Stories of the coast…
Travelling Bruny
It is a weekend’s getaway for Hobart people, a week’s stay for interstate tourists. Bruny Island a long string of an island off Tasmania’s southeast coast.
IT WILL COST YOU around AU$45 return to take your vehicle on the ferry from Kettering to Bruny Island (pensioner fare about $10 less). Once there, stay a couple days or more. Over its approximately 100km length the island offers landscapes varying from the undulating farm fields of North Bruny to the forested mountains and rugged coast of South Bruny.
You will drive on asphalt along the main road from the ferry dock on North Bruny to Lunawanna, Adventure Bay and the light station on South Bruny. The road north from the ferry landing to Dennes Point, a village of 50 or so on the island’s northernmost point, is narrow gravel. So is the road to Cloudy Bay on South Bruny. All are okay for 2WD vehicles.
Bruny is two islands joined by a narrow isthmus the locals call The Neck. The tourist steps up the dune at The Neck that take you to Truganini Lookout, commemorating a woman noted in Tasmania’s Aboriginal history and from where where views are extensive, is worth doing as is the boardwalk over to the ocean beach.
What to do
On our most recent visit to Bruny we climbed Fluted Cape and camped at the commercial caravan park at Adventure Bay. It is a low-key, basic but clean place popular in the holiday seasons when booking is recommended, and is just across the narrow road from the beach.
Hiking is only one of the options on Bruny. European maritime exploration buffs will find much to interest them, especially around Adventure Bay. Surfers might as well head straight to Cloudy Bay. South facing, the bay catches the swells coming in from the Southern Ocean (2/3 steamer wetsuit in warm season, 3/4 for the cooler months). There’s the tour boat trip along the coast. South Bruny light station on the island’s southern tip is also worth a visit.
We did the walk up Fluted Cape with a nine and and eleven year old and their mother and they made it easily. Accessible from the southern end of the beach at Adventure Bay, the steep track is suited to those of average fitness who don’t mind a bit of an uphill walk. As with all Tasmanian walks, carry water, a warm top and waterproof jacket as the wind sometimes blows cold and strong and rain comes in with little warning.
The circuit walk of roughly 14km around the peninsula near South Bruny light station gives fine views across the d’Entrecasteaux Channel to the peaks of the South Coast Range. There is a track to a waterfall in the mountains on South Bruny, however the falls are not large and the track is reported to turn muddy.
Finding food and services
I recommend stocking up with food, fuel and your camping needs in Hobart as the two grocery stores on Bruny offer a limited although adequate range of goods. You find them at Adventure Bay and at Alonnah, on the other side of South Bruny. Alonnah general store offers coffee.
Restaurant meals are available at the Alonnah Hotel on the western shore. Takeaways from Alonnah and Adventure Bay general stores. As well as takeaways and groceries, the Adventure Bay general store has petrol and an electric vehicle charging station. There is a paramedic at Alonnah.
Camping
If you want to splurge, try the accommodation at Alonnah Hotel which also offers restaurant-type meals at restaurant-type prices. Numerous private providers offer a range of accommodation around the island.
Van travellers and tenters will find the more robust option of camping rather than the soft option of hotel or other indoor accommodation to their liking. Bruny offers a few options depending on whether you prefer more of a basic, bush camping experience or to camp somewhere you can take a shower.
- the commercial caravan park at Adventure Bay, close to Fluted Cape, is a local enterprise that offers coin-operated showers and proximity to the beach
- at $10 a night for two, the national parks bush campsite at The Neck is by the beach; it is Tasmanian-basic and has a pit toilet (you will need a parks pass to stay and also to climb Fluted Cape)
- the Pines is a small, free campsite with a pit toilet just off the road close to Cloudy Bay beside a pine forest; it accommodates only a few vehicles; minimalist, for sure, but if it is Cloudy Bay’s swells that attract you, they are close by.
Campsites fill in the summer holiday season as tourists from the Australian mainland descend upon Tasmania like locusts onto a field of wheat.
An island with history
The original inhabitants, the Nuenonne people, knew Bruny Island as Lunawanna-allonah, the names retained in South Bruny’s two west coast villages — Lunnawanna and Alonnah.
South Bruny is a significant site for those interested in European maritime history. Adventure Bay provided anchorage for several noted European navigator-explorers including Abel Tasman, the first to drop by in 1642.
English navigators who stopped at Bruny Island include James Cook and William Bligh (who planted the first Tasmanian apple trees on the island and who is commemorated in Adventure Bay’s Bligh Museum). He anchored HMS Resolution in Adventure Bay. As part of Cook’s first Pacific expedition of 1770, Tobias Furneaux anchored at Bruny in HMS Adventure, the name being given to the bay. George Bass and Matthew Flinders visited in the sloop, the Norfolk, in 1798, after which Norfolk Bay in Tasmania’s southeast is named.
The first European visitors to the bay were from the D’Entrecasteaux expedition in 1792. Bruny Island figures prominently in the French exploration of Tasmania, with Bruni D’Entrecasteaux in the vicinity, from whom the D’Entrecasteaux Channel separating Bruny Island from the Tasmanian mainland gets its name.
The two ships of another French navigator-explorer, Captain Nicholas Baudin, carried scientists who conducted the first purely scientific expedition in Tasmania. The French navigations were more scientific voyages than the English expeditions although the French were interested in establishing a colony in Van Diemens Land, the name given by Abel Tasman to what is now Tasmania.
It was a practice for exploratory voyagers to plant gardens and fruit trees for future voyagers and, the expeditioners thought, for native people. On their search for the missing La Pérouse expedition (the two ships were never found), the d’Entrecasteaux expedition anchored in 1793 in Recherche Bay (Nuenonne name: Leillateah) to the south of Bruny Island. The bay was named in honour of the Recherche, one of the expedition’s ships. Here, the expedition’s two botanists, assisted by gardener Félix Delahaye, conducted the first deliberate scientific experiment in Australia (other than observations and knowledge held by Aboriginal people) by collecting and cataloging almost 5000 specimens. They made friendly contact with the Nuenonne people and established Tasmania’s first vegetable garden. Nicholas Baudin’s crew were also reported to have treated the Aboriginals they met with respect.
Visiting Bruny
If you can, make your visit to Tasmania (also known as lutruwita in the state’s dual naming system) in spring or autumn to avoid the tourist season, especially in January when campsites are crowded. If you do come in January and plan to stay at the Adventure Bay caravan park, book ahead. Bush campsites are first-in gets the space.
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