South Australia: Taste of the wilderness

Once home to a bunch of motley convicts, Australia's Kangaroo Island now teems with a different sort of wildlife. NICK SQUIRES checks out Australia's third-largest island


Life was rough on Kangaroo Island 200 years ago. When a Captain Sutherland of the Royal Navy visited in the early 19th century, he found the place inhabited by a motley band of fur-clad whalers, sealers and escaped convicts.

These renegades, he wrote, were "the terror of ships, being little better than pirates". Using the island as a bolt hole from the colonial authorities, they hunted seals and whales, traded skins and meat for rum and tobacco, and grew vegetables on tiny plots hacked out of the bush.

They carried out raids on Tasmania, kidnapping Aboriginal women and bringing them back to the island as their wives, "keeping them in a state of slavery, and cruelly beating them on every trifling occasion," the officer noted with distaste. "They are complete savages, living in bark huts like natives," Sutherland wrote. "They dress in kangaroo skins and wear sandals made of seal skins. They smell like foxes."

These days, the pirates and whalers are long gone. Instead of clubbing seals and hunting whales with harpoons, the inhabitants of Kangaroo Island, which lies off the coast of South Australia, are busy rectifying the damage done by their predecessors.

Seal colonies are thriving, whales pass by on their migration from the Antarctic to the Great Australian Bight, and the tracts of native bushland which cover a third of the island pulsate with life.

At times it feels as though the island is one vast nature reserve. Within half an hour of flying in from Adelaide to the island's only airport, at Kingscote, I had spotted a chubby male koala propped lazily in the crook of a gum tree.

Echidnas snuffled through roadside undergrowth, Cape Barren geese pecked at swathes of grass, and sea eagles flew overhead.

When I first told friends I was going to Kangaroo Island, the standard response was "Where's that?" Some thought it was in Queensland, others didn't have a clue.

For such a little-known island, it is remarkably big - Australia's third-largest offshore island, after Tasmania and Melville Island, north of Darwin.

It is 155km long, up to 55km wide, and has 450km of rugged, unspoilt coastline. And yet it is home to just 4000 people.

Last connected to the mainland 10,000 years ago, it was named by the British explorer Matthew Flinders, who saw kangaroos when he sailed past in 1802.

The island was uninhabited - experts believe Aborigines lived there once, but disappeared, leaving behind evidence of fire sites, a few shell middens, and little else.

At Kingscote I hooked up with Brian Vanner, a guide with Adventure Charters of Kangaroo Island, who came here in 1975 from his native South Africa on the first leg of a round-the-world trip.

"A mate of mine had no one to go surfing with so I thought I'd give it a go," he said. "I've been here since."

We drove in Vanner's 4WD to Lathami Conservation Park, where we crept through low mallee scrub before coming across a timid Tammar wallaby. The tiny marsupial stifled a yawn as it cleaned its snout with miniature paws, scanning us.

Further along the track we came across a rare glossy black cockatoo poking its head out of a hole high up in a gum tree, while the biggest ants I have seen trooped across the path. "They're called inch ants because of their size," Brian said. "Be careful - they have a sting worse than a bee."

After bouncing down a long dirt road for 40 minutes, dodging kangaroos, we came to the isolated Cape Willoughby lighthouse. Completed in 1852, it was South Australia's first lighthouse.

At its base are three whitewashed, red-roofed keepers' cottages, two of which provide accommodation for visitors.

The third is used by national park ranger Bart Khaper, whose duties include taking daily weather recordings for the Bureau of Meteorology.

"Southern right whales come past this point each year," said Khaper, scanning the narrow waterway known as Backstairs Passage which separates this end of the island from the mainland. "We've got sea eagles, kestrels, ospreys and lots of tiger snakes. The workers who built the lighthouse killed 1800 in two years."

With that sobering thought in mind I set out that evening for one of the most isolated restaurants in Australia - Samphire, a stunningly designed timber and glass eatery perched on the cliff edge a couple of hundred metres from the lighthouse.

It felt like we were at the end of the earth, and I would have been happy with fish and chips or a decent burger.

Instead, we were treated to a seven-course meal of steamed crayfish terrine, King Island freshwater trout, stuffed chicken with mushrooms and brie, and to top it all off, sticky date pudding.

All this for just $45. It seemed doubtful the restaurant would make any money. "I'd rather have 20 people in here at $45 a head than five paying $60 a head," said chef and owner Susan Pearson, who last worked at the prestigious River Cafe in London.

The next morning we set off to explore more of the island. We stopped briefly at Pennington Bay, one of the island's many unspoilt beaches. A pod of eight dolphins appeared and proceeded to surf the breakers rolling into shore.

An hour's drive through picturesque sheep country brought us to another isolated spot, Western River Cove, on Kangaroo Island's northern coast.

We climbed aboard the Wind Cheetah, a 15m catamaran crewed by fisherman and dive master Jim Thiselton and his deckie, 24-year-old James Marshall.

Thiselton's speciality is providing divers with close encounters with one of the most decorative and bizarre-looking marine creatures, the leafy sea dragon, a relative of the sea horse.

The animals we had come to see, however, were much bigger. Kangaroo Island is home to thousands of Australian sea lions and New Zealand fur seals, and as we cruised along the base of 300m cliffs, we came across little groups basking on rocks and rolling in the surf.

The great thing about these seals is that you don't just get to look at them; you can swim with them, too.

I struggled into a full-length black wet suit, pulled on a mask and snorkel, and jumped off the back of the boat.

I swam towards a group of fur seals lolling around in a narrow channel between the cliffs and an outcrop of rock.

"Let them come to you," Thiselton yelled. "And keep your arms in. If you look threatening they make take a bit out of you."

Through my mask, I saw sleek dark shapes emerge, from deep down in the gloom, heading towards me with astonishing speed. The seals twisted and turned all around me, peering up.

Back on dry land, we spent the night at the new King Island Wilderness Resort, another sensitively designed timber and glass building, before continuing the next day into Flinders Chase National Park.

A blanket of bushland, the park is bigger than Singapore but has a permanent population of just 14.

There were more seals and sea lions at Cape Couedic, the island's most southwesterly point. A winding gravel path leads to a series of viewing platforms, the last of which opens on to the great limestone cave of Admiral's Arch.

Dozens of fur seals lazed on rocks or bobbed in the surf, as the smell of dung and sea salt drifted over us.

A few kilometres further along the coast lies another much-photographed feature, the Remarkable Rocks. A great tumble of weather-eroded rocks sit on top of a smooth granite dome which slopes to the sea, hundreds of metres below. The curiously sculpted boulders are covered in red.

On my final day I drove past Vivonne Bay, yet another stunning white beach which was deserted but for a couple of fishermen, and on to Little Sahara, an area of shifting sand dunes rising above swathes of dense mallee scrub.

A little further on was Seal Bay, perhaps the island's most famous attraction. A protected area, it is home to more than 600 Australian sea lions. They were everywhere - lying on the beach, wallowing in the shallows and wiggling their way in an ungainly fashion through the sand dunes.

Accompanied by a national park ranger, we walked slowly along the beach, keeping a safe distance from the animals.

The males, which can weigh up to 350kg, must be treated with respect, and can move with a speed which belies their bulk.

As we watched pups suckling from their mothers, it was hard to imagine that more than 100,000 fur seals and seal lions were slaughtered in the early part of the 19th century.

Those days are long gone. Kangaroo Island's wildlife is well on the way to recovery.

* Nick Squires travelled as a guest of the Australian Tourist Commission and the South Australian Tourist Commission.
CONTACT DETAILS

Adventure Charters of Kangaroo Island, ph (618) 8553 9119

Cape Willoughby Lighthouse cottages, ph (618) 8559 7235
Samphire, Cape Willoughby, ph (618) 8553 1333

Jim Thiselton, Kangaroo Island Diving Safaris, ph (618) 8559 3225


Kangaroo Island Wilderness Resort, ph (618) 8559 7275
On the web: Australia Dreaming