Today is Easter Monday the 6th of April and we’re off to explore Bruny Island, which is south of Hobart.
From our camp at Phil’s Place, north of Hobart, we drove down to Kettering to catch the ferry over to Bruny Island. Operating on a first come first served queueing system, we only had a 15min wait at Kettering, before the 20min ferry trip over to Bruny Island.
With only one main road travelling through the island, funnily enough called the Bruny Island Main Road, we followed the seemingly never ending stream of cars and travellers who had also disembarked the ferry heading south. The convoy of travellers started peeling off as we reached the bottom of North Bruny, as some stopped at Get Shucked, an Oyster Bar, or the Bruny Island Cheese, Beer and Bread company.
Note, despite everyone calling it North and South Bruny Island, it is in fact a single island, which is approximately 100km long top to bottom, connected in the middle by a very thin stretch of land, just wide enough for the Bruny Island Main Road to pass through, called The Neck. Those remaining travellers who hadn’t already peeled off for Oysters or Cheese soon did at the Neck Viewing Platform and Penguin Rookery, on the north end of the Neck.
We, however, kept driving down across The Neck, pulling into the The Neck Campground at the south end. The campground is reasonably large, but pretty chaotic with small dead end areas all over the place. Luckily our car and van rig are pretty small as we almost got caught in a dead end, but after a 324 point turn, we were out and we’d selected our site and had parked and setup.
Unfortunately, a large bogan group not far away decided to turn their music on, and up to 11, at 7pm, and proceeded to play it through to midnight, only retreating to their swags and turning it down when the rain set in at midnight. At least it was good Aussie music, but even so, listening to ACDC at 10pm in a beautiful bush setting is not our idea of camping, Barry!
With occasional rain and strong wind forecast for Tuesday, we decided to make this our drive and see shit day. I was awake before sunrise so decided to walk the 50m from our van to the beach to see if there were any sunrise photo’s worth taking.
And, after brekky in the van, it was off north to our first stop which was Get Shucked for a 10am morning tea of a dozen freshly shucked, succulent oysters. They were yum.
Then, with an hour to kill before our next appointment, we drove to the north tip of Bruny Island, Dennes Point, doing the circuitous loop road back to the main road to take in what is mostly farmland on the north part of the island.
It was then off to the Bruny Island Cheese, Beer and Bread Company, which was founded by Nick Haddow who we used to watch years ago on A Gourmet Farmer TV show. With a pre-booked beer and cheese tasting experience, our host provided a paddle of 4 beers, all large pours, and a selection of 5 cheese with condiments and bread, which we promptly proceeded to devour, discuss and enjoy.
The beer and cheese took a little longer to enjoy than expected, so it was then a quick drive down the road, across The Neck, to the Spirit of Bruny, a small, local gin and vodka distillery. Meeting Mark, the owner and distiller. He and his wife have been making gin since 2021, using all local island ingredients with a high focus on sustainability. As the distillery door is only open by appointment (which we’d made), it was just Jules, me and Mark, and we had a great chat, whilst sampling their spirits and admiring the view out over Ford Bay. The vodka and both of their gins were great and we bought a bottle of the White Wallaby Gin for the van cellar, to be consumed at a not so later date.
By now, it was approaching early afternoon and we thought we’d chance our luck trying to spot one of the famous Bruny Island albino wallabies down at Adventure Bay. Seeing nothing as we drove through the small town, we turned down a back road but by chance came across the Raspberry Farm which sold Devonshire tea and scones. Like the NCC1701 USS Enterprise being inexorably pulled into a black hole, we automagically found ourselves stopping to partake in said tea and scones, which were yum.
By now we were literally fat little Oompa-Loompas, so we rolled out of the Raspberry Farm and back into Sir Gwavin, stress-testing the shock absorbers as we did. We then proceeded to follow the bush track we’d turned off on, finding ourselves taking the 4wd track up and over Mount Mangana to the west side of the island. Given that we were already half way there already, we then proceeded to drive further south to visit Cloudy Bay. By now, the weather was pretty shit so the view and walking options not so good.
On our route back home, we dropped back through Adventure Bay to see if we could spot the white wallabies and success! There were heaps of them, so we stopped for a gawk and to grab some photos. Dr Google says they are albino Bennett’s Wallabies and as they have no natural predators on the island, the albinism has not been bred out of them via natural selection, and now there are about 200 of them on the island. If they were in an environment with predators, they’d stick out like dogs balls in the bush, but here, they are a tourist drawcard and we saw lots of people searching for them in the afternoons.
Oompa-Loompas we are no longer!
In hindsight, somewhat stupidly, we decided to hike the Labillardiere Peninsula today (Wednesday 8/4) as it’s listed as one of Tasmania’s “Great Short Walks”.
I’m not sure what measuring stick they use to define “short walk”, but it’s signposted as a 14km, 5hr, medium difficulty walk, but I was tracking it via a .GPX hiking file in my hiking app and we clocked in at 18.4km’s, over 6.5hrs, which was inclusive of a 30min lunch stop midway.
This is definitely the longest walk we’ve ever done and in retrospect it was like walking from our house in Dianella, into Perth and then back out again. However, unlike our home to Perth walk, it was not down a lovely maintained footpath. Rather, the first half of the walk followed a heavily eroded 4wd Tassie Parks & Wildlife service road, with the back half being a narrow, goat track through the scrub following the north side of the peninsula.
Despite being pretty Sir Weary (Dunlop) at the end of our walk, we did enjoy it, but were certainly glad to finish it. Unfortunately, there was a major bushfire through the peninsula back in Nov’25, and whilst the bush is now starting to bounce back, much of the walk is through sparse, burnt-out trees which is a shame. We think this also contributed to the distinct lack of birds, reptiles and animals we’d hoped to spot. Although, our walk highlights included two animals that were very far from our animal spotting radar. Check out the pics below to see what I mean.
We had originally planned to spend four nights on Bruny Island, but after yesterday’s heroic hiking effort, we decided we’d seen enough of the island to satiate our travellers urge, and so headed back to the ferry to get back onto the mainland of Tassie.
With a couple of nights to fill before our pre-booked camping at Freycinet Peninsula, we googled and wiki’d and then decided to free camp at the Ye Olde Buckland Inn, in Buckland. Established in 1831, it’s one of the five oldest pubs in Tasmania and gets great reviews for its camping and pub grub.
Pulling in, we were quickly setup and decided to do a quick local explore, first visiting the Church of St John the Baptist, which was built by convicts in 1846 and features some of Australia’s best stained glass windows. The stained glass windows are in fact subject to many rumours and urban myths, many stating that the windows date back to the 1400’s, however, from our googling they are reported to have been painted by an Irishman back in the 1840’s – so they’re still very old, but not the 1400’s old. Regardless, they are stunningly beautiful. The colour and detail in them is fantastic and the best bit was we had the whole church to ourselves, to explore at our leisure, and also the windows are not covered in sheets of plexi-glass or wire to protect them which is nice to see.
We then did a short drive out the back of Buckland, taking a random road up a hill that looked interesting, finally stopping on a river which unfortunately was reduced to a couple of still, standing pools of water.
We apologise for the interruption to bring you this special broadcast….
They say Tasmania is one of the most beautiful places on earth. What they don’t tell you — and frankly someone bloody well should — is that at 2am on a dark and howling Thursday night, somewhere between “scenic wilderness” and “what have we done,” Goldie rocks like a boat in a cyclone while the wind outside screams like it’s got a personal vendetta. We lay there in the dark, braced against the mattress, listening to the van flex and groan, half expecting to look out the window and find ourselves airborne somewhere over Launceston.
But the wind, as it turned out, was the sideshow. The main event was the mosquitoes. Not a cloud of them — just one. Then another. Then, seemingly, their entire extended family arriving in shifts. Each one waited patiently for the exact moment you’d drifted back toward sleep before materialising at ear-canal level with that thin, electric whine that is scientifically proven to trigger murderous rage. Jules — who, it should be said, normally has the patience of a saint — was reduced to flailing wildly at the darkness, hissing “there’s another one” with an urgency usually reserved for medical emergencies.
By 4am we had the sheet pulled over our heads, breathing recycled air like a pair of sweaty submariners, too exhausted to fight and too wired to sleep. The wind howled. The van shuddered. Somewhere in the void, a mosquito whined in triumph. Sucks to be us.
We now return you to normal programming. Thank you to ClaudeAI for perfectly capturing the vibe of last night, a night we wish to forget asap.
Friday morning started slower and later than normal as we were catching up on lost zzz’s from last night. But start it did and once up we determined to use today to get some much needed clothes washing done, so we went to the great laundromat at Triabunna, which just happens to back onto a nice little cafe. So with the washing a-washing in the washer, we headed next door to grab a coffee, and I partook in a Vanilla Slice which was very good, not Wudina good, but very good.
We then spent the rest of the afternoon exploring the area and taking the back roads down the coast, before looping back up to Buckland for the evening.
On arriving back at camp, I went around the van to ensure there were no holes or mosquito entrances anywhere. Fingers crossed we’re just having to deal with the wind tonight as it’s still blowing a gale.
That’s it for this post. The next stop and the subject of our next blog is the Freycinet Peninsula, which is where we’re headed tomorrow – assuming we don’t get blown away like Dorothy and Toto, or drained of all our blood by vampiric mosquitoes – or both…
If you don’t hear from us again, it has been fun.