Natural splendour, real musics, wines, wordpower
Come late afternoon on 17 March 2025, we were comfortably ensconced in an upstairs room.
Ever-growing numbers of wallabies were emerging from the wooded, lower slopes of the “roof” of Flinders Island, in order to graze the immediate surrounds of Mountain Seas Lodge.
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Strzelecki National Park’s signature features are its glorious, unspoilt beaches and the hills that tower above them.
Generally, the hills have well-wooded lower slopes, which eventually yield to quasi-naked granite.
The above photo was taken just a few minutes after I and the previous post’s star had been mutually-surprised, but unalarmed…just a few wallaby-hops distant from this post’s vantage point.
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20 minutes after the wedgetail “fly-by” (see #5 in this series), I enjoyed a much more intimate, ground-level, animal encounter.
Pictured is Notamacropus rufogriseus – a species which is particularly abundant in Tasmania, but is also common through much of eastern Australia’s coastal scrub and sclerophyll forests.
In Tasmania it is generally known as “Bennett’s wallaby”; in mainland Australia the more common name is “red-necked wallaby”; some humans regard the Tasmanians and the mainlanders as two distinct subspecies.
Doubtless, some would say the same of the two relevant human populations!
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An hour earlier, I had been standing in brilliant sunshine, as my eyes and camera gazed across intensely blue water, a rocky shoreline, coastal scrub, and colourful, granite-loving lichens.
By 2.45 pm, however, our little group was walking under a light grey sky, and heading just a little inland.
It was no longer pointless to point a camera lens at the “roof” of Flinders Island.
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I took this post’s photo an hour or so after we had landed on Flinders Island.
Luggage collected, our little group proceeded to the picnic shelter which is adjacent to Trousers Point Beach.
I am keenly aware that “good” light can disappear or shift, quickly.
So, whilst everyone else started to eat, I ducked down to the shoreline, where I took the featured image, at 1.49 pm on 17 March 2025,
The island’s most celebrated beach was just behind my left shoulder, with Flinders’ most spectacular peaks rising above it.
The sun, however, was in exactly the “wrong” place – there was no point in pointing a camera lens at Trousers Point Beach and the mountains.
As you can see, the “lesser view” – looking the other way, working with the available light – was still splendid.
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All photos in this post were taken from Walkers Lookout.
(actually, from just slightly below it, which is the better choice, if you are looking south)
Near to the centre of Flinders Island, Walkers Lookout offers sweeping vistas in every direction, as you can see, here.
The best views look south, across the Darling Range and then to the much higher Strzelecki Peaks which dominate Flinders Island’s southwestern “corner”…and define the featured image’s horizon.
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It is Bass Strait’s largest island.
Among Tasmania’s more than 1,000 islands, only the “Apple Isle” is bigger.
However, Flinders Island’s nearly 1,400 square kilometres are home to fewer than 1,000 humans.
Any observant tourist will encounter many more wallabies than people; the same is true of wombats, cattle and Cape Barren geese.
Finding a splendidly wild and uncrowded beach is phenomenally easy; Flinders Island has more than 120 of them!
And if you are partial to granite and lichens….
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The Missing Goose is a cafe/restaurant on Flinders Island, in Bass Strait, north of the northeastern edge of “mainland” Tasmania.
(its Slovenian proprietor/chef rescued an orphaned Cape Barren gosling. She took delight in its return to the wild, but fondly hopes that its adult self may, eventually, choose her venue’s backyard as its nesting site)
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On the 5th day of March 2023 my beloved and I ate a delicious lunch, al fresco, just outside a tiger sanctuary in southern India.
On the 18th of March 2018 in southern Tasmania, the food, the winery’s Pinot Noir and our lunch’s quasi-natural setting were all lovely.
However, as so often proves true, in both the above cases it was one of our fellow diners who made our lunch unforgettable.
Neither of them had made a booking.
We were unable to converse.
We never discovered their names…
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It’s presumed that the author starts with an intention and if the book’s published they’ve succeeded in it. But successful books are ones that have escaped the author’s intentions and become something else. Novels when they succeed are incoherent and contradictory and mysterious. Nothing is more secondary to a writer’s achievements than their original ambition.
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