I try to be worthy of this place by moving slowly, listening to the human and other inhabitants, and giving blood to the granite and insects who demand an offering. I am thankful for the scratches and bites, for hopefully they mark me as one who is prepared to sacrifice something to be part of this, one who moves on island time.
writer, poet and photographer SONIA STRONG
This is my sixth trip to Flinders Island. Each time, the call to return gets louder and I want to stay longer, such that I’ve started to think of these forays as homecomings more than holidays. I used to come just to climb peaks, comb beaches and check out for a while, but isn’t “unwittingly” how all great love affairs begin?
Whereas the beauty of these islands used to simply fill me with awe, it now also elicits a prickling discomfort, as I’m forced to consider how my presence might contribute to their untimely weathering. With visitation increasing significantly, how not to be one of “those tourists” has become a pressing concern. More and more Tasmanians are coming, and whilst Cradle Mountain and Freycinet are generally remote enough for big islanders to get their holiday fix (foreigners having rarely heard of this place), some of the more adventurous still make it here.
To access the best of the Furneaux Islands, however, you need a whole extra layer of local knowledge, and that takes time and earned trust. I try to be worthy of this place by moving slowly, listening to the human and other inhabitants, and giving blood to the granite and insects who demand an offering. I am thankful for the scratches and bites, for hopefully they mark me as one who is prepared to sacrifice something to be part of this, one who moves on island time.
I first came here on a naive and spontaneous adventure 16 years ago. My relationship with this place blossomed fireside, maps spread across the rug, imagining the briny bluster on some distant outcrop. There is something about a navigation chart romantically dotted with swell-battered bergs which stirs the adventurer in me. The spattering of islands off Tasmania’s north-eastern tip, wearing misleadingly approachable names like Little Dog, Badger and Prime Seal, had me instantly hooked.
Of the available access options, the most exciting was obviously to take my partner’s boat. What we hadn’t adequately grasped, however, was that Banks Strait is one of the world’s most treacherous stretches of water and was no place for a tiny trailer vessel in anything but ideal conditions. We managed to place ourselves at the furthest point from land, right when the strongest tide and swell were facing off in opposite directions, causing standing waves and holes of thin, salty air into which our stoic but woefully undersized vessel repeatedly fell.
There’s a lot to be said for local knowledge, and whilst we’d sought advice from a few locals before setting off, clearly something had been lost in translation. Thanks to some serious helmsmanship, we eventually limped into Lady Barron, albeit with leaks, cracks and good deal more humility than we’d left with. Details of that trip, like all good trauma tales, are as clear in my mind as the day they unfolded.
The Strait and Narrow
So finely finned, the flying fish, flit between two realms.
White-knuckled concentration through the deluge at the helm.
An inward breath, chopped sharp and held, to chance an upward glance
Horizon lurching madly now, as through the spray we dance.
Standing waves come left and right and disappear beneath,
Then with a shuddering thud, again she finds her salty seat.
Knotted brow and spine compressed, my mouth the last thing dry,
Unlike those fish, a hull of glass was never built to fly.
Wheel frantic, nose into the wave, the wind stealing my shouts
and in a flash, somehow we’ve come, full one-eighty about.
Wide-eyed we climb the towering mass, then fall clean off its back,
Her courage more than compensates for any size she lacks.
Canopy bent, her gunwhale breached, the sea about our feet,
The roil and roll gratefully hides the rocks so near beneath.
Finally, the swell recedes, as land comes into view.
Her full five metres still intact, and almost so, her crew.
Coast radio now checking in, “Position, Whitley 1?”
“We’ve made the sounds,” my heart still pounds, drips glint in the sun.
Our little vessel, bow puffed out, bravely limps to shore.
That seemed a great idea, back with the nav charts on the floor.
Long-held breaths, cautious exhales, the windshield seals all cracked.
A brief reprieve, we take out leave, to plan the journey back.
On more recent trips, some solo, I’ve opted to brave the Roaring Forties in the comparative safety of a light plane. Bumping into the air out of Lost Farm, it is characteristically rainy and rough. We can’t make out the islands on the horizon today, and I’m reminded of how far this stretch of water is when relying on a bit of metal barely longer than a couple of cars and a 20-something pilot, albeit one clearly in his element and capable beyond his years. Although the flight takes only 45 minutes, the swell and spindrift below low-slung cloud make the islands feel just the right amount of “away”.
Even without the spiritual effects of the local whisky, it’s impossible to be unaware of bigger forces at play here. To even the resolutely pragmatic and tech-distracted, there’s a palpable presence in these islands, although I’d be surprised if such folk found themselves here too often. The Furneaux is not a cheap or easy weekender from most places, thank god (who, in whatever form she or he is known to you, can be felt everywhere in this landscape).
I feel observed by ancestral beings in granite tors, their stony countenance surveying the many comings and goings of more mobile, fleeting creatures. The easterly weather system has us resigned to several days of drizzle, and as the deluge wears away Devonian granite across a time scale so vast as to be incomprehensible, it’s hard not to feel judged by … something.
As I stand in awe of the granite massif before me, stretching like the backbones of a great sleeping animal along the Furneaux’s length, I want to throw my arms around these sacred islands, their wildlife and their people. But who am I to presume such familiarity? I can only tread carefully through the saltbush, stop and note the tiny Druid hoods of nodding orchids and remove my shoes in reverence to the ribbons of tannin rushing back across white sands to the sea. I can stop and listen and try to understand a little of how to be here. I can acknowledge that the original human inhabitants are entirely present, sad proud echoes mingling with a living culture so connected to the country with which they are inextricably linked. Rushing feels disrespectful when there is wisdom to be read in the sand-blasted limestone sculptures, salt spray hieroglyphs to interpret, circular poa grass sand-scratchings to pore over, and, of course, riding the whistling winds of those lonely high places, there are the peregrins.
Most people know of the peregrin’s status as “fastest of all creatures”, but watching them on the updrafts atop K2 I am more impressed by their capacity for play. K2 is the colloquial reference for the second-highest of Mount Killiecrankie’s peaks, and to say it’s “quite the view” from up here falls well short of what is spread out before me. The nonchalant pair of adult falcons appear suddenly in the updraft. Turning briefly towards one another as if to say “you going first?” suddenly one, then the other, tucks into a dive, pulling up expertly before the boulders below, a peripheral blur of movement against the too-blue sea and fluorescent lichen. They circle lazily, calling to one another. Clearly this is not hunting or tuition, just simple fun. Learning to paraglide was the closest I’ve come to experiencing a little of what they might feel. I recall looking down upon the back of a black-shouldered kite with whom I shared a thermal (a bizarre perspective), both of us intuiting our way up an invisible spiral ladder of warm air.
The first bird again rises serenely, repeats its acrobatics and returns to hover directly in front of me. Locking eyes with the animal, something quivering and monumental moves between us in mutual recognition. Time warps into elongated shapes, the bird lifts a wing tip and is gone. I can’t help but feel I’ve experienced a brief communion with the divine.
As I contemplate what just passed between us, a descending cloud lays tiny baubles in my hair. I am enveloped under a blanket of ancient mist, weightless and immense, which leaves me small, dripping and insignificant. It is time to go – the weather is an authority I’m prepared to be instructed by. As it sucks the light from the sky and glazes the lichen dark orange, I think of how this damp and dancing spectre has also seen oceanic currents, sea fog, storm surge, tidal eddies, waterfalls, tears … even the body of a whale.
Yesterday I stared into the vast eyeless socket of a beached humpback as its disintegrating fat and pages of baleen sloshed against a remote beach. What had that eye last seen as it lolled in its great cavern? I had no way of knowing whether this keeper of stories had suffocated under the weight of its own existence there on that beach or met its fate somewhere far out to sea. As I stroked its bleaching vertebrae, I hoped the whale’s suffering was brief. I’ve heard it said that humans differ from other animals in our ability to cause our own suffering through anticipating future troubles or ruminating over past regrets, but I’m not convinced our animal natures are so different. Perhaps this graceful Goliath did indeed regret taking a wrong turn onto the beach and worried what would become of its family as the ocean currents change and the clouds of krill become harder to find.
. . .
Although I’m yet to meet a human with wisdom or acceptance to rival a whale, many islanders do appear to have reconciled something of life’s bigger questions. It’s as if they’ve weighed up some existential concerns, shrugged them off and decided they’d rather go fishing. Either way, they seem to understand things a little better than most.
No-one finds themselves living here by accident, for whilst it’s not an easy place to live, physically or logistically, there is an easiness of mind on offer here which, in a city existence, slips so readily through one’s fingers. When there are less than a thousand of you bunked in together, everyone’s well-being is a collective consideration, and that collective is not species specific. It extends to hooded plovers under the watchful stewardship of daily beach walkers, and orphaned wombats raised by locals who never question their responsibility to give back to the place into which their lives are woven.
To quote one local speaking on The Islander Way podcast about their approach to life, “We don’t chase growth. We chase meaning.”
The Islander Way is an initiative seeking to understand and qualify what community-led tourism might look like here and to collectively shape future visitation to these unique islands. As I listen to the various interviews with passionate residents, I feel welcomed, but with a caveat. Respectful visitors to Flinders Island are invited back as welcome guests, whereas behaving like tourists is clearly discouraged. We are wisely instructed to, “Slow down. Listen. Get lost. Contribute. Don’t try to change this place. Let this place change you.”
Sonia Strong moved to Tasmania in 2005 and lives in the forested hills of the D’Entrecasteaux Channel. She has worked in conservation and alpine/marine park management, as a paramedic and recently, as a wilderness ranger. She is also a metalsmith, writer and painter. She has a deep affection for windswept and interesting people and places and is happiest when creating, immersed in a creek looking for sapphires, exploring wild places or in the sunshine with wine and friends. Sonia has published several children’s books through Forty South, including “Tazzie The Turbo Chook Finds Her Feet”. You can follow her on Instagram, @soniastrongartist.