Australia’s newest ‘Great Walk’ truly lives up to the name

The warm turquoise waters are so clear that every ridge in the white sand floor is visible. Tea trees line the shore for a distinctively Australian look.

Is this the Whitsundays? Maybe Rottnest? The dead giveaway is the orange lichen garnishing the granite boulders.

Yep, it’s Tasmania. And that’s me, swimming in Bass Strait.

Not so cold, not so barren.Credit:

An hour into my week-long walking holiday, Flinders Island has kicked the stereotype of the Bass Strait islands being cold and barren.

“It’s the jewel of Tasmania,” the pilot shouts as our eight-seater Airvan chugs noisily away from Bridport, on the state’s north-eastern coastline. Below us stretch the low islands of the Furneaux Group, remnants of the mostly submerged plain that once linked Tasmania and Victoria.

Flinders is the Furneaux’s alpha island, being three times the size of Bruny, Tasmania’s largest. And the Flinders Island walk is the 13th addition to the Great Walks of Australia collection of guided, multi-walk hikes. Operated by Tasmanian Expeditions, our trip is a quiet one; a full tour is 12 walkers, but there are just six of us this time, and all Australians, including Bernie, whose first crack at the walk was cancelled during the pandemic.

Into the wild … night time at camp.Credit:

“So I thought, I’m 73, I’d better get there before I can’t do this any more!” she tells me over our first picnic lunch, on sunny Allports Beach. Given her phenomenal energy, I reckon Bernie’s still got a few years left in the tank.

We’ll spend the week with two wilderness guides: bluff trivia king Nigel, and Matt, who is quieter and more reflective, with a very Tassie affection for flannelette shirts and AC/DC. Our secluded eco-camp on Tanners Bay is a cluster of tents with clear ceilings for stargazing and cloud watching – even a potential aurora appearance – and each is named for an Australian icon – mine is Nitmiluk, the Jawoyn name for Katherine Gorge.

The packing list, emailed before departure, is an ambitious mix of gear that ensures survival and comfort in sub-Antarctic temps. But we’ve hit the meteorological jackpot, and the second week of February is so warm and balmy that I pack hope and my swimmers in my daypack every day.

It’s not a through-walk – each day, we head out to different parts of the island for a day’s walking; from the easy beach stroll to Castle Rock (a giant, fissured molar balancing on the foreshore) to the climb up to Old Man’s Head and on to Mount Killiecrankie or North East River, with its black swans and sandy inlets, covering about 42 kilometres over the six days.

The curious Castle Rock on Marshall Beach.Credit:

By day three, this tour has become a walk-swim-walk expedition, with a lunchtime swim bookended by mornings and afternoons of walking, and I find myself dipping into Bass Strait every day bar one. Allports Beach tops the list, my first day’s swim and the sun-and-sand photo that blows up my Instagram account. Second is Lillies Bay, with its crumbling jetty; third is Trousers Point Beach, where limpid waters lap against a deserted white-sand beach and 380 million-year-old rocks.

The only swim-free day is our longest one, spent climbing to the island’s highest point, Mount Strzelecki. Let’s talk about Strzelecki. An elongated range with more humps than a caravan of camels, the signs at its base estimate it will take four or five hours to complete the steep, 5.6-kilometre return route. The record is 58 minutes to run the trail to the summit at 756 metres.

Climbing steadily and slowly through gullies filled with towering tree ferns, into the cloud forests, a quick hello to the island’s rare burrowing crayfish and over bald saddles with postcard views, our group takes six hours – including a leisurely picnic – though those of us with knee cartilage make it down about 40 minutes ahead of the pack.

And we have struck gold: the day is so clear, I can easily see the wind farms on the coast of mainland Tasmania, more than 50 kilometres away. Sheltered from the wind by tenacious shrubs, I unpack my lunchbox to the tuneless singalong of another walking group, every song with the word “walk” in it.

Trousers Point on Flinders’ west coast with Mount Strzelecki in the distance.Credit:

As a rousing chorus of “I would walk 500 miles” floats on the breeze, I wonder: Did Pawel Strzelecki ever suffer thus? I think not. In 1842, the apparently very handsome Polish geologist – who also named Mount Kosciuszko – became the first European to climb the peak while on a charting mission on the celebrated HMS Beagle. Naval pundits will know this is the same ship that took Charles Darwin around South America and the Pacific several years earlier, while he cogitated on his theories of evolution and natural selection.

From Strzelecki’s peak, I spy Mount Chappell Island, distinctive for its pyramid-like hill. The island – population: two – has an airstrip. I can’t think why; the island is home to the world’s most concentrated population of mutant tiger snakes. On an almost exclusive diet of baby mutton birds, they grow bigger and more venomous than their mainland brethren, with huge heads. I’m simultaneously fascinated, revolted and terrified.

From here, I can see some of the Furneaux group’s 50-plus islands, including its second largest and one of the few populated islands, truwana/Cape Barren Island. Many of the tiniest islands were sealers’ outposts, where hard men kidnapped Tasmanian Aboriginal women for “wives” and nearly wiped out Bass Strait’s abundant seal population. The strait has a reputation as an antipodean Bermuda Triangle for the vast number of ships wrecked or vanished here, savaged by reefs and the Roaring Forties, but it’s still busy today with freighters en route to Melbourne or New Zealand.

In camp, each day begins with a plunger of coffee from Launceston roaster Ritual, brewed so strong that it’s almost rigid, and a spread of Tasmanian produce – yoghurt from the Tamar Valley, granola and local fruit and sourdough from the island’s bakery. Most condiments are made by Jon “the Juggler” Hizzard, once a professional juggler, who found his home and second calling here on the island, creating sizzling hot sauces and fine baguettes.

And each evening, before darkness falls at 8pm, we take turns at the hot, gravity-fed shower, and everyone slinks off to bed well-fed and briefed, leaving the communal tent empty save two of us; Garry, a fanatical word puzzler, and me, the journalist on deadline, sitting in companionable silence at our chores, while the bush creaks and groans.

The quiet is broken by a hulking brushtail possum attempting to plunder the sealed tubs in the stores tent, and raucous carolling at first light from kookaburras perched directly above our tents, rendering alarm clocks redundant. Another evening, we’re visited by a pair of wallabies, who creep quietly around the camp kitchen. Curiously, wallaby burgers appear on the menu the next night. In a clear case of plausible deniability, Nigel assures us there is no correlation.

One afternoon, when it’s too hot to walk, we visit the Furneaux Museum, a bright little jewel of local history, its collection including a terrifying antique operating table, shipwreck bounty and Whitemark police station’s old holding cells. There’s a replica 1920s mutton-bird processing plant showing the harsh life on the outer islands, and a 1950s Nissen hut, built for the soldier settlement scheme for returned World War II veterans.

Even paradise has a dark side, and Flinders’ darkness is Wybalenna, where the Indigenous Tasmanians – including Truganini, the so-called “last full-blooded Tasmanian Aborigine” – were exiled to be “civilised and Christianised” by its founder, George Augustus Robinson. That’s the nice way of looking at what, in reality, was a prison and a dumping ground for people taken from their homes, their land cleared for farming by settlers. Many dispossessed remain on Flinders Island, buried beneath the stark chapel that stands witness to its history.

Tiny houses, wagyu cattle and pairs of lovingly monogamous Cape Barren geese dot the island’s flat interior, bumbling echidnas cross our path, and near Palana, we run the gauntlet through wombat alley – the sturdy little tanks outnumber humans on the island roughly 77 to one. And while it might not have sewerage and fresh water is precious, the main town of Whitemark – population 300-ish – does have a Saturday morning ParkRun, the grandly named Flinders Interstate pub and the IGA supermarket, for souvenirs of manuka honey and Jon the Juggler’s sensational figs in port.

At the airstrip of the island’s second town, Lady Barron, the toilets outnumber the population. There are hundreds of toilets, says Nigel, waving his hand across the bush that fringes the airstrip. “Just pick a tree!”

There may be tree toilets, but there are no seats. So I prop up against my backpack and listen as the wind tousles the bushland canopy, until the slow drone of our Cessna 208 from the Tasmanian mainland marks my exit from an overlooked paradise.

The details

Visit
The six-day/five-night Flinders Island Walking Adventure In Comfort tour departs from Launceston and operates from October to April, costing from $3595 a person. It includes charter flights from Bridport to Flinders Island, all meals, accommodation and guiding.
See greatwalksofaustralia; tasmanianexpeditions.com.au

More
visitflindersisland.com.au
discovertasmania.com.au

greatwalksofaustralia.com.au

The writer travelled courtesy of Great Walks of Australia and Tasmanian Expeditions.