Stories of the trail…
Walking the peninsula
OUCH!
That was the ten year old as she brushed up against one of the spiky acacias beside the track. Like the bracken that lines the track, the acacias are at her head height. She doesn’t like it but she makes no complaint and pushes on. One thing I have learned in bushwalking with her and her 13 year old sister is that they are resilient kids who will not be put off by something like spiky plants.
We are following the walking track along the northern side of the Labillardiere Peninsula, the long, western-projecting finger of land at the far southern end of Bruny Island. The 18km circuit walk traverses the shoreline of the peninsula and, more for its length than difficulty, is classified as Grade 4 under the Australian walking track system.
Walking into history
To walk the track is to walk in history. The Nuenonne band of the South East tribe of Tamanian Aboriginal people, who called this island home for what is said to be around 40,000 years, knew it as Lunawanna-alonnah. Tasmanian Aboriginals walked into Tasmania over the land bridge connecting it to the Australian continent that existed when sea levels were lower, during the Pleistocene glaciation. That land bridge now lies below the waters of Bass Strait. The name of their Lunawanna-alonna homeland was adopted for the closest settlements to the Labillardiere Peninsula—Alonnah, population around 164, and Lunawanna, population around 144.
Bruny Island figures in the early European exploration of Tasmania, with James Cook, William Bligh, Mathew Flinders and Tobias Furneaux anchoring here in the late 1700s. The French expedition of Bruni D’Entrecasteaux, for whom the island as well as the channel separating it from the Tasmanian mainland is named, spent months in the region in 1792 and 1793 during which the first food production garden in Tasmania was planted by the expedition gardener at Recherche Bay, named after the ship, close by on the Tasmanian mainland.
The peninsula circumnavigated by the walking track from Jetty Beach campground was named for the naturalist on Bruni d’Entrecasteaux’ 1791 expedition to Oceania in search of the missing ships of the La Perouse expedition, which were never found.
Walking
The broken layer of cloud that was overhead when I walked down to the beach at dawn this morning persists, making for day of flat lighting that is not the best for photography. We set off along the track at ten. That’s later than I prefer to start a walk, my preference being early starts so I have time to make photographs and to linger in places I like.
You can walk the peninsula circuit track in either direction. Our group of three adults, a 13 and a 10 year old, set out along the northern shoreline from Jetty Beach. A curious name for a beach lacking a jetty, I thought, until I came across a couple posts at the end of the beach. Why a jetty here, though? It was only later that I learned it was where supplies for the Cape Bruny lighthouse were landed by ship in the time before the road was built. A track connected the jetty to the lighthouse along which supplies were moved for nearly five kilometres by bullock wagon.
The bracken that overhangs the track was not difficult for the kids to push aside. Have to check ourselves for ticks when we get back, I tell them. Like her sister, the 13 year old pushes on. The two have done a Grade 4 walk before, rock hopping across the Potato Fields, the extensive scree slope on kunanyi-Mt Wellington on the track to Wellington Falls. They carry their day’s needs in the 20l Osprey packs we gave them a couple years ago. The idea was to get them used to carrying their own equipment in preparation for longer walks.
The vegetation we pass through is coastal eucalyptus forest with a shrubby understory of heathland species and patches of casuarina bushland. Many of the shrubs are in flower, which would be a bonus for anyone with a botanical interest at this time of year. Here and there, gaps in the trees provide views over the waters to the far shore of Great Taylors Bay and of the oyster farms off Hopwood Point at the tip of the peninsula where a barge and a couple dinghies are working. The track dips down to a number of small beaches along the shore and there are no significant climbs and descents along this northern shoreline.
The track turns southwards at Hopwood Point, the western extremity of the peninsula where it follows the shore through casuarina forest with its open understory where the ground is browned with a layer of leaf fall. Around the point the track starts to trend eastwards along the southern shoreline.
Here at the point, I stop.
Superb! That is what I say as I stand and gaze westward to where the Southern Ranges form the horizon, the white of remnant snow patches standing in contrast to the blue of the mountains. There they are — Pindars Peak, Mt LaPerouse, Adamson Peak all arrayed along the horizon. My mind goes back through the years to the time I walked among those mountains, where I stood and gazed over the far south coast of this island into the misty blue vastness of the Southern Ocean beyond, knowing that there was no land for a couple thousand kilometres until the icy shoreline of the Antarctic continent.
The mountains, the sea. I stand and look across them. Doing so is uplifting. There is no need to think… I stand there in the vastness of the landscape and just be as if I am a part of that world made conscious so as to comprehend its own existence. For a moment I feel an integral part of it all.
Mentally exhilarated by the sight of the Ranges I follow the others through the forest until we come to the end of a long beach. Lunchtime. Minako and Fiona lay out wraps, salad and a can of tuna on the rocks, the girls eat and play on the sand. They come alive on the beaches we encounter on bushwalks. The openness of this one makes a contrast to the walk through the forest. Maybe it’s not an interesting bushwalk for the kids, Fiona says, with the sameness of walking through the scrub.
Now it is along the beach to pick up the track where it heads into coastal scrub. The terrain changes. The more or less flat track is no more. Here, it traverses sea cliffs but they are not visible from the trail. We feel their unseen presence in the exertion of the ups and downs that make this length of track the most physically demanding of the walk, however the climbs and descents are of only moderate steepness along what is now an occasionally used service vehicle track. This is where the 13 year old encounters a pademelon and echidna that scurries off to the protection of the scrub. I could see the pademelon’s tail and I thought it was a snake, she tells us.
Perhaps, I think, it might be better to start the track along this southern shoreline so as to pass over the hilly terrain when you are fresh. We descend to a beach where three tents are tucked into the shelter of the scrub at the far end. Families. A couple kids. Most must have walked in because there are only two sea kayaks that I can see.
This is how it goes until we encounter a sign pointing down a track to the end of the walk at the Jetty Beach campground. We are camped here. The girls and their mother in a tent, Murray in the back of their station wagon to give the family more space, Fiona and I in our VW minivan. Over both of our nights here we enjoy the conviviality of shared meals and talk, a spicy curry warming us on the first night and rice and vegetables on the second, accompanied by a fruity white wine and fruit juice for the girls. At times like this we recognise with gratitude how fortunate we are to live in an island state free of the conflict and turmoil that troubles other parts of the world.
Jetty Beach is a basic national parks campsite like others of its type. A large clearing among the trees, pit toilets, and campfires permitted—but not today thanks to a fire ban introduced to reduce the chance of bushfire. Parks charge AU$10 a night for two people. Anyone planning to camp here should bring food and water as there is no water at the campground.
Jetty Beach campground was largely full when we arrived on the Friday, but come Saturday morning people packed their tents and vans and headed out, leaving us to puzzle over why the campground was largely empty on a weekend.
Day’s end
While the others slept I was up at 5.30 this morning to check out the dawn from the beach. There, I met a person whose motorcycle I had heard pass by not long before. His name was Michael and he lives in nearby Lunawanna. Like me, Michael was here for the sunrise. You should have been here a half hour ago, he told me, it was superb. And it was from what I could see from the photos he showed me on his phone of the clouds lit rosy red as the sun approached the horizon, the bush and the bay still in the dimness of predawn.
The parks service sign says the walk is between five and a half and six and a half hours. Including lunch and other stop we took the longer time. It is now six in the evening and it has been a long day. We set about making an evening meal, immersed in the quietness of the bush.
Walking the Labillardiere Peninsula circuit track:
- the track is located at the southern tip of South Bruny Island at 43°29S, 147°08°E, not far from Cape Bruny lighthouse, the second oldest in Australia
- you need a national parks pass for the track, campground and lighthouse
- access to Jetty Beach campground, where the circuit track starts and ends, is around an hour and a quarter via road from the ferry wharf on North Bruny Island, the latter part being on all weather gravel road; the ferry connects to the town of Kettering, around 40 minutes south of Hobart
- if camping at Jetty Beach, bring water as there is none available there
- this is Tasmania so even warm, fine days can quickly turn to rain and cold; pack a waterproof parka and a warm top, a hat, first aid kit, food and a couple litres of water as there is no water on the track.
