Fashioned by unimaginable heat and subterranean forces and polished by tide and time, the archway through which I step is an architectural statement in layered, upended dolerite. Behind me rises Mars Bluff, a great pile of rough stone bristling with coastal heath. Ahead, Moorina Bay’s turquoise water foams along a white beach washed clean of human footprints.
Back on Bruny Island eleven years after my first visit, with my Bruny-virgin husband Simon, I have found it even more gorgeous than I remembered and subtly different from everywhere else in Tasmania. I reckon the island’s several hundred residents and the Hobartians who have long escaped here on short breaks and extended holidays must have felt protective – and even a little possessive – when news of their private treasure got out and they had to start sharing it with “outsiders” like us!
Roughly 80km long and 30km across at its widest point, Bruny is basically two geologically dissimilar islands joined by a narrow elongated isthmus appropriately called The Neck: North Bruny is pastoral and rolling while South Bruny’s forested mountains and precipitous sea cliffs give it a wilder more adventurous feel, even on a calm, sunny day.
Our base for a too-short two-day visit is Adventure Bay, on South Bruny, but a highlight of my return is the North Bruny walk to Cape Queen Elizabeth.
One of the best coastal day walks in Australia, this fairly easy 13km return leg-stretch starts with a stroll along a leafy corridor of eucalypts and banksias, between farmland and the island’s airstrip, which leads into Bruny Island Neck Game Reserve. Then we walk past weedy, fresh-water Big Lagoon, which is annually stocked with brown trout and is a popular fishing spot for humans (licence required) and white-bellied sea eagles (no licence required). Then it’s up and over Mars Bluff (at all but low tide) or around its base (and even then you can get wet feet) to the extraordinary dolerite archway on remote Miles Beach.
Cape Queen Elizabeth rests arm-like along Moorina Bay’s north shore and we continue along a stretch of palest sand, with no other human beings in sight, almost to where the beach runs into rock. The track then climbs into the dunes and runs vein-like along the cape to its fluted “hand” for expansive views: south over The Neck, and the ocean and channel waters it separates; down the island to Adventure Bay and the settlement of that name (originally called Cooktown).
When I first discovered Bruny Island, I kayaked in Adventure Bay, paddling in the wake of Tobias Furneaux, James Cook and Matthew Flinders, renowned British mariners who anchored ships called Adventure (after which Furneaux named the bay), Resolution and Providence in this sheltered harbour to restock with water and food. (Dutch mariner and merchant Abel Tasman had sighted the bay in 1642 when exploring for the Great South Land but gale force winds prevented him from landing.)
Adventure Bay was the only Australian port-of-call for Captain William Bligh and HMS Bounty in 1788 and Fletcher Christian and the crew he lead to mutiny are often credited with being Tasmania’s first sawyers, the founders of the industry that began in earnest in the late 1800s and controversially continues.
Bruny and the channel separating it from mainland Tasmania are named after French Rear Admiral Bruni D’Entrecasteaux, another visitor in that era of epic exploration and navigation.
I am neither an epic explorer nor an expert navigator, but I paddled along the bay’s southern shore and around Penguin Island to Fluted Cape, a wall of dolerite columns rising so steeply from the sea that I almost cricked my neck looking up to its crown, almost 300m above me.
Then I explored further along that spectacular coast with Bruny Island Cruises, whose founder Robert Pennicott, 2012 Tasmanian of the Year, now operates an equally awesome cruise along the Tasman Peninsula and another on Hobart’s waterways. On a journey that thrilled the big kid in every passenger we squeezed between twin towers of soaring stone, felt Breathing Rock’s damp exhalations and visited an aromatic Australian fur seal colony on The Friars, a collection of small off-shore islands.
Back on dry land I walked to Fluted Cape, in South Bruny National Park, which involved a shoreline ramble to the site of Captain Kelly’s whaling station (1829-1841) and a steep climb to the top of Fluted Cape for a very different view of this battlement of dolerite columns and the kelp-thick inky blue water from which they thrust skyward.
I drove to Cape Bruny Lighthouse, constructed by convict labour on Labillardiere Peninsula in 1826, to warn mariners off the island’s dangerous southwest point, and delved into Bruny history in the Bligh Museum of Pacific Exploration (open daily except Christmas Day and Good Friday).
Housed in a reconstruction of St Peter’s Anglican Church (1846) built of convict-made bricks from the original’s ruins, this Adventure Bay museum is a treasure chest of aged globes and maps, copies of expedition journals and correspondence, and aboriginal artefacts that tell of thousands of years of habitation by the Nuenonne people, who called the island Lunnawannalonna.
And to keep up my energy for all this activity I ate local fudge and blackberries picked from roadside bushes.
Bruny’s culinary offerings have multiplied since then and driving to South Bruny from the ferry landing on the north island now involves running a gauntlet of temptations – and frequently succumbing.
Just 3km from the ferry terminal we pull into Bruny Island House of Whisky but not for a morning tipple; neither Simon nor I drink whisky so the extensive range of Tasmanian malts is wasted on us. But they also sell BISH (Bruny Island Smokehouse) products and other island fare and we leave with a 30cm-long free range Bruny Island Farmers Sausage and a jar of scrumptious BISH Moroccan Peach Chutney, seconds of both of which we buy before leaving the island.
Next up is Get Shucked (open daily), the farm-gate outlet for a family-owned local oyster concern. In the fully licensed Oyster Bar you can eat natural oysters naked or dressed – the oysters, not you! – or cooked; and wash them down with a glass of Tasmanian beer, wine or cider.
Get Shucked’s mission is to increase Australia’s oyster consumption from an average of only six per year per person so we do our best to help by buying two dozen plump, creamy molluscs that slip down our throats before our pork sausage main that night.
About a kilometre beyond Get Shucked is the Bruny Island Cheese Co., creators of eight artisan cow’s and goat’s milk cheeses, three of which we add to our camping fridge: 1792, an indulgent French-style soft, washed rind cheese named after the year the French first set foot on Tasmania; C2, a lovely hard, cooked cheese; and ODO, a fresh one-day-old cheese.
As well as tasting cheeses, you can watch them being made and chat to the cheese makers. Also sit down to a cheese platter with a bottle of Tasmanian wine, grab a crusty loaf of organic wood-fired sour dough, and treat yourself to a cone of home-made seasonal ice cream – perhaps flavoured with Tasmania’s famous leatherwood honey.
Information boards in the garden identify some of the birds commonly seen on the island, which includes green rosellas, flame robins, superb fairy wrens, and New Holland honeyeaters. Bruny also sustains the world’s largest population of the endangered forty-spotted pardalote and about a third of the planet’s population of endangered swift parrots.
Seabirds abound too, despite Captain William Bligh’s endorsement in his log that Bruny Island gannet “…roasted with its skin off is preferable to any of the others and is reasonably free of any fish taste” and the island is the breeding ground for a staggering quarter of a million pairs of short-tailed shearwater (Tasmanian muttonbird).
From the boardwalks on The Neck you can watch shearwaters returning to their burrows after a day’s fishing between September and April and laugh at the unintentional comedy of these masters of flight clumsily touching down – even crash landing. Watch little (fairy) penguins, too, waddling up the beach to their burrows in the dunes.
But that’s enough of birds for the moment, because we have something else on our minds as we drive down The Neck towards South Bruny, with calm, opalescent channel shallows on our right and ocean beach on our left: and that’s our blood sugar level!
This is put at severe risk just after we turn off Bruny Island Main Road onto Adventure Bay Road, at Bruny Island Providore (open daily), the factory outlet for HIBA fudge, truffles, and all things chocolatey! And nothing partners chocolate better than berries, so our last stop is Bruny Island Berry Farm, which grows seven varieties, including the unusual jostaberry, a robust, black current-gooseberry cross. Pick-your-owners have stripped the day’s crop so we buy a punnet of strawberries.
More than amply victualled we drive to Captain Cook Caravan Park in Adventure Bay, where we camp on a grassy area patrolled by ducks and Tasmanian native hens and sometimes visited by the island’s famous and rare white Bennetts (red-necked) wallabies.
Nestled between Captain Cook Creek and Adventure Bay beach, a 1.5km walk from South Bruny National Park and minutes from the general store and bowls club, Captain Cook Caravan Park is a laid-back place to spend a few days. It has a communal kitchen and dining room with plenty of space to cook and eat and an array of power points for charging electronic gadgets. You can hire kayaks from reception.
With a year of car-based camping planned for 2015 we splurged on an Oz Tent RV4 late last year so we could spend less time making camp and more time eating and drinking and enjoying the places we visit. Even putting up a footprint we have our tent up and bed made in minutes rather than the half hour-plus it takes us to erect our three-room Taj Mahal.
Temporary home erected, I cross the road and stroll north along Adventure Bay beach, trailing footprints in white sand scattered with tiny shells. I stop at an elevated, hollow terrestrial globe with a mother whale and calf swimming within its metal frame; this beautiful sculpture by Matt Carney represents the symbiotic relationship that humans have with Earth’s other inhabitants. Then I continue north along the beach for several hundred metres more, turning back at a rocky outcrop.
Over the next two days we walk to Cape Queen Elizabeth and do a loop-drive to the hamlets of Alonnah and Lunawanna, on South Bruny’s channel (west) coast. We sample the cool-climate produce of Bruny Island Premium Wines, Australia’s southernmost vineyard, and return to Adventure Bay on rough, unsealed roads that wind up and over the hills and through Mount Mangana Forest Reserve. (The eucalypts are so thick there is barely any view from the lookout.)
And then it’s time to leave.
But this island has a habit of delaying departures and we detour off the ferry road to visit a new historic attraction on North Bruny.
Hidden away on a blunt 128-hectare peninsula projecting into Barnes Bay, Bruny Island Quarantine Station is a fascinating place to spend our last couple of hours.
This remote corner of the island was settled in 1856 by pardoned convict Anthony Cox and his freed convict wife Jane Daly, who lived tough supporting a large family by cutting firewood on their grant of 7.7 hectares of “very poor land.” Then the State Quarantine Station operated here from 1884 to 1908 and the Commonwealth Quarantine Station until 1986, when it was declared surplus to requirements.
That Commonwealth tenure included the internment of German Prisoners of War in 1914, the quarantining of returning World War I troops during the Spanish Influenza Pandemic of 1918-19 (the busiest time in the station’s history), and the site’s final use as a plant quarantine station, for which the still-standing glasshouse was built.
The site is now managed by Tasmania Parks and Wildlife Service (and the Friends of Bruny Island Quarantine Station) and staffed by volunteer caretakers who live in the heritage-listed cottage built for the Medical Superintendent in 1884.
After our introductory talk – from a lovely couple setting forth soon to hike the Overland Track – we head off on the two-hour self-guided walk which loops through the remaining buildings and grounds and up into the eucalypt scrub behind, to visit the lonely graves of Charles Loaney and John Johanson, crewmen of the S.S. Oonah who died of influenza in 1919.
Along the way we learn how to disinfect a room using formalin and potassium permanganate crystals; and that the class distinction of passengers at sea continued when a suspect ship was quarantined, with separate accommodations provided for saloon and steerage passengers.
The patients and internees housed here over the years would have been delighted to turn their backs on the place and never return – as too perhaps were some of the men and women who staffed this lonely place – but as we head for the ferry landing and mainland Tasmania, I hope it will be much less than 11 years before I return to beautiful Bruny Island.
FACT FILE
Bruny Island is 40km from Hobart and accessed by regular vehicular ferry from Kettering. For island information and ferry times visit www.brunyisland.net
Bruny Island Cruises depart daily (except Christmas Day) at 11am and last 3 hours. Tickets are $125 for adults, $75 for children, and $390 for a family (2 adults, 3 children). For more information and bookings (essential) ph 03 6293 1465 or visit www.brunycruises.com.au.
There are lovely tent sites, powered sites and cabins at Captain Cook Caravan Park, Adventure Bay; all guests can use the roomy communal kitchen and dining room. Full details www.captaincookpark.com or phone 03 6293 1128.
Other links:
www.brunyislandberryfarm.com.au