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The original owner of Picnic Island was Captain Robert Hepburn. Born in 1782 he had an adventurous life as a sea captain. In 1828 he had a bit of a mid life crisis and decided to move with his wife Jacobina (Jacobina?!), his three sons and five daughters to Van Diemen’s land.

As you do when you arrive in a new land, within 10 days of arrival he obtained a location order for 2560 acres of land at Roys Hill. While his family was very happy to be on dry land after the long voyage, they found the land was infertile (unlike Rob and Jacobina) and they applied for a secondary grant, claiming that Roys Hill was “suitable for nothing but garden walks”.

So in 1829 he was granted 500 acres on the coast around Coles Bay, including Picnic Island (which he wanted as a breakwater for his boat).

With the help of his convict labour he build a sandstone house in nearby Swannick (which you can still see on the way out of Coles Bay if you drive almost to the beach, on the right hand side of the road). It was constructed from sandstone mined on Picnic Island, the only place in the region where sandstone is found (most of the region is granite).

Meanwhile Hepburn’s arch nemesis, George Meredith was running his whaling station at the Fisheries at the base of the Hazards, across the bay. When the whales weren’t running he would send his convicts out to Picnic Island to pinch Captain Rob’s sandstone. He too wanted a fine sandstone abode. A legal fight ensued and George had to stop quarrying on Picnic Island.

So this was the local legend when I came on the scene and started camping on the island. The spot I would pitch a tent (and later a tiny shack) was a depression cut into a cliff with mounds of dirt providing some protection from the wind. I figured this must have been the quarry but had no proof until I started digging the footings for the new building. What I discovered was a beautiful rectangular sandstone block with all the pick marks created by some convict over 200 years ago.

Very exciting. Probably the most exciting thing I have ever found. I suppose it might have been a block that got buried and forgotten, or perhaps the boat was so laden it was left behind for the next trip which never eventuated. It now sits as a hearth under our fireplace.

Having transported tonnes of material I have great respect for these convicts who somehow cut the sandstone into perfect blocks by hand and then carried them off the island. Could have done with this sort of help during our construction and transportation of materials.

One of the best things about travelling backwards and forward to Picnic Island to deal with all the maintenance and other issues is to check out the guest book on arrival. We love to hear how much people have appreciated a stay on the island. Here are a few entries…

Way back in the early 2000’s when the family bought the island we used it for regular camping trips. Based in Melbourne, we would fly to Tassie, hire a car, drive to Coles Bay and then try to organise a lift out there or hire a tinny.

A few times we found we got to Coles Bay and the weather was such that we could not get a boat. Clearly we needed to be self sufficient. So we bought a 3 metre zodiac and stored it in an old car we kept at the airport. Trying to keep it simple, I thought it best to rely on rowing rather than an outboard that could break down. It was only 800m after all. The first trip out in a fully laden boat in a headwind took over an hour. A little outboard arrived soon after.

These days you have the luxury of a jetty to pull into. Some hairy experiences we certainly had landing an inflatable boat on a rocky island. Proud to say we never put a hole in that little boat.

It was a pretty rugged experience but we loved it. Nothing like the anticipation of wondering if you are going to arrive wet, dry or at all!

Over time I knocked up a basic shack (using just hand tools) with a triple decker stackable child system, a futon for the parents and everything squeezed into a 2.4×2.4m flooplate (the original “tiny house” before the “movement” began). This little shack was located where the kitchen is now. Before we started the build, we used a car winch to drag the shack down the hill out of the way. It was used as a site shed on the rocks and sadly was demolished when we had finished building. It served its purpose well and confirmed for me that my enthusiasm for building was not matched by my skill level.

 

Steve is the guy I found on Gumtrees who hunts down old trees that farmers want to gets rid of and rescues them from being put on a bonfire.

He has a mill up in the hills where he cuts these trees into timber. All of the decking and ramps are made of his macracarpa pine, a naturally very oily timber that has a long life, almost as good as treated pine (I have an aversion to treated pine and only used it where absolutely necessary in the footings).

These big old trees were used by farmers as windbreaks and many of them are coming to the end of their lives now so it is a good business for Steve.

Steve also helped out doing the hard yakka of actually getting the timber off his truck, into a boat and stacked onto the island. At the end of one of these very long days he mentioned that he had a special stack of timber that he had been holding onto for years. He thought Picnic Island would be a worthy home for his 98 year old California redwood planks that had been air dried. This was a tree that a farmer had offered him which is very rare in Tasmania (unlike in California). I grabbed what he had which was just enough to put down on the bedroom floors.

It had been rough cut and to mill it into floorboards would have meant losing a lot of width. So all we did was get the edges milled to a straight line and laid them down. Not an easy task but my carpenter Bennie worked out a way to fix them. Builders hate working with materials that aren’t quite square or uniform but the end result is exactly what I was looking to achieve.

So you are on an island, you may as well try some of our local seafood. Nothing beats cooking up a meal after a day or foraging, fishing and hunting.

First up, don’t eat the penguins or shearwaters. They are protected. They also taste awful (so I am told).

The easiest way you can get together some seafood, without even leaving dry land, is to forage for mussels at low tide. At the western end of the island  there are masses of the things, but please be careful as the rock shelf is exposed to waves. Only suitable to go at low tide on calm days.

Next easiest is to throw in a line. Squid can be caught casting out and winding in a squid jig. Flathead can be hooked from the sandy bottom if you cast out a bit too. For a bit of fun (but not great eating) you can drop a line straight down off the jetty for parrotfish and leatherjackets.

For divers there are sea urchins readily collected at shallow depths (although I can’t see the attraction in eating them, some love them). Abalone are also out there, although you will have to dive down and search within the seaweed. Crayfish can also be found if you are into swimming head first into tiny caves on a single breath of air.

Crayfish and abalone require a fishing licence and there are bag limits (and yes inspectors have been known to check so please make sure you get licensed at Service Tas and make sure the season is open). You don’t need a licence for rod fishing in Tasmania.

If all this sounds a bit hard, buy some live oysters from the Freycinet Marine Farm and stick them in a rockpool. You will feel like Bear Grylls when you wander down to the sea, sauvignon blanc in hand and shuck them on a rock.

www.freycinetmarinefarm.com

 

 

For those interested in a bit more detail around Picnic Island and how it came to be I will be progressively adding to this blog. My web designer (Lex from Prevalent Media by the way – highly recommend) says it all helps with SEO and “driving” traffic and all that stuff that makes my eyes glaze over. But I reckon it is as good a place as any to get all that information out of my head and stored somewhere permanent.

So please excuse me if in coming posts you learn the details of how to carry 500 litres of water out to an island in one hit to make concrete footings, how to backwash the desalinator, what happens to a stack of timber when it gets washed out to sea by a freak wave, why it’s not a good idea to use power tools over water and why it is a good idea to build a jetty prior to building on an island rather than after completion.

These posts will be raw and real and give you the warts and all backstory and pics. If you are looking for all the nice promotional images and text please go back to my website (which Lex has spent a lot of time on making pretty).