photographer STEVE BARKER
I was told before I travelled there that there is A Flinders Way Of Doing Things. And so there is.
I found it abruptly when our borrowed car was ambushed by a particularly vengeful set of corrugations hiding in wait behind a sharp bend on the road to Settlement Point. Within minutes of the car rolling dumbly off the road, four vehicles pulled up and eight or nine heads peered into the engine bay, each with its own helpful theory on the cause of the disaster.
On this occasion, however, collective wisdom was lacking, and my wife and I abandoned the vehicle, caught a ride back to our accommodation, organised a hire car and rang our island contact with the news.
Welcome to Flinders, that lush island bathing off Tasmania’s north-east coast with its spectacular beaches and rocks and mountains, and its code of offering speedy, good-natured help to strangers in need.
My first trip there, after years of longing, came after a gauche remark at the counter of a jewellery shop in the Hobart suburb of Sandy Bay a month or so earlier. Handing over my credit card for a special piece of gold jewellery exquisitely shaped into a fagus leaf, I heard myself mumble, “Oh, I take photos of fagus leaves.”
Accepting my card, the jeweller had the grace not to cringe, then asked if I would send her some of the photos for her to look at. So I did. I sent a small collection of colourful autumn images of the famous Tasmanian beech (Nothofagus gunnii), and days later an email arrived asking if my wife and I would “like to go to Flinders and take some photos for our social media campaigns. We’ll pay your airfares and accommodation, and we can lend you a car.”
The email was signed “Freya, Claudia Jewellers; Tasmania by Claudia”.
Yes, we would. We certainly would.
An hour’s flight from Hobart, the first view of Flinders slid under the wing of the small commuter aircraft and already the famous beaches were there, long, curved strips of white backed by dark green bush and pasture.
Flinders is the largest island in the Furneaux Group, named after Matthew Flinders who, with George Bass in 1798 proved Tasmania was an island by sailing around it, so making one of the most important discoveries in the history of early Australia. Now, ships from England would not have to make the long and dangerous passage south of Tasmania in order to reach the new colonies. They could make the shorter, equally dangerous, passage through what is now Bass Strait and what is still called Shipwreck Coast. Nineteenth century navigation was made of hard choices.
Four years later Flinders was again to sail past the island that bears his name in HMS Investigator – a name shared today by the CSIRO’s state-of-the-art research vessel RV Investigator, which is based in Hobart.
The history of Flinders Island, of course, long predates white navigation. For tens of thousands of years, First Nations people hunted and fished undisturbed until the arrival of British and French sailors and sealers in the late 1700s,their arrival marking the beginning of a calculated and protracted policy of displacement and depopulation. The shameful and cruel treatment of Tasmanian aboriginal people is well documented, and sobering evidence of white behaviour is waiting for the curious visitor at the tiny museum at Emita and at the remains of the Wybalenna settlement where aboriginal people were sent from mainland Tasmania, and where most of them died from illness and disease.
But on my visit, distracted by the island’s quiet beauty and the job at hand, the ghosts of the past stood their distance, except on silent, still, black nights when the ceiling of brilliant stars pulled at my spirit, resonating with something deep and timeless.
If the nights were peaceful, the days were full of travel as we pressed as many locations into our time as possible – from one end of the island to the other, again, and again.
Freya, thoughtfully, had given us a heads up on the codes one must follow on Flinders Island. It seemed one did not simply get into one’s car and drive. Local lore, for example, required drivers to raise a lazy hand in salute as other vehicles storm past, often in in swirls of dust. It didn’t take me long to feel guilty on the occasions I forgot to do it.
Driving at night had its risks and was best avoided – there was no doubt about that as we counted off yet another wombat or wallaby lying at the side of the road having not made it home the night before.
In retrospect, the car we had been so generously lent had done itself, and us, a service by shaking itself to a resolute standstill on the Settlement Point road. The Freya car had no protective bars on the front, while our local hire car came with the Flinders bespoke ‘roo bars – distinguished by longer, wrap-around steel pipes protecting the side fenders.
And so on the way to Stanley Point, driving at a respectful 50 kph, in broad daylight, with both sets of eyes scanning for wildlife, I still managed to whack a wallaby trying to cross the road. Damage to the car, zero; to our nerves, considerable. To the wallaby, well, he was last seen making a wobbly path off into the bush.
But a damaged Freya car, without the special Flinders’ protection, would have given rise to an awkward conversation on arrival back home.
And speaking of awkward, what was the cause of the car’s stubborn refusal to move on the way to Settlement Point? Distributor leads shaken loose by the corrugations. A 30-second fix.
Freya’s comment, “Well, you can’t go to Flinders without some kind of adventure.”
Steve Barker is an amateur photographer living in Hobart. An accidental immigrant, he arrived in Tasmania in 1970 intending to stay three or four years before moving to a bigger job in Sydney or Melbourne. Good sense prevailed and he has made his home here and travelled the length and breadth of the state many times trying to capture the stillness and awe of Tasmania’s unique landscape. Now retired, his resolve is to devote more time and energy looking through the viewfinder of his camera.
