Australasia > Australia > Tasmania > Tasmania > Island > Articles > Walking Maria Islands

A city dweller, I wouldn't know a dogwood tree if it jumped up and bit me. Or a so-called cheesewood tree if I jumped up and bit it. Similarly, I can't identify all sorts of "looks-like" trees — honeywood, blackwood, pinkwood — except perhaps the "smells-like" tree, stinkwood.

Not that it matters right now. Even though I am facing a Tasmanian forest full of these eponymous giants, my greater concern is the frigid water that's glaciating my legs. I splash ashore on a virgin beach on Maria Island (pronounced "Mahr-eye-ah", as in Ms Carey), hoping that the sea here gets warmer in summer. "This is summer," my companions remind me.

We — seven of us — make it to the beach. It arcs away in both directions; beneath the midday sun its sands, framed by blue-green bush and shimmering headlands, are almost phosphorescent white. We clatter into the scrub, passing countless this-wood and that-wood trees, as our guides — a trio of well-informed young Tasmanian women, Natalia, Hanny and Madeliene — make for our first campsite.

This turns out to be no rough clearing with a few leaking, collapsing pup tents in which we will dine on freeze-dried something with a nice garnish of sand grit. Instead we find fixed tents, each with twin bunks, mattresses, mozzie nets, wooden floor and plenty of headroom. Then there's the mess "tent" — it's more like a dining room — with stove, table, chairs and a killer larder. It would be tempting to immediately open a bottle of wine, but this is just the start of our three-day excursion and so we persist with what we came here for, to bush walk.

Call us sons and daughters of beaches, but we Australians are royally spoiled when it comes to long, clean shorelines. While we sigh about iconic strands like Wineglass Bay (not far from here at Freycinet Peninsula), the sleepers that rarely get a mention are equally spectacular. We're soon striding south along one that must be a finalist in the Best Least-Known Beach Anywhere category. There's no one but us to revel in the three and a half kilometre curve of bone china sand and crystal waters that of Riedle Bay beach, the eastern shore of Maria Island's central isthmus.

We soon head inland, tramping below a high nave of trees. Everything, of course, has a name and a sub-name — Natalia knows most of them — like wattle (in silver and black varieties), peppermint eucalypt (white and black kinds), casuarina (she oak and bull oak) and so on. Despite my urban handicap, I can still tell a forest from a tree, and indeed I am soon onto the subtle distinction between a spotted pardalote and a potoroo — for instance, one is a bird, the other a mammal. We reach an extraordinary spot, Haunted Bay, at the southern end of the island. There is no beach but the granite shore is covered in brilliant yellow and orange lichen, and the steep path down to its time-sculpted rocks is lined with the burrows of fairy penguins who peer out at us.

Maria Island is clearly no swizzle stick-encrusted resort shore. This rugged island (around 20-km long by 13-km wide) that sits six kilometres off Triabunna, has been a national park and wildlife sanctuary since 1971. Its 11,550 hectares bristle with history, from 19th century convict settlements to later, quixotic schemes for agriculture and industry. The wildlife includes 'roos and echidnas, sea eagles and wombats, honeyeaters and butterflies, plus a thousand other species, all there for us to more or less trip over.

Our dinner of Tasmanian scallops and Thai black rice, plus a local pinot noir, banishes all notions of "roughing it." My hiking and dining companions on this trip, run by Maria Island Walk, turn out to be a chiropractor, a doctor and a lawyer — perfect company for any mishap (with subsequent rehabilitation and litigation possibilities) except that our only "event" is two blisters on the chiro's left heel, the result of her wearing new boots.

Next morning we get into serious striding, heading north along Riedle Bay. Anselme Riedle, the botanist on the French explorer Nicolas Baudin’s expedition to these waters in 1802, died well before Baudin reached Maria Island and thus never saw the beautiful bay that became his namesake. Long before Baudin profligately splashed the map with French names, the first European to sight Maria Island was Abel Tasman who in 1642 named the island after the wife of Anthony Van Diemen, Governor-in-Chief of the Dutch East India Company in Batavia. Preceding them all, of course, were the region's Aborigines who knew the island by the euphonious name of Toarra-marra-monah.

The meteorological opera of summer in Tasmania continues. The sun blazes down until I am ready to take a photo — then nips behind a cloud, glooming the grandeur of the landscape. I dive into a surf that's the temperature of recently-melted ice-blocks. I thaw in the sun. A splat of rain is my shower. It all bears out the alleged motto of the Tasmanian Meteorology Service: "If you don't like our weather — stick around five minutes."

It is a day of beach and bush. We cover some 13 kilometres and five beaches, not to mention pine forests, fossil deposits, striated sandstone cliffs, heathlands, swamps, lagoons, old convict cells and an abandoned farm. Every place and name tells a story. There's a Chinaman's Bay where three savvy Chinese gathered abalone during the Victorian goldrush era, shipping the delicacy to their digger mates on the goldfields, and no doubt making far more money in this than in disturbing dirt. That night, we dine not on abalone but quail and lamb, followed by pears and nougat.

The convicts who were banished here during two settlement periods — between 1825 and 1850 — would have missed out on the quail and nougat, but life was not too onerous. An early commandant noted that convicts deliberately committed minor offences on the Tasmanian mainland just to be sent to this island of "ease and pleasure," from which some then escaped on rafts or bark canoes. On our third day, we encounter more evidence of the convict era at the island's only settlement, Darlington, where well-preserved barracks and other buildings tell their tales.

"To find a gaol in one of the loveliest spots formed by the hand of Nature in one of her loneliest solitudes creates a revulsion of feeling I cannot describe," wrote island prisoner and Irish rebel nobleman William Smith O'Brien on his arrival here in 1849. The poignancy lingers. One can look, as O'Brien did, past the sunny fields around Darlington and across the moat of Mercury Passage to the Tasmanian mainland where imagined liberty lay just out of reach for the convicts.

Meanwhile, close at hand remain the austere whitewashed buildings of the penitentiary. These used to sleep up to 400 prisoners, but many structures of that era were demolished in the 1880s to accommodate the dream of an Italian entrepreneur, Diego Bernacci whose projects — growing olives and wine grapes, making silk and, much later, cement — all eventually foundered. Despite the fate of his "get-poor-quick" schemes, he left behind a clutch of elegant buildings, one of which is our final "campsite" for the trip.

Our last day, of forest hiking and mountain climbing, is followed by a feast of whole salmon and more good wine, then a night between sheets of linen in the Italian's modest old mansion. It feels like Bernacci's Maria Island dream coming true, even if not for him.

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