Bruny Island

The Tasmanian landscape was the constant backdrop to the first 20 years or so of my life. It is stunningly beautiful, awesome, rugged, wild, and primaeval, torn northward from Antarctica as ancient Gondwana broke apart. The climate is driven by the Roaring Forties – the strong westerly winds swirling around the Southern Hemisphere between 40º and 50º latitude.
Abundant rainfall has created the south-west wilderness. The eastern side is dry with a milder Mediterranean climate. At Hobart in the south-east, the two ecologies meet in either side of the mighty Derwent River flowing from the Central Highlands through fertile valleys into the deep water of the Derwent Estuary. To the west, Hobart nestles below the mountainous wilderness of the south-west, which casts a rain shadow over the east.
I grew up on the eastern shore where the rainfall was half that of the western shore. Like many working-class families of the time, every summer included seaside holidays in shacks with grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins replete with boating, fishing, swimming, squabbling, good and ‘bad weather’, long twilights, and finding solitude in exploring the landscape.
None of my extended family owned a shack, but they were easy enough to borrow or rent. Thus I stayed in many different locations in the south and east – a land of bays, inlets, and coasts resplendent with beaches.
There are many places south of Hobart where one can find solitude by the sea, on a mountain or a cliff, and feel the rawness of the air, the vastness of the sky and the beauty of the wild country. The sense of isolation and the remoteness at the bottom of the world are palpable. It’s not the end of the world, but you can see it from there. A land down under Downunder.
I spent three nights in the height of last summer camping with family on Bruny Island in Storm Bay off the south-east coast in Storm Bay. At 43ºS it is a delightful place to enjoy the gloaming of long summer twilight. Again I felt a powerful connection with the land of my youth. It is surely imprinted in my DNA.
Perhaps the Cornish who settled in Tasmania in the nineteenth century found their new island home reminded them of the old country, with its sea cliffs, and beach-laden coastline. And the relentlessly changeable weather blowing off the most tempestuous of the world’s oceans?