Two days in Bruny

 

 I’d been hearing about Bruny Island for almost as long as I’ve known Pete Hay, which was 1998 when I met him on the bus going to Souris for the “Viking Hunt.” We’d organized a pre-conference event for “Message in a Bottle: The Literature of Small Islands,” with Icelandic saga scholar Gisli Sigurdsson leading a voyage from Souris to Montague in search of the elusive Vinland. I plunked myself down beside this man I’d never seen before, and found out that he was fromTasmania of all places! He was a professor of Geography, although he was a political scientist by training, and he was a poet – his book, The View from the Non-Members’ Bar, was to come out in 1992; I remember him reading for us on one of his later visits in the UPEI Faculty Lounge. His youngest daughter was the same age as my oldest. And his favourite place on the planet was his “shack” – what we call a summer cottage - at Bruny Island, an island off Tasmania. We didn’t find any Vikings that fateful, fog-filled day, but I did find a new friend. And little did I know that 12 years later I would be seeing Bruny for myself.

We set off for the island on Wednesday morning with a carful of three white dogs and one grey one – Flossie and Ollie are Pete and Anna’s, and Zephyr and Billy were borrowed, giving their owner a break for a couple days. The woman behind us in the ferry line-up noticed the dogs in the car, wondering what eccentrics owned all these dogs – turns out Anna P. and her husband – Duncan Kerr, a just-retired MP in the Australian government - were joining us at the shack, and she had brought along her little white chihuahua named Butch.

The ferry ride from Kettering to Bruny takes about 15 minutes. Locals get a break on the ferry toll; if you don’t have a shack there you pay about $30 return, and if you do it’s about $10. There’s a spot along the drive to Kettering where the island looks like you could swim to it. (The author Richard Flanagan has been known to canoe across from Tinderbox, on the “mainland,” to his shack just down the road from Pete and Anna’s.) Apparently there’s been talk about building a bridge. If they had a plebiscite, like Prince Edward Island did before we got ours, I wonder what the results would be…

Here’s an article about Bruny – I particularly like this line: “…because it is an island it can be tricky and forbidding and should be approached with proper respect and awe.” Let this be a rallying cry for all islands!

Bruny is made up of North Island and South Island, joined by “the Neck,” a sliver of land that looks like a long tongue of saliva (no wonder they call it “spit”).

Pete’s shack is on the North Island, near Dennes Point, a small village inhabited now by a number of retired art teachers. Anna’s gorgeous silver jewellery pieces can be found in the sales gallery there.

The roads on Bruny reminded me of the backroads of Cape Breton, but the trees and other vegetation were from another world: the grass trees, the gums…

The first thing I noticed in the shack was the old piano; the last time it was played was by Bill Holm, the (now late) author of Eccentric Islands and fabulous player of ragtime piano (we got to hear him onstage at the Carrefour as part of the Islands of the World Conference VII in PEI in 2002). Given this instrument’s illustrious past, I’d need a few drinks in me before I’d even attempt to go there! The shack was filled with all the stuff a summer cottage should have: lots of beds and blankets and dishes and chairs and tables, a woodstove, a composting toilet, an old wash basin for doing dishes and brushing your teeth; and all the things you no longer need at home but which are too good to throw out. The view from the deck down to the water and across to the mainland was spectacular – nothing like being able to see where you’ve come from to really appreciate where you are.  It reminded me of the idyllic days and nights we spent with Claire and John and the kids at Mucky’s cottage on the Montague River – life was so much simpler then: picking raspberries and blueberries and baking pies, reading detective novels in the middle of the afternoon, sharing a glass of wine and the odd puff of cigar, sleeping the sleep of the dead because the fresh air and river water have soaked into your pores…

Going to an island off an island always makes me wonder: how small an island do we need anyway? I think of David Weale spending his summers writing on Entry Island, off Île du Havre-Aubert in the Magdalens. Or all those wonderful artists in their enclaves on the islands off Vancouver Island. Or staying on Herm Island off Guernsey… What is it about going to smaller and smaller islands that is so compelling? What is being that much closer to the edge answering in our own psyches and souls? And, in Tassie, what is it about Bruny Island that makes it so many people’s “place” – the one spot in the world where you feel utterly at home – a place you know and are known – and the place where both Pete and Richard Flanagan do so much of their writing and the artists in Dennes Point make their jewellery and glass and paintings?

 

Our two days at the shack were filled with walks and food and drink and lots and lots of talk. Pete and the dogs took me on a tour of the most amazing rock formations along Nebraska Beach – the layers give you a sense of the age of the island and the power of the waves as they create yet another piece of art…

On one of my walks I spotted a bird nesting in one of the mailboxes. It barely moved a muscle while I marveled at its ingenuity. I tried out “Moo brew” (my new favourite beer) and some great Tasmanian wines. We were invited to supper at Gerard and Shayne’s shack just down the road: Jerrod is famous for his paella, cooked on the outdoor fireplace that was specially built for his gigantic paella pan.

And there was lots of talk about politics, given the recent Australian election: speculation about whether the independents would line up with the Labour party or the Liberals, and whether the Greens would hold any sway fed my hosts’ political fires. (Nancy Murphy, Ms. Political Junkie: you’d fit in perfectly!)

Speaking of fire, Anna has a hate-on for boneseed, an invasive plant species that has been declared “a weed of national significance,” and she’s trying to eradicate it – seemingly singlehandedly – from Bruny. While driving to a pond where she’d planned to use her borrowed hip waders to get at some hard-to-reach plants, she spotted one that had grown to the size of a TREE in the middle of a field. Chainsaw in one hand, a spray bottle of blue poison in the other, she set off over fences and through waste-deep bush to fell it. I felt compelled to follow, in case there was SOMETHING I could do, and there in the middle of the field I spotted my first jumper: a wallaby. But one boneseed led to another to another…  until the chainsaw ran out of juice and the bottle was empty…

 But that’s the thing about come-from-aways and islands… there’ll always be one more…