An Island off an Island off an Island

The drive south to Triabunna took us back through country we had seen two years earlier, before the bus, before any of this. Bicheno came first, and we stopped for breakfast at a place we remembered, the four of us at a table overlooking the water, Grammy and Fran meeting a town that already held something for us. The Blowhole was quieter than last time, the swell not high enough to force the spray, but we walked out to it anyway for the sake of completing the visit.

The ice cream detour was Anth's doing. Two years ago, on his birthday, we had driven to Coles Bay and found an ice creamery with a view of the Freycinet peaks that made the food secondary. It was thirty kilometres off the route and he did not care. Grammy, who had not been consulted on the detour, tasted her first scoop and became an immediate convert, and the thirty kilometres justified themselves in a single mouthful.

On the way back to the highway we stopped at the Spiky Bridge, a convict-built structure from 1840, its surface covered in vertical stone slabs that give it a rough, defensive look unlike any other bridge in the country. Grammy ran her hand along the stonework. We camped that night behind the pub in Triabunna with Maria Island visible across the water and the boat tour, Grammy's gift, set for the morning.

Mic, the owner of Maria Island Cruises, met us at the marina at dawn. The water was flat, the sky overcast, and the boat was full, but Mic had the kind of knowledge and timing that made a full vessel feel like a private tour. The circumnavigation began at Darlington Probation Station on the island's northern tip, the convict ruins sitting heavy and grey at the waterline, and moved clockwise into the Fossil Cliffs.

The cliffs are three hundred million years old, and up close from the boat the fossils were visible in the rock face, pressed into the stone like evidence filed and forgotten. The calm water allowed Mic to steer into a cave where the detail was closer still, and a white-breasted sea eagle watched from a ledge above as though supervising the visit. On the eastern side Mic showed us a geological sequence he clearly loved: metamorphic rock beneath sedimentary beneath igneous, the entire history of the earth's forces stacked in one cliff face. None of us understood it fully. All of us understood his excitement, which was enough.

Mille, the first mate, mentioned dolphins. She had barely finished the sentence when a pod of common dolphins appeared alongside, feeding on a school of fish in tight, fast circles. They came close enough to see the light on their flanks, and the albatrosses arrived within minutes, drawn by the same fish, different varieties wheeling above the surface while the dolphins worked below. It was the kind of moment that no itinerary can promise and no amount of planning can produce.

Morning tea was at Riedle Bay, a sheltered beach on the southern coast where wedge-tailed eagles circled the cliffs above. Peron's Pyramid rose from the sea at the island's southern tip, and sea lions lay on the rocks below it, a dozen pups playing in the shallows with the particular gracelessness of young animals that have not yet learned what their bodies are for. The painted cliffs on the return leg glowed with their banded colour even under overcast sky, and by the time we landed at Darlington for the walking tour the island had already given us more than we had expected from a day on the water.

The wombats appeared within five minutes of stepping ashore. A mother and a joey, feeding on the grass beside the track, unbothered by the group walking past. Two months in Tasmania. Countless camps, countless walks, cube-shaped droppings at every turn, and not a single sighting until now. Grammy had never seen one either, and the expression on her face as she crouched with her camera was worth every one of the empty searches that had come before. The island was thick with wildlife: Cape Barren geese, bandicoots, swift parrots flashing colour through the trees, pademelons grazing in the clearings. We stopped so often that two hours passed without covering much distance at all, and nobody minded.

On the boat back to Triabunna the four of us sat on the top deck in the wind and agreed without needing to argue about it: this was the best day of the trip with Grammy so far. An island off an island off the mainland, reached by a gift, walked among wombats we had spent two months failing to find. Some days do not need to be improved upon. They only need to be remembered accurately.Read more