Running my hand across my forehead, I realised I was considerably damp all over, the wetness startling even me. ‘Fine. I’m fine,’ I offered. He was not convinced. ‘Sorry, bit low was it? Just wanted to check out the ’strip. Haven’t put down there for a while. Should have said something. Don’t worry, we’ll be back at Stanley in a sec.’

  Robert, behind me, seemed oblivious to all but the wonders of nature around him, and, still in rapture, uttered his soft, delighted mantra, ‘Marvellous. Just… marvellous …’

  Driving east back along the highway that threads its way along Tasmania’s northern edge, the little hamlet of Stanley seemed a metropolis. Robert, tireless and unflappable for an entire week, flitting across the tips of dangerous boulders, sliding through undergrowth on his belly and leading expeditions along barely used tracks to tiny pristine beaches, seemed, behind the wheel of his little blue car, somehow diminished, as if the source of his unceasing energy was now out of reach and all that was left was exhaustion.

  ‘I say, you wouldn’t mind driving for a bit, would you?’ he asked as we swapped seats along the side of the busy road where fully laden logging trucks thundered past with their doomed cargo destined for the pulp mills. ‘After I drop you off at the airport, I’m heading on to Hobart, you see,' a weariness in his voice made it sound like a trek across the Andes. ‘All the way to Hobart,' he repeated. My plane was due to take off from nearby Launceston in a couple of hours, to take me back to a city of four million. At that moment, I could barely conjure it in my mind.

  For the first time, on that drive back, with the clock winding down to our farewell, Robert and I talked about our lives. He told me about his children, as I did mine, and our own very different childhoods. His, I learned, was not always the idyllic adventure many assumed it to be. As a youngster, he was sent to a wealthy boarding school on the mainland, where he was ostracised as some kind of wild animal. ‘I’d hardly ever worn shoes,’ he told me. ‘I’d grown up on a deserted island and here I was suddenly made to sit still and wear a uniform. They thought I was some kind of freak.’ Our conversation ranged widely on that journey back to civilisation, but whenever it veered once again towards the island and the ocean, his soul seemed to lift, and the familiar humour and energy returned.

  We talked about the week we’d just spent, and the adventurous flights, which had taken us there and back. ‘There’s one story of a pilot,’ he told me, remembering, ‘somewhere on the north-west tip of Tasmania, famously coming in to land on his property. As he came over a hedge to drop into the paddock, a horse took off in the same direction, and he landed astride it!’ The way he told it, the ghastly but absurd vision he put in my head made me laugh so hard I almost had to stop driving. ‘I don’t know who was more shocked,’ he continued, ‘the pilot or the horse!’
I would try often to retell it but without his style, it came across simply as a sad story about the demise of an innocent animal.

  There was only a little melancholy in his voice as we passed the towers and woodchip heaps of industrial Burnie, and he reflected on his time growing up on Three Hummock, then later running his business there. ‘Fifty years we had on that island. Not a bad innings, I suppose. But I get just as much pleasure from the place now without all the worry and paperwork. Now when I go back it’s all someone else’s problem.’

  We said goodbye at the airport and I watched as he drove off to continue his journey south, looking suddenly very small again in the driver’s seat. The glow of his company stayed with me a long time, and I could only hope that I had absorbed just some of his generosity and perhaps a little of the island itself.

  13

  THE NATURALIST

  The text came through at the most unexpected of moments, while taking a walk to work up an appetite before dinner at an old seaside hotel: ‘Boat leaving for Deal Island Monday. Call…’ – before my phone went dead. I was supposed to be on a romantic getaway, so hadn’t bothered to pack my charger. We had the grand old Victorian-era pile entirely to ourselves. It had undergone a restoration at some stage but now badly needed another. Dinner was taken at one end of a draughty dining room where we sat wearing slightly too many layers, close to an enormous glass bowl of daphne that wafted a syrupy scent in our direction. The sole member of staff – waitress, receptionist, possibly cook – brought our meals on large plates that were already cooling by the time her shoes clacked across the tiled floor. She was young and thin and smiled sweetly, apologising for almost everything, including the solitary nature of our stay, as if being the sole guests in a large old hotel was her very picture of hell. We loved the idea.