The Forgotten Islands

by Michael Veitch

  ‘Gets a bit steep here,’ was all I heard from Kate in front of me. The air was delicate and oddly perfumed close to the ground but the soft fine sand made the going incredibly hard. Its coolness, however, had a soothing effect on my upper legs. Scrambling over a mesh of low branches and roots, with trees blocking out most of the light above, it was hard to tell at what angle we were progressing. At one point it began to very much resemble a climb. Here, I felt my backside being covered in sand. Reaching back to inspect, I felt not my trousers but the bare skin of my leg, and realised my pants had caught one of the branches and been torn open in a great flapping hole from the back pocket almost to the knee – just to add to the pile of humiliation steadily engulfing me.

  I could hear Chris, only a few metres away, but his voice was muffled by the closeness of this demi-jungle. Then a more distinct ‘Here we are’ and the light changed from a green dappled gloom to vivid white. Another series of efforts – pulling myself along like a prisoner in an escape tunnel – before emerging, blinking, into a magnificent arena of sand.

  We stood together for a few moments at the edge of this great expanse contemplating its beauty and its strangeness. All was silent except for the panting of our breath and the soft exhaling sound of the breeze that came from the trees at our backs. The dune stretched in front of us, slightly sunken, like a shallow crater with a ring of trees marking its edge, a great lake of fine white sand. ‘I couldn’t quite remember the way,' said Robert, tapping his chin in his odd way, breaking the silence at last, glancing back to the bushes, which had swallowed up all signs of our passage. ‘Been a while since I’ve been here.’

  Without a word, we plunged into the sand ankle deep, making our way down the slope towards the centre, seeking out firmer ground where we could. The fine, cool sand trickled past my ankle through the gaps in my shoes. The far side seemed to recede as we progressed, ant-like, into the heart of this secret place. The sun, hidden all day behind an overcast sky, now emerged, dazzling us with a white glare that made me think of a snowfield. For a moment, an old story I had read long ago came to mind, about people crossing the Gobi Desert, tramping day after featureless day towards an invisible horizon. The Forty Thousand Horsemen, along with the film crew, could have all fitted in here easily, and the ocean, still just over the ridge behind us, seemed a thousand miles away.

  ‘Here, let me show you the middens,’ said Robert, who seemed to be growing in energy and stature as the day progressed. ‘They’re quite interesting. The Aboriginal people used them for thousands of years, piling up their shells after eating. Might be about lunchtime too.’ I’d quietly been dreading this announcement. All Robert and I had managed to scrounge between us was a loaf of hard but wholesome bread, half a jar of honey and some ageing tahini. Having neglected the grocery stop myself, and Robert assuming Chris and Kate were better supplied than they were, we had both of us miscalculated and would have to rely on the kindness of the others.

  Robert led us to a spot at the bottom of a gully off to the side of the great dune, where we sat on hard clay and broke open our repast. Robert noted with sympathy my torn trousers, but registered an amused smile that lasted just a little too long for my liking. To atone, perhaps, he handed me one of our sandwiches. I sat, buttock exposed, crunching my way through sand grains that had worked their way into the sandwich, so decided to break smaller pieces off in my mouth and swallow them whole. The bread was dry and the tahini stuck to the roof of my mouth. But the honey was like a tonic, and I kept eating, feeling the nourishment working its way steadily to the tips of my arms and legs. ‘Good,’ I said between mouthfuls. ‘This is really good. What do they call this big sand dune?’ I asked Robert. He thought for a moment. ‘The Big Sand Dune,’ he said without irony. ‘Strange, it doesn’t seem to ever get any bigger. It was this size when I lived here as a child.’ I looked over it, thinking that somewhere in the universe, there is probably another planet where one can experience this exact same view.

  We sat there lunching in this ancient feasting ground among the middens, their sloping flanks sealed by centuries of windblown sand, their bases in some places spilling out their treasure of abalone shells and tiny bones, all white and brittle to the touch. Strangely, the tide of sand had halted its march just at this spot and we stood and sat on the same clay, hard as iron, where once had stood hundreds of feet – so long ago as to muddle comprehension. Kate found the jawbone of some small creature, broken up perhaps with these same stones that lay strewn here and there, but declined to disturb the timeless, perfect tableau, only half buried even now. It was as if nature was preserving this place, frozen for the benefit of no one, save a few lucky stragglers such as ourselves.

  It has been said that no other human society has been so isolated for so long and so completely as the Tasmanian Aborigines. The initial colonisation of the island occurred, it is thought, at least 3 5 000 years ago from the mainland by people simply walking across the Bassian Plain before its gradual inundation at the end of the last ice age 10 000 years ago. This led the people of Tasmania to exist in very much their own world, isolated from new developments occurring on the mainland such as the stone spear point and the dingo, neither of which ever reached them. Other curiosities marked them too, such as their decision, roughly 3000 years ago, to abandon eating fish, the bones of which can only be found at the base of some of the oldest middens. The reason for this curious decision is still being debated by scientists and anthropologists today, but it was shellfish that provided the bulk of the seafood diet for Tasmania’s Aborigines. Middens of abalone shells have been discovered dating back nearly 7000 years. We could only guess at the age of the ones we were gathered around, at the base of the big dune.

  There were no permanent Aboriginal settlements on Three Hummock, but seasonal journeys were made using the neighbouring islands in the Hunter Group as a bridge: Trefoil, Bird Island, Hunter, then an extraordinary amphibious crossing of the four and a half kilometre-wide Hope Channel to where we stood now. The few settlers who witnessed the crossing reported the Aborigines using a basket-like canoe made from reeds, which they held onto and pushed along like a kicking board, carrying various items for hunting, as well as, amazingly, fire. The creation of fire had been either forgotten or made taboo, says Robert, and had to be kept permanently alight and carried always with the group. Robert tells me that fire was so important, even warring tribes would cease hostilities if their respective fires were extinguished till such time as they were again alight, when battle would recommence.

  The trek back to the house on that first day was an ordeal. The weather, contrary to predictions, unleashed a sudden squall as we began our march back along the several kilometres of West Telegraph Beach. Making headway was hard, pushing against spiteful sheets of fine rain, driven by a low sky.

  The journey would be made easier, I decided, by engaging Chris in conversation. Besides the distraction, I was curious to find out more about this interesting man. As it turns out, he is a retired professor of geology, and was more than happy to impart some of his voluminous knowledge of the island’s natural history.

  ‘Come up here,’ he said, as we ascended a giant boulder at the water’s edge during a break in the rain. ‘Now these are feldspar crystals,’ he said, running his hands along the surface of the glistening stone. ‘It’s a potassium aluminium silicate mineral, which actually forms clay as it weathers …’ It’s not that I had no interest in the local rock formations, but I hadn’t expected a dissertation in the middle of a storm. Chris was not perturbed in the least. ‘Look here,’ he continued, standing upright in his shorts, ‘there’s quite a bit of quartz as well. And these black particles are biotite or what we call black mica …’ Once started, there was no stopping the man. He stood, oblivious to the wind which had picked up again and was buffeting us as I quietly hung on, firmly seated beneath him. But if he wasn’t prepared to flinch in the face of the elements, neither was I. Besides, there was a geology lesson to get through.


  ‘… so you see all this was a molten mass that came up from the earth’s crust, a sort of porridge that cooled over millions of years …’ I felt the pressure of a fresh gust against my ear and I thought Chris was going to fall. Like a tacking sail, he gave slightly, but did not flinch. ‘Oh, and over here’s quite a nice xeno-lith …’ he announced and vanished from view, emerging a few metres away, having leapt like a mountain goat to an adjacent peak. I crept down and followed via a far more cautious route. It was exciting to hear the man speak his knowledge, standing in the open with his trimmed, white beard and startling blue eyes, now even more like the captain of that square-rigger rounding Good Hope. ‘Have a look at this,’ he said, pointing out a smooth black stone embedded into a side of granite, like a thrust spear. ‘Basalt?’ I ventured.

  ‘Ah. Possibly!’ he replied. ‘… molten granite creates its own magma chamber … other types of rock melt off the roof and fall in, then it cools like this …’ I gripped my hands around this perfect natural sculpture of smooth dark stone, created by forces long extinguished.

  We all traipsed back along the empty beach, silent, cold and all now weary. Ahead, my water-blurred vision told me the beach ended in a curved vanishing point of pale yellow.

  ‘He’s very interesting to talk to,’ said Kate, appearing beside me. ‘When he gets interested in something. Quite a bit of energy for seventy-four.’ That stopped me, literally, in my tracks. I looked ahead at Chris’ lithe figure, his thin but solid legs, entirely bare to the elements, deep in conversation with Robert. These were obviously two men used to the elements, as comfortable plodding through wet sand in shorts and in the rain as strolling in a park.

  I had guessed Chris to be at least twenty years younger, and told her so. ‘Yes. I know, he doesn’t look it, does he?’ she laughed and looked down. They were a curious couple. Chris, kingly in his domain of facts, Kate, more ethereal, explaining how she couldn’t bear to sleep on a sprung mattress as it caused her to ‘feel’ the electricity in the air around her. Hearing this, Robert stopped and joined in, showing us some small brownish metal discs he always carried, which, he said, protected him from those same electric currents – or possibly radio waves – that he too sensed everywhere around him. I left them to carry on their slightly bewildering conversation, happy to drop behind once more as we made our way home.

  7

  BEAR ISLAND

  As I lay awakening slowly in my rough but solid bush bunk the next morning, I found it hard to recall the rest of that first day. The walk back seemed to have lasted all afternoon. My legs twinged a little, but eventually became numb enough for me to not feel anything anyway. That evening, a meal was provided – I could hardly remember it – scratched together by our caretakers, and we had retired. Lying there on my bed, chipped mug of tea cooling on the floor beside me, the prospect of a day as strenuous as the last seemed a little overwhelming. But I was anxious to explore, and, today at least, the sun was shining. Out the window, the island promised to reveal itself to me in its finest attire.

  Robert’s time on the island, he tells me, lasted from when his parents took out the lease after the war, with dreams – not unsuccessfully realised – of becoming a latter-day Swiss Family Robinson, until he sold that same lease to a wealthy family on the mainland after his illness forced him to surrender to early retirement in the mid-nineties. ‘I had a ball,’ he says. ‘I flew tourists in, gave them good Tasmanian food, told them stories, walked them around the island and sent them away again happy. It was quite successful… in a small way.’

  It was just the two of us that morning. Again, he left me in his wake with boundless energy. Surely, I thought, as we came to a massive field of granite boulders that I recalled seeing from the cockpit of the plane, he’d be compelled to slow down. The man, after all, has Parkinson’s disease. But it was among these giant stones, stained spectacularly with lichens of orange and red, each of which he seemed to know like individuals, that his climbing skills truly came to the fore. They were, to Robert, like stepping stones in a pond.

  Seeming to defy gravity, he would approach a rock and, without any foothold that I could see, travel almost vertically up its side using his toes. Once aloft, he would contemplate, at a crazy, dangerous angle, the terrain below, sway in the wind a little, then either make his way in a careless leap to the next precipice, or descend again as easily as he had climbed. At times I could barely look.

  My progress was far more cautious. I chose the slower ground route, picking my way at a snail’s pace through the rocky folds. At one point, as I followed him around the shoreline, his disembodied voice sounded above me. ‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’ I looked up to see him outlined against the now blustery sky, perched like a seabird, his sinewy form with his head of short, reddish hair leaning into the breeze. I could barely look up at him as I plodded on at the tide level, the close percussive sound of the waves breaking against myriad nooks and chasms of stone.

  Eventually I emerged to find him waiting for me, quite unfazed and happy to pause while I caught up. The path he’d taken was straight across the very topmost rocks, the size of small buildings with a sheer drop on every side. ‘You know I used to be quite a good mountain goat when I was young. I’ve lost my touch a little.’ I could only laugh.

  A small rocky outcrop just off the tip was what he wanted to show me. ‘That’s Bear Island,’ he said and laughed, and told me how it got its name.

  In Dr Nigel Brothers’ comprehensive Tasmania’s Offshore Islands, the entry for Bear Island reads, ‘… this small island is a series of three disjointed granite boulders, with patches of vegetation dominated by Carpobrotus rossii …’ Included is a scale map of its parameters, longitude and latitude, a list of bird species to be found (such as the little penguin and the common diving petrel) and authoritative comments such as ‘an island vulnerable to extreme weather, with low species diversity and biomass …’ No mention is made, however, of the origin of its curious name. Koalas – for years erroneously referred to as bears – were at one stage introduced to Three Hummock, but a scarcity of their favoured eucalypt soon saw them die out. This, however, is not the explanation of Bear Island’s unusual moniker.

  ‘We used to go out there as kids,’ he told me. ‘You can get to it at low tide.’ The prospect did not look an inviting one. ‘One day the state nomenclature board came to visit us. They’re the bureaucrats who go around putting names on things for all sorts of spurious reasons and on this occasion they were officially naming, or renaming, some of the points on the island.’ Robert’s younger sister Ingrid insisted to the official-looking men that this particular point be called Bear Island. The men glanced at each other and, perhaps recalling the island’s former koala population, allowed the name to stick. Had they known the actual reason for the child’s request, they might have changed their minds. ‘After they’d gone, Ingrid revealed that she’d recently left one of her favourite toys out there – a bear. We went over there later but couldn’t find it, but that’s why she was so insistent. It might just be the only place in the world named after a soft toy,’ he says.

  8

  I AM NOT AN ANGLER

  ‘We’ll be round at half nine,’ said Chris as Robert and I said goodbye for the evening and thanked him and Kate for yet another dinner, before turning into the dark and making our way back down the hill to our little wooden house at the bottom. Chris and Kate’s caretaker’s residence was by far the grandest house on Three Hummock, a solid, white-painted brick family home dating from the 1940s, which would not have looked out of place in many suburbs of Sydney or Melbourne. But here, standing alone in a paddock on a virtually uninhabited island, surrounded by geese and kangaroos, it seemed almost surreal.

  Chris and Kate fed us every evening of our stay. Without them, Robert and I would have no doubt starved. Despite their own supplies needing to last the remaining few weeks of their stay on the island, this dynamic couple managed, from somewhere, to find enough vegetables, meat, wine, rice, cake
and bread to cater for us two freeloaders, day after day, meal after meal. Each evening after our exploring, Robert and I would perform a kind of ritual, checking the ageing fridge and pantry in our shack in case a ham or roast chicken had somehow materialised during our absence. This nightly charade over, we would shake our heads a little then mumble something about ‘wandering up to … see what’s doing.’

  Affecting nonchalance, we’d casually saunter up the hill in the late evening light, sidling up to Chris and Kate’s front door, which was always ajar, one of us hanging back a little, so as not to appear too much like a delegation, or indeed the hungry incompetents with nowhere else to go that we in fact were.

  ‘Come in, come in,’ we would be told, and ushered into the kitchen where a full meal was waiting for us.

  ‘Oh my goodness, look at that, how marvellous!’ Robert and I would now usually exclaim, along with hollow enquiries about there being enough.

  I did manage to create dessert after rifling through their pantry on one occasion – my date pudding, always a winner – and one evening, I even contributed a fish.

  I adored fishing when I was young, and would never hold back from espousing its double virtues of skill and patience, two qualities I in fact possessed very little of, and was hence an extremely poor fisherman. This, however, would never deter me from throwing a line willy-nilly into any body of water whenever the chance allowed. Not far from Robert’s and my shack was a small wooden jetty, Three Hummock’s only proper dock. A large shed at one end was unlocked and sticky-beaking one morning, I spied several large and sturdy rods, fully rigged with the appropriate tackle, stacked neatly against the wall. I vowed to put them to use that very night after we had returned from the day’s expedition.

  Several hours later, pausing not even to drop off my bag at the house, I bolted down the hill to the shed to grab one of those rods to take advantage of the late afternoon light.