“Do you know why they call it Wineglass Bay?” chopper pilot Greg Ross asks as we skim over Freycinet National Park, the perfect curve of one of the world’s best-known beaches lining up in the distance.

The answer has less to do with its shape than with what happened here – the sea stained claret red by whalers turning blubber to oil in the early 1800s. Now the area is an international tourist destination, and a breeding ground for the growing number of humpbacks and southern right whales.