The Forgotten Islands

by Michael Veitch

  Amos and Fannie Pearce and seven children; William and Mary Rowbottom and two children; Mary and Susan Caffry, both single; George and Ann Finding and one child; Emanuel and Mary Ann Franklin and two children; Helen Houghton, single; John and Jane Woods and seven children; Thomas Hopkins, single; Margaret Williams, single …

  32

  FINALLY, DEAL

  The bluff was dead ahead and finally, after more than an hour of powering across the sea, starting to look bigger. For ages, it had just sat there on the horizon, long and low and, despite the perfect sun-filled sky and calm water, wrapped in its own greeny-brown shadow, reluctant to shrug off its lingering night attire. I had been told about it, had read about it, had seen it from the air and come tantalisingly close to it in a yacht, but now, for the first time, in a few short hours, I would finally be setting foot on Deal Island.

  Cunningly, I positioned myself to make my part of the boat look uninviting to anyone else. There was only one seat in the little crow’s nest, but if certain members of the small party travelling with me wanted to share it, I couldn’t really refuse. But I wanted the box seat, and guarded it with an ostentatiously outstretched leg.

  It had been, as usual, a rush job. Another phone call at an inconvenient time telling me that yes, a boat was booked to take people out there, leaving from Flinders Island, and that yes, some last-minute room had emerged and all things being equal with an eternally temperamental stretch of water such as Bass Strait, the weather might just hold to its promise for Saturday.

  For weeks I had kept up a barrage of enquiries, but the few boats that were venturing out had neither the interest nor the room to take me.

  It was Christian who had once again come good for me.

  ‘Lighthouse people …’ he told me in his chuckling, abbreviated way, sorcerer-like way ‘… doing a run … think they have some space … ha, ha … might want to call them …’ Promising to leave him something in my will, I followed up the lead immediately. ‘Oh,’ he added as an afterthought, ‘… they, ha, leave tomorrow…’

  For once, though, everything worked. The last seat on the last flight into Whitemark was there for the taking, and on a blustery Friday evening, I touched down once again on Flinders Island.

  Having suffered a variety of obsessions in my lifetime, it felt somehow liberating being the only person at the welcoming dinner that night not to have any connection whatsoever in the interest that was responsible for my being here: lighthouses. Is this what I sound like? I wondered, zoning in and out of the various lighthouse-related topics that flew back and forth between the half dozen or so enthusiasts at the table. Have I, for decades, sounded thus to family and friends? said the gnawing voice inside me. I shuddered to think of the answer, but avowed to concentrate even harder on the topic currently under discussion – a detailed analysis of catoptric and catadioptric lenses and the equivalent powers of wattage and acetylene. Lighthouse people, I was starting to realise, can be rather intense.

  It was a lighthouse, in fact, that I was quietly scouring for almost as soon as we left Killiecrankie Bay in the northern part of Flinders Island. For a change, the good weather had stayed true and the gamble of my mad dash looked like it might indeed pay off, if for only a day. Tomorrow’s conditions, James assured us, would be far less benign, and we were all very lucky for this one perfect day.

  So there it was in front of me – this magnificent rock, Deal Island. I hardly dared take my eyes off it, except to follow the flight of the mutton-birds, finally seeing them in their daytime element on the water, graceful, fast and elegant. They seemed to almost play with the boat, uncannily slowing down and speeding up, without any apparent effort, sidling up alongside, riding the gentle swell like a roller-coaster, then suddenly pulling up like a jet, looping over and starting again.

  Then, in the distance, the sun caught a flash of white, high up on the far-away headland. Trying to focus the binoculars in the swell was useless, but unmistakably, there, just visible standing like a proud white sentinel, was the lighthouse at Deal Island.

  ‘There she is!’ came an instant chorus of yells. The incessant lighthouse talk to which I had been subjected since my arrival had, I realised, started to embed itself, as I too felt a rush of excitement. But these guys were in a league of their own. They gasped audibly at what was still barely visible to my eyes but a shining beacon to them, despite this in fact being a decommissioned lighthouse that hadn’t ‘shone’ for years.

  Deal Island, the major island in what is called the Kent Group, is regarded by many as the jewel in the crown of the Bass Strait Islands: beautiful, remote and exotic. Only a lucky few have ever seen it, despite its relative equidistance between the Victorian and Tasmanian coastlines. Many have in fact disputed the state to which it belongs, as the historically changing sea border has on occasions put it in both. There are no flights, no regular boat services, no tourist parties, and even if you could find your way onto it, there are no cars, roads, nor anywhere to stay. But it is spectacular.

  The origin of the name Kent is slightly vague. Some sources cite Flinders naming it as he passed by on his first voyage into the strait to search for the survivors of the Sydney Cove in 1798, after his friend William Kent, the captain of the oldest of the First Fleet ships, the Supply. But as each of the group’s islands is named after a port in the county of Kent – Dover, Erith, Deal – and the fact that it was originally termed Kent’s Group, suggests nostalgia for the home country as the source. Whichever is true, Flinders’ partner George Bass evidently didn’t think much of them, saying:

  … small group (of islands) appears to be formed of granite, which is imperfectly concealed by long straggling brush, and some few still diminutive trees, and seems cursed with a sterility that might safely bid defiance to Chinese industry itself. Nature is either working very slowly with those islands, or has ceased to work on them, since a more wild deserted place is not easily to be met with. Even the birds seemed not to frequent them in their usual numbers.

  At 39 degrees south, roughly 50 nautical miles to the north-west of Flinders, Deal comprises nearly 16 square kilometres of cliff, rock and forest. It is also remarkably high in parts, so high that its famous lighthouse – so mesmerising to my companions (and, I admit, starting to work its magic on me) – is regularly obscured by low cloud, negating the very reason for building it. And the building of it is a story in itself.

  On the map, Deal is the largest in a group of islands that form part of the barrier of islands running south-east from Victoria to the northern tip of Tasmania: the remnants of the 10000-year-submerged mountain range of which I was given a close-up view on the yacht many months before. Ships’ captains sailing south from New South Wales to the colony of Victoria and beyond would take a large breath when entering the strait from the east, knowing they were about to run this rocky gauntlet, which, by the 1840s, had already claimed many ships and lives.

  Ships with names like Daphne and Dewdrop, Surprise, Mary and Ionia were all lost in the Kent Group before a light was built to ward them off the reefs and the shoals. The first recorded wreck in the Kent Group was that of the schooner Brothers, 40 tons and built in 1809. Bound for Sydney in 1816 from Kangaroo Island, she carried 20 tons of salt and 200 bushels of wheat when her captain, William Hilton Hovell, entered Bass Strait from the west and was immediately caught in a driving easterly gale, running ashore and wrecking up on Erith Island with one man drowning.

  Marooned for ten weeks in the middle of winter, he and his crew of eight survived on the bits of wheat washed ashore from their own lost cargo, and anything else that could be scavenged. Eventually they escaped in a tiny raft which Hovell put together with seal skins, to be picked up by a passing ship, the Spring. (Anything but put off by the ordeal, Hovell continued adventuring, eventually joining explorer Hamilton Hume in opening up the southern overland route from Sydney in 1824, and finding fame as one half of ‘Hume and Hovell’, one of the most famous explorer duos in Australian history.)

/>   It was Hobart’s Port Officer, William Moriarty, who first proposed the construction of a tower atop Deal’s lonely escarpment, one of a series designed to light the routes between the colonies of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land. It would not be an easy task. Even today, it is difficult to supply, but in the early nineteenth century a major construction such as this would have been a monumental task.

  The Tasmanian colonial architect John Lee Archer was chosen to design the light, and engineer Charles Watson to build it. Archer had already been behind several prominent structures in Tasmania, including the famous tower of St George’s Church in Hobart’s Battery Point.

  In a groundbreaking first for inter-colonial cooperation, New South Wales and Tasmania agreed to share the cost of construction, a rare event back in days of notoriously suspicious relations between Britain’s far-flung outposts.

  The light was ordered from Chance Brothers Limited in Birmingham, properly insured and shipped on the vessel John Woodall, direct to Van Diemen’s Land in forty-eight cases including, according to author Kathleen Stanley in her book Guiding Lights:

  … everything from 16 curtain rings (four extra) to the feather and dart for the top of the vane. Six cases each contained nine squares of plate glass and even polishing powder and cloths.

  The task was nothing if not daunting. The light’s position was chosen atop a nearly 1000-foot cliff, 3 kilometres from the landing site at East Cove. The list of materials included ‘5000 bricks, 12 000 shingles, eighty rafters, 2500 bushels of limestone, 200 joists of various lengths and great quantities of battens, boards, planks and other goods’.

  Two quarrymen, two carpenters, four masons, a medical officer, one blacksmith, nineteen labourers and ten bullocks were all shipped over to Deal to begin work, under the auspices of engineer Watson. Even a tramway and whim – powered by the bullocks – complete with timber sleepers was installed to haul the material up the precipitous slope from the little harbour, and a road cut 3 kilometres through virgin bush.

  Sandstone and granite were sourced locally, hand-cut and brought up, as well as 3000 bushels of lime to ‘perfect the works’.

  Archer’s Tuscan Doric column tower was built in good time and stood just 20 metres high, but its naturally elevated platform gave Deal’s light a record which still stands today: highest lighthouse in the Southern Hemisphere. Since its completion in 1848, it had survived hundreds of storms, several bushfires and the ravages of time and the elements to still be standing the morning I pulled into East Cove in James Luddington’s fast and reliable Strait Lady.

  I had just one day to explore what was left of a shipwreck and an air tragedy, and perhaps find the source of a strange story told to me when I was just twelve years old.

  33

  SEEING THE LIGHT

  James, who had been to Deal countless times, leant back in his languid way at the helm as we finally closed on Deal Island, running slowly next to the base of her spectacular cliffs with their countless crags and inlets, each outcrop a work of art. ‘Heard of the Beagle?’ he asked, expecting me, surely, to be familiar with Charles Darwin’s legendary vessel, perhaps the most famous survey ship of all time. ‘It nearly sank on that rock right there.’ I glanced to where he was pointing to a sharp crag that seemed to lean against the bottom of a cliff at an odd angle as we turned into Murray Pass, the water that divides Deal from its sisters, Erith and Dover.

  Darwin himself had left HMS Beagle by the time it was engaged on its third major voyage in 1837, surveying large areas of Western Australia before continuing on to Bass Strait. ‘She was coming into the pass here, and got caught on one of the currents that constantly change,’ said James. ‘It pulled them right onto that point. They were so close their jib was actually over the rocks.’

  The Beagle’s survey lieutenant, John Lort Stokes, gives an account of the very incident in his classic record of the voyage, Mariners Are Warned!:

  … during the awful moment that succeeded, a breathless silence prevailed and naught was heard but the din of waters that foamed in fury round us. Providence however decreed otherwise and the next moment Beagle’s head was slowly paying off from the shore.

  ‘Another eddie happened to pull them off it at the last second,’ continued James. ‘That sort of thing happens here. It would have added to Deal Island’s fame, don’t you think? “The last resting place of the Beagle”?’

  Safely avoiding all such rocky outcrops, we turned a rocky corner and pulled into a cove where a sheltered beach stretched across the base of a steep headland. This was East Cove, the site of Deal’s only jetty, and a truly beautiful sight. The island’s entire population had turned out to greet us. The fact that this comprised just two people in no way detracted from the ceremony of occasion. Bob and Penny, on the verge of finishing their lonely three-month vigil as caretakers, seemed delighted to see us, although perhaps any company would be welcomed after twelve weeks alone. They ushered us onto the eighty-year-old jetty. ‘There are signs saying it’s unsafe,’ said Bob, ‘but really, it’s in beautiful condition. It’s the pylons underneath. Concrete cancer. The steel rods rust and expand, breaking it up, you see.’ Not finding this quite as reassuring as did he, I nonetheless agreed that the timbers, worn to the very contours of the grain, looked sturdy enough.

  For a moment, the island played a trick on me when an exposed rock on the shore seemed to shudder slightly. Thinking it might be some kind of animal, I looked closer and was on the verge of making an announcement when, astonished, I realised it was in fact under a metre or so of unbelievably clear water. Beneath the boat was the same. It seemed to be floating not on water but on air, and the purple and grey colours of a school of small fish could be clearly made out as they swam lazily about the pylons.

  On shore, the first of many slopes I would contemplate that day rose before me like the ramparts of a fortress. An official welcome sign with rust bubbles attempting to break through its enamelled surface told me that we were sitting at a major crossroad of ocean currents: westerlies from South Australia, northerlies from New South Wales and the cooler waters of Tasmania. I asked if this accounted for the clarity of the water.

  ‘Oh no,’ said Penny. ‘That’s because there are no rivers here. Not for miles.’

  ‘… the Kent Group,’ read the sign, ‘includes shallow and deep reefs as well as extensive sponge beds in deeper water and is unusually rich in fish species. It has the highest diversity in Tasmania … and the cooler Tasmanian waters have a strong influence on the flora and fauna found here …’ I suspect, however, that ‘flora’ didn’t include the strange plant blanketing half the slope in front of me, its pale green contrasting with the native hues around it.

  Euphorbia paralias, or sea spurge, arrived, unwelcome, in the late eighties on Deal and now presents an ongoing battle to contain its rapacious advance. Its long upright tendrils of fleshy elliptical leaves supporting a single flower give it a delicate, slightly evil appearance, remarkably similar, in fact, to the monstrous triffid in the old movie of John Wyndham’s famous story.

  It arrived in Western Australia from the Mediterranean, probably in ships’ ballasts in the 1930s, and has gradually colonised vast areas of dune and beachfront, relentlessly working its way east, and now even threatens southern New South Wales. It is fast-growing, highly resilient, and each adult plant can produce up to 5000 salt-resistant seeds which float on the tides over vast distances. The only way to effectively control it is to rip it out of the ground.

  ‘Oh, and it has poisonous sap, too,’ said Penny, completing the malevolent picture. The sea spurge’s milky ooze can indeed inflict a severe skin irritation, as the story she related of her children gambolling among it attests. It was on a family holiday. ‘They were playing happily, bobbing up and down in the stuff, then on the drive home, they started rubbing their eyes, then the skin started to come off their hands and around their middle,’ she said. ‘They looked like neglected children.’ She and Bob had cleared exactly one half of E
ast Cove’s main slope of the dreadful spurge, a gigantic effort for ten people, let alone just two.

  My wary contemplation was interrupted by the broken muffler of Deal’s only vehicle, an absurdly small Daihatsu tray truck of ancient origin, which noisily chugged up the cracked concrete slope to the keeper’s cottage and the terrain beyond. As it seemed to struggle under the weight of just half a dozen bags and some mail, no passengers were allowed. This immediately disheartened one or two of the party, who gasped at the gradient of the slope in front of them. There would be many more before the day was done.

  The men headed off in an enthusiastic clump, a noisy gaggle lugging cameras, tripods and backpacks. I puffed my way in the rear beside Penny, who barely raised a breath as she pointed out some of the features now emerging as our elevation increased. It was a truly dramatic vista: small trees growing at crazy, windswept angles; ridges and rocky peaks with names like ‘Dragon’s Tail’; and, in the foreground, across the tumultuous passage named Murray Pass, Deal’s Kent Group stablemates, Erith and Dover, sailing alongside. It could be said these two are in fact one island, dipping at its centre, separated only by a tiny spit of rock known as ‘the swashway’, which at high tide vanishes completely.

  ‘We’ve been infested by earwigs lately,’ Penny told me in a curdling tone, blunting my idyllic contemplation. ‘They get into the garden, into all the lettuces, inside the house. I’ve never seen anything like it.’ I shuddered slightly, having always reserved a special revulsion for this particular creature. Other problems and infestations had affected their lives on this remote place as well. Various waves of flies and insects, and large numbers of small kangaroos, which thrive here, eating anything not imprisoned behind veils of chicken wire.

  Having reached the top of the track, we came across a house in the style of the early 1960s, surrounded by a thriving and well-kept garden of flowers and vegetables, and the older lighthouse keeper’s cottage, starkly whitewashed and redolent of older times. Now officially the Deal Island museum, it served for over a hundred years as the principal residence of the head keeper, built from stone, convict-hewn and cut here on the island.