Flinders Island Day 2: Out and About

There’s a custom on the island where all drivers wave at each other. It also extends to pedestrians but seems friendlier when drivers all lift one or two fingers from their steering wheel in greeting. We make a game of it – Nicole will count down from three and then all of us will wave at the same time. We’re probably a little too enthusiastic for the even-paced laconics of the island but it’s a nice tradition; a sign of community in a bottle realm where all people could feasibly know each other.

Being without network coverage or a GPS throws us back twenty years into a world of driving with more active executive function. Signs matter. Maps matter. Taking a wrong term requires critical thinking skills and a marriage counsellor.

Thankfully it doesn’t matter too much as our plans are fluid and we have one singular goal – to see the island.

We accidentally head south instead of north and find ourselves at Lady Barren, the second largest of the island’s settlements. We walk along an empty beach, sifting for shells amongst cuttlebones the size of footballs. So many cuttlebones and all so massive.

One of the highlights of Flinders Island is the unique wildlife. Most of the human-inhabited parts of the island are quiet, idyllic farmland – filled with cows, sheep, and the occasional pony. Filtering in and out of this agricultural environment are Cape Barren Geese. These large stocky-legged native geese are the rarest geese in the world, a bird almost driven to extinction in the 1950s but a species that continues to thrive on Flinders Island and its close neighbour Cape Barren Island. They are plump-grey with fluoro-lime bills, expressively honking if confronted.

The Bass Strait Wombat, known locally as the 'Blonde Wombat'

Today is also our first sighting of the island’s Blonde Wombats, a subspecies of the Common Wombat once found throughout the Bass Strait Islands but now restricted to Flinders. It is unbearably cute, and the rolling paddocks make for a charming backdrop when dotted with these floofy, lightly-toned, plush-toy-like marsupials.

We also see many birds I’ve never seen before – Firetail Finches, New Holland Honeyeaters, Sooty Oystercatchers, Pied Oystercatchers, magnificent Caspian Terns. There are also feral peacocks and more of the large feral turkeys, which hang about in packs, their tails fanning out as they gobble aggressively in response to our turkey calls.

It’s fair to say we see far more wildlife then we do people.

A pack of feral turkeys

We travel to the northern end of the island to Killiecrankie, a place of wild and breathtaking coastlines and multiple historical shipwrecks. We visit a local, an elderly woman married to one of the descendants of the first Europeans to settle the area – a fishing family originally from South Australia. More than 100 years ago, their boat was damaged ashore and they were forced to set up home. They discovered they liked the area so much that they would remain permanently, even after their boat was repaired. Anyway – the local woman specialises in Killiecrankie Diamonds, the colloquially-named topaz that can be found along the beaches in this area. Nicole hires some pans and a small shovel and takes to some of the known areas, sifting through the bracken rockpools and finding all manner of tiny treasures, but probably no topaz.

It’s bittersweet as Bobo is a curmudgeonly mix of under- and overstimulated by this point. It rains on and off all day, and it’s an annoying rain picked up by the wind so that it hits you sideways. It’s also cold and very windy, and Bobo has to sit in the car a lot as we travel from place to place. His patience wears out and he hits tantrum-town in Killiecrankie. He’s crankie in Killiecrankie.

Eventually when he calms and after Nicole has returned the equipment to the lady and found some topaz she likes, we travel a little further north to Palana – a rural settlement at one of the island’s two northernmost tips. There’s a certain awe in looking out into the misty horizon of the Bass Strait, knowing that Australia is somewhere there in the distance. In between us and the unseen mainland are the Sisters – two smaller islands once inhabited by the farmers who eventually settled in Palana.

We return to our base at Island Quarters in Whitemark and shelter in our room away from the wind and sea spray cold.

Cape Barren Goose

With Goslings

Sea-bitten mooring from years gone by

A house in Palana

Stone hut in Killiecrankie