The News’ John Lewis went looking for time out from the noise of the internet age.What he found was Bruny Island – a place where time moves to the rhythm of the waves and wandering wallabies.
Hold tight - we’re checking permissions before loading more content
Looking for wild nightlife among grass-chewing locals dancing to a hypno beat?Then Bruny Island could just be your kind of party.The locals have long powerful legs for pounding the ground and they come around every evening at dusk ready for a munch on the garden greenery to the rhythmic backdrop of lapping waves.Watch out for the white ones – they look like stoned ghosts.We stayed in a house nestled up a hill overlooking a curved beach called Adventure Bay where the only true measure of time is the gentle fall and suck of the waves.On the first night, I woke up just before dawn to what I thought was the sound of a faraway steam train puffing up a hill.This train was so slow it felt like it would never arrive.Waves always sound mournful and lonely in the dark.When they are just 100m below your open bedroom window, you feel like taking a walk to keep them company.Bruny Island is about an hour’s drive south of Hobart and, like all islands, it has its own distinct charm.It has no flashy hotels or nightclubs. It has no trendy wine bars or three-hat restaurants.It has one main bitumen road with no public transport and no car-wash joints.Mobile phones and internet don’t work in a lot of places.What Bruny Island does have is one pub, a main shop with a single petrol bowser, a whisky distillery, a cheese and beer company, a winery, a fresh oyster cafe called Get Shucked and several outlets selling local chocolate, honey or berries.What else do you need?It also has lots of friendly little cafes.Oh, and a lighthouse.But there’s something else here that’s much rarer. Bruny Island offers that priceless treasure of 21st century life – the solace of emptiness.We spent hours walking on empty beaches and scouring rock pools for shells, sea-washed jewels and little fishes.We took photos of sand-blown seaweed and driftwood softened by wind and sand into the shapes of fantastic animals.Many times we sat and watched the gulls swoop and the little plovers scurry about the sand to protect their nests.Sometimes we just sat.For the more adventurous there is Bruny Island Cruises – offering a three-hour wilderness cruise on a high speed yellow boat alongside some of Australia’s tallest cliffs to search for whales and dolphins.We left that to the spray-loving sea dogs.When we selected Adventure Bay as our destination I thought it might be a name dreamt up by a tourism committee.In fact, the name is soaked in history.It comes from Captain Tobias Furneaux’s ship HMS The Adventure which anchored in the bay for five days in March 1773.The bay area was visited by Furneaux for fresh water and also by captains Cook, Bligh, and Tobin in the late 1700s.Bruny is named after the French explorer Bruni D’Entrecasteaux who also laid anchor in Adventure Bay for fresh water.There is a place in the bay called Two-Tree Point where history and the present collide.In front of two huge gum trees growing on a rocky outcrop looking across the bay at Resolution Creek is a noticeboard with an image of the site and the trees painted by Captain Bligh’s artist Lt George Tobin in 1792.The trees are still there 250 years later – lonely sentinels on the edge of the great southern land.The Bligh Museum of Pacific Exploration in Adventure Bay is a fascinating little place built from convict-made bricks and packed with historic maps, diary entries, paintings and other objects which tell the story of the area’s early explorers.Bruny Island is really two islands joined by a long, thin and sandy isthmus called The Neck – one side has crashing waves, the other is a calm pool.Newly-built timber stairs lead up to a hilly point with breathtaking 360-degree views and a memorial to Aboriginal woman Truganini and the indigenous Nuenonne people.At the far end of the rugged south island is Cape Bruny Lighthouse towering 114m over dramatic cliffs and coves.It was first lit in 1838 and was decommissioned in 1996.Today it stands as a reminder of the lonely life of the men and their families who maintained Australia’s southernmost lighthouse.The beauty of island life is, of course, its isolation.So if you are planning a visit, be prepared for at least a day’s journey to get there.We drove to Tullamarine, left our car at a long-stay airport car park and flew to Hobart.There, we picked up a hire car and drove to Kettering on the mainland where we caught the ferry to the island.The journey takes about 15 minutes and the cost is $38 return for vehicles under 6m long.The ferry runs every half hour from 6.30am to 7pm at Kettering.For more information about Bruny Island go to www.brunyisland.com.au