Coast Australia (2013–2017): Season 1, Episode 4 - Tasmania: Freycinet Peninsula to Bruny Island - full transcript
Coast is on
its biggest expedition ever.
I've arrived in Australia.
It feels like this ancient land
has been there, done that
and still has loads
of energy for more.
Around every corner,
every bay you go into,
there's something more spectacular
more fascinating, more immense.
But the true marvel of the coast
is its power to inspire
the imagination.
The endless possibilities it holds
for those who know it, love it.
And return again and again
to rediscover it.
Australia's only island state,
Tasmania is defined by its coastline.
Separated from the mainland
to the north
by the formidable Bass Strait,
to the East
by the Tasman Sea
and rolling in uninterrupted
all the way from Antarctica,
the chilling vastness
of the Great Southern Ocean.
Three western empires
put this island on the map.
Dutchman, Abel Tasman,
was the first European
to step ashore in 1642.
Then came the French surveyors
who made several expeditions here
but of course,
it was the British who claimed it,
settling here in 1803.
We've come here to explore
how Tasmania's geographic isolation
has steered its history
and shaped the people
along its South-Eastern shores.
Brendan Moar journeys
to remote rugged Tasman Island
to understand the dramatic
grip of lighthouse life
on coastal culture.
This would have to be one
of the most beautiful places,
I think I've ever seen
but you can feel the isolation.
Marine Ecologist,
Dr. Emma Johnston,
dives into the battle
between alien sea urchins
and giant rock lobsters.
Hurray!
Palaeontologist,
Professor Tim Flannery
reveals Hobart's crucial role
in Antarctic exploration.
In the footsteps of
Scott, Amundsen and Mawson.
They were tiny, weren't they?
Anthropologist,
Dr. Xanthe Mallett
is grateful that fashion changes.
I do not fancy wearing this.
And I discover
the enormous effort
to restore a grande dame of the sea.
This is definitely in the once in
a lifetime category of opportunities.
This is Coast Australia.
In this episode,
we explore a coastline
that starts at Wineglass Bay,
on the Freycinet Peninsula,
continues on to Port Arthur,
into Hobart
and crosses over
to Bruny Island in the South.
The majesty
of this coastal landscape
and its flora & fauna
cannot fail to inspire,
but its natural beauty
belies a dark past.
From the European perspective,
this island outpost
was from the outset,
the realm of hard men.
Given how perfect it looks today,
it's hard to imagine
the scene down there
when the whaling industry
was at its height.
But when that bay
was completely full of whales' blood
lapping against
that perfectly circular rim,
it was said to resemble
a wine glass full of claret.
As if coloured by such a past
the rare pink granite
characteristic of the region
forms nearly 40 kilometres
of pristine coastline.
As we head south, the rock
changes colour, but not the history.
I'm heading to Port Arthur
on the Tasman Peninsula,
the show-piece
of Australia's convict past.
In Britain, the initial fear
of transportation was waning,
so the British government
had to up its game.
What was needed
was a new penal colony.
A place whose very name would inspire
fear and dread in all who heard it.
The new Governor, George Arthur,
was tasked with creating
a sophisticated new penal system
designed to become
the ultimate deterrent
for the Empire's most
wayward malcontents.
What he created, was this.
From small beginnings
as a convict timber-camp in 1830,
Port Arthur's settlement
expanded into new industries
of both hard and light labour,
and new methods of punishment
to replace the bloody practice
of flogging.
By the time the last convict
left in 1877,
around 7,000 men
had served time here.
At Port Arthur the creed was simple,
"To grind rogues into honest men."
Now, it sounds unpleasant
and I'm sure it was.
What I want to understand though
is just how successful
they were at the business of reform
through punishment.
I'm meeting colonial historian,
Dr. Hamish Maxwell-Stewart,
who has spent years
studying this place,
and the people
who worked their way through it.
Hamish, I have to say, on a day like
today, this place looks beautiful.
It's hard to imagine it as a place
of suffering, punishment.
It's gorgeous, isn't it?
One of the interesting things
is that the convicts that were here,
some of them,
said exactly the same thing.
So they wrote in memoirs
about the strangeness
of being a prisoner
in a penal station,
the worst sink whole
in the British Empire
in a location that was so beautiful.
And what kind of prisoners
ended up in this colony?
Secondary offenders largely,
so these are people
who had committed an offence in
the colony, but not serious offences.
So you did anything really bad
you got topped.
The largest single group of people
who came here were absconders,
so convicts who ran away
from other locations and also,
really interestingly,
some people who commit crimes
that are so spectacular
in the British Isles
that they're singled out
for special punishment.
- So who are these spectaculars?
- Well, if you threw a stone
at George III for example,
that might get you here.
That goes in the box marked
"Asking for trouble."
Hamish is taking me
into the Penitentiary Building,
in which 484 desperate lives
were once cramped.
How have you gone
about your understanding this place?
You know, how do you make sense
of so much human misery?
I think that's a really
important question
because all we've got here is walls
but one of the fascinating things
about this site
is the records
for this place are just insane.
You can actually track
individuals through this place?
We know the colour of their eyes.
Hamish has brought with him
the very detailed records
of Scotsman, William Irving,
a 40-year old fabric printer,
convicted for assault
and sentenced to 21 years
in the colonies.
Complexion, head,
hair, whiskers.
And all of this
is his conduct record,
so we know exactly what happened
to him in the colony.
We can follow him
right the way through,
all of the work locations
that he was in.
Every encounter
with a magistrate's bench.
How many people are recorded
like this, to this level of detail?
- Seventy-two thousand.
- Seventy-two thousand?
- Seventy-two thousand prisoners.
- And you've got this level of detail
right into the colour
of their whiskers and their whatever.
Some of them we know the species
of the worm that infested their gut.
Of those 72,000 lives
preserved in
Tasmania's convict records,
almost 10 percent
spent time in these grounds.
We think these are the most
documented people
in the British Empire.
In 1850, a new building
was opened at Port Arthur,
modelled on the Panopticon design
developed in Britain and America,
where once flogging
was the ultimate penalty
for unruly convicts,
isolation was the new weapon.
Having being transported to Tasmania,
how does William Irving
end up in the complex of buildings
at Port Arthur?
It's a really sad story,
see, he almost gets his freedom
but he can't get work
and he ends up as a pauper/invalid
and one of the places
that pauper/invalids
were sent was Port Arthur.
And he's
in the invalids establishment
where he's done for
being absent without leave
and he goes into this building.
And this building here is...
It's like the epicentre
of this spider's web, isn't it?
If all else fails,
you end up in here?
Well, you were in a panopticon,
so an all-seeing prison
and this point here is, you know,
the heart of the panopticon,
it's where the warden sat
and he can see down every corridor.
All of these cells
are just single occupancy?
Yes.
This is a claustrophobic
space, isn't it?
This is where a convict
spent their time during the day,
but if they had to go outside,
they had to wear one of these.
Why do you put that on?
So if they did happen
to be seen by another prisoner,
the other prisoner
couldn't recognise them.
So no name, no face?
- Just a number.
- Gosh.
This only half of it. When
William Irving is in this building,
he again messes up and he transitions
into yet one more level below this.
This is the heart
of darkness in here.
It's a full-blown
solitary confinement cell.
And it would have been dark?
It would have been pitch dark,
and you've got four doors in this one
between you and the outside world.
- So, meter thick walls.
- So it's sensory deprivation.
Absolutely.
What was that supposed
to do to the man?
Reflect on the error of your ways.
And did they persuade
themselves that it worked?
No, and we've got no evidence that
it mediated convict behaviour at all.
I'm struck by how strong
the desire to escape this place
would have been.
But beyond the mental torture,
the natural, physical boundaries
have created a formidable challenge
for the daring.
The only escape by land
was 20 kilometres north,
across the 30-metre wide neck
called Eaglehawk.
But even here,
there was an even more fearsome,
and hungry, line of defence.
I've come here to meet Port Arthur
Archaeologist, Dr. Jody Steele,
to discover what the chances were
of surviving a desperate
attempt at freedom.
Who's your ferocious friend?
He's part of the line of defence
that protected the gateway
to the penal peninsula
but he didn't act alone.
I've bought a postcard from
our collection to have a look at.
- That's great, isn't it?
- It is.
A team of between 11 and 18 dogs,
lined up between here all the way
across this isthmus out into the bay.
If you wanted to make a break for it,
the ocean was your best bet
but that meant swimming.
But for all that I presume,
men were trying to get out.
There were a lot of people
attempting it,
but usually they wouldn't
make it very far.
Everything about it is just a
challenge for the convict, isn't it?
It would have been
and they were wearing leg irons
in the chain gain,
and I've brought a pair to show you.
So anyone who's out
in the environment,
in the landscape
has got their legs shackled?
They were, yep. They were usually
in gangs and they would
have been wearing these heavy irons.
And these are, the real deal?
These aren't replicas?
They are the real deal.
And you can see they're slightly
burrowed, in an oval shape,
so they had a fair amount of damage
done to them to try and get them off.
Right, so that's-- Someone has sat
on a beach somewhere
and just thumped away with a rock--
Most likely a rock or whatever
they could get their hands on.
What about William Irving
that I've been hearing about?
At Port Arthur
he just seems to disappear.
A number of things
could've happened to him.
You can assume that he got out,
made it to the mainland,
might have changed his name
and lived happily ever after.
But, unfortunately,
not many of them did.
We have records of the ascenders
ending up in the bush.
Several decades' later,
people finding them
still with their leg irons on,
nothing but a skeleton.
And I suppose any one of those
could have been William Irving.
Any of them could have been.
Little consolation to think
that William Irving
may have spent his last years
stranded in paradise.
We're traveling along
the south-east coast of Tasmania.
Old stories are aplenty here.
Born of a daunting coastline
and living in the minds
of those who watched over the ebb
and flow of history's seafarers.
Brendan Moar wants to know why,
at this very forbidding tip
of Tasmania,
the memory of it all
is worth preserving.
In Australia today,
all lighthouses are automated
but they remain as beacon
of a bygone era.
Much loved and cared for by small
armies of devoted volunteers.
I'm on a mission to find out why
lighthouses occupy such a romantic
and dramatic place
in our coastal culture.
But before I can board my ride out
I've got to scrub down!
I'm joining a working bee
at the legendary
Tasman Island Lighthouse.
It stands in a particularly
pristine environment
which means no bugs
or weeds from the mainland.
Tasman Island,
off the rugged south-eastern tip
of the Tasman Peninsula,
topped by that familiar sentinel
of maritime safety.
My God!
This is a rare privilege.
I'm joining a very dedicated
group of volunteers
who come here three times a year
to maintain the Tasman Lighthouse
and surrounding buildings.
If anyone can explain the fascination
with lighthouses these guys can.
- Good morning.
- Good morning.
- Hope your boots are clean!
- They are. You must be Carol?
- I am. Welcome to the island.
- Great to meet you.
The Tasman Island lighthouse
was opened in 1906.
It was de-manned in 1977
and has run on automated
solar power ever since.
The homes too have stood
empty since then.
But why do the memories
remain strong?
Carol Jackson
spent her childhood here.
For a lighthouse kid, it's different
to being a keeper or a keeper's wife.
As kids, Mum used
to always say to us that,
we grew up with
too much wind in our heads.
So you have this freedom,
you have an independence,
you have a resilience.
You had to make do.
You had to make your own fun.
We didn't have TV. There were
no shops. There were no doctors.
You had a life
that was pure and simple.
With such strong family connections
she formed The Friends of
Tasman Island eight years ago
to preserve its heritage,
in partnership
with the Parks and Wildlife Service.
Why is this important
for anyone to do this?
People love wild places. We
have a motley crew each working bee.
So some people are ex-keepers
or like myself, a keeper's kid
and know the history
and love the history behind it.
The stories
behind the light station here.
Other are pharophiles.
They just love anything to do
with lighthouses.
The volunteers arrive
with a diverse range of skills
to repair, paint and maintain
the ageing buildings and gardens,
which cop the full force
of mother nature.
This is a much bigger house.
Enormously important bit
of maritime heritage
in a stunning spectacular spot
and they deserve to be preserved.
There are four brick
keepers' cottages and the remains
of several other smaller buildings
that dot the plateau
that's just over one and a half
kilometres long
by one kilometre wide.
And here we are
arriving at what we call the WIM,
- the top of the haulage way.
- It's beyond stunning.
This is the most extraordinary
view, landscape, thing.
It's amazing.
It's just breath-taking.
- My backyard.
- Your backyard?
It's a hell of a backyard.
Before helicopters, ships were used
and it made
for a hazardous landing.
People and supplies could only travel
up the steep tramway
from the small wharf
all the way down there.
It's about
45 degrees most of the way down.
But the last couple of hundred feet
are one over one,
so you're actually
lying on the trolley
but you're standing up almost.
- That's me.
- That's you there?
- That's your mum.
- Yeah.
And this is how we got on the island.
- Gosh!
- So the basket
would be dropped,
so down on the landing,
there was a flying fox shed
and the flying fox
would send the basket
down and drop it into the boat.
The boat would go back out,
you'd clamber into the basket
and then boat would come back on,
hook you up onto the flying fox.
And you'd be battered back and forth
until you got onto the landing.
Sheep, cattle,
all the coal briquettes
everything came up this haulage way.
- Were there ever any accidents?
- Yes.
There's been a couple of deaths
on the haulage way.
When the crane wasn't
working on the landing,
one of the workers there fell into
the sea, never to be found again.
Memories that linger on
in the rusted wheels
and old homes that stand
against the windswept landscape.
It was a solitary life
with just one purpose
to keep the light burning bright.
As Tasman Island's last permanent
keeper, Karl Rowbottom, tells me,
It's always an emotional time
when he returns.
- Can you smell the kerosene?
- No.
I still can.
The place was full of kerosene once.
Let's go up.
This is the first landing, Brendan,
and we're still gonna keep going.
Right, Brendan. Come out
and have bit of a look, mate.
See what you reckon
of this for a view.
- My God!
- Yeah.
It's amazing.
It didn't matter
if anyone was sick
or someone died
or some catastrophe happened,
this light would have to go
every night.
It would have to go and everyone
was secondary to the light.
The light was God around here.
You're basically
the last man standing.
How does it feel for you that light
keeping is now a thing of the past?
It's a sad thing that
that history is gone from our society
because they were men--
Men of a special calibre
and so were their families
to live out in these places.
The day I had to leave here
was the worst part.
That really hurt. That really hurt.
I think my heart died that day.
I went back to the mainland.
I couldn't settle there.
I became a rebel.
Wonder I didn't end up in jail
but anyway, um...
It's funny, as I was going down
in the basket for the last time,
I could feel my heart
going down and down with it and...
So that was a bit sad really
and then when I saw
John Daly--
He's still relief keeping...
I went up in the basket and that's
when I thought, "The job's gone".
Bit sad.
This would have to be one
of the most beautiful places,
I think I've ever seen.
But you can feel the isolation.
And to think
of the people spending
up to two years here,
which was the maximum posting,
I have no idea how they did it.
I don't think I could do it.
They were certainly made of sterner
stuff than I am, that's for sure.
Memories and traditions
are well preserved in Tasmania,
particularly
when it involves the sea.
I'm going to meet the people
who are committed to cultivating
a Renaissance of Australia's wooden
maritime culture.
They have a really big get together
every two years
to show off their precious vessels,
it's called the Australian
Wooden Boat Festival
and they've invited me along.
I'm in Oyster Cove on a special day.
It's the ninth and last morning
of a little boat raid
called Tawe Nunnegah.
- Ros. How are you?
- Good morning.
Ros Barnett is a member
of the Living Boat Trust,
a community devoted to keeping
Tasmania's maritime heritage alive.
Ros, what is Tawe Nunnegah?
It's an expedition of small boats.
A raid, we call it.
And the idea is that
a lot of these boats are so small
that they wouldn't be safe going
alone so they go together in a group.
How important is it
to keep the boat-making skills alive?
Just incredibly important.
And to build a boat,
you need the knowledge,
the skill, and the timber.
So Tasmania's
got the best boat-building timber.
We've got some
of these precious people
that really know
how to build a boat well,
and we've got these enthusiastic
people that want to sail them.
We're out there in boats.
Best water than you'll ever get
anywhere else in the world
and we're just having fun.
With over 10 nautical miles
of water to travel
before I jump ship,
I'm happy not to be relying
on oar-power.
We get the good boat
with coffee and everything.
I've scored a lift north
on one of the biggest boats
in the Tawe Nunnegah raid.
- How you doing?
- Hi.
It's a genuinely
pleasing site, isn't it,
to see so many vessels on
the water together, it's just lovely.
But I'm trying to spot
my date to the festival,
an elegantly restored
three-masted barque.
The tallest ship of the fleet
heading into to Hobart
for the opening of the festival.
Aha! I've clocked her.
I make my way
onto the 140-year-old James Craig,
to discover the extraordinary story
of her salvage.
Thank you.
Again,
the main top mast stay still.
Alan Edenborough
has been a member
of the Sydney Heritage Fleet
since 1969,
and fascinated
by tall ships since a teenager.
So all this madness is yours?
Initially, yes, yes.
A lot of people have helped since...
Built in England in 1874,
she ploughed the world's oceans
as a merchant ship.
Later reduced to transporting coal
and abandoned in 1932
in Recherche Bay,
this is what Allan discovered
in 1972.
How did-- I've seen
the photograph of the rusting hulk.
Somebody told us in Sydney they said,
"We want one tall ship to Sydney",
and I was silly enough
to take up the challenge
to see if we could find one.
- How did you finally come across...
- I found a little magazine
which had written an article
from a Sydney sailor
who'd been down to Hobart,
and he'd seen the hull.
I said that's the best-looking wreck
I've seen and the rest is history.
- That was the best-looking wreck?
- Absolutely.
And when you saw
that hulk in that tragic condition,
you knew that this was achievable.
Not immediately
but we did two surveys.
We went down and we spent
a total of about two weeks
on board the ship.
Living on board this hulk,
we'd go down to the keel,
and once we got to the keel,
we realised that she was salvageable.
The frames and the ship and
the fabric of the ship was intact.
That's the critical thing.
I must admit we had to pour
about two bottles of scotch
down the surveyor's throat before
he'd sign the letter to say it could
be salvaged, but he was a nice chap.
And then it was a 20 year slog to
get it back into working condition.
She is one of only four barques
from the 19th Century
still sailing anywhere in the world.
A true masterpiece of restoration,
a 30-year labour of love
for those devoted to her.
I'm going up
to that little white deck up there.
Absolutely thrilled.
It is a bit good up here.
How often does a person
get the chance to look out at Hobart,
from this far up the mast
of the James Craig.
This is definitely in the once in
a lifetime category of opportunities.
A salute to hand-made history.
Since the early 1960's,
Hobart's Tasman Bridge
has been the vital link
between the city
and its eastern suburbs.
But on a calm night in 1975,
fate shattered the peace and quiet
of a sleeping city.
A wayward bulk ore carrier
struck the bridge and sank
bringing down pylons
and concrete spans.
Seven crew were killed
and five motorists died
when their vehicles plunged
60 metres from the top.
The city was left with a bridge
to nowhere for almost three years.
Hobart has never forgotten
its night of adversity.
And today, it builds bridges
of a different kind,
over distant horizons.
This is the heart of Australia's
enduring exploration of Antarctica.
Palaeontologist,
Professor Tim Flannery,
discovers a heroic blend
of science and adventure.
There are more
Antarctic scientists here
than anywhere else in the world
because Hobart's the gateway
to the Southern Ocean and beyond.
So I want to discover what a modern
day expedition to the ice involves.
And to do that,
you really have to understand
what happened in the past
and you simply can't disregard
the greatest Antarctica story
of them all.
It begins when a raggedy,
exhausted man
walks into this city hotel
fresh off the boat
after an 18-month expedition.
Just over a century ago,
a disreputable looking figure
made his way into this
rather grand hotel lobby.
The duty clerk
mistook him for a tramp
and gave him an inferior room
at the back of the hotel.
But the following day,
that man would be
recognised as a great
international hero.
He was Roald Amundsen,
the first person
to reach the south pole.
And here he is after
a well-deserved shave and shower.
He had just travelled 5250 kilometres
from his triumph to Hobart.
The papers proclaimed,
"The hero Amundsen had conquered
the South Pole, the race was over.
His long-time rival,
Robert Scott, had died trying."
And back then, the voyage out
must have been a hazardous one.
But scientists are still going south
and they're discovering great things
and I'm really keen to learn
what the journey's like today.
I'm returning port-side
to meet Australian Antarctic Division
Chief Scientist, Dr. Nick Gales.
So, tell me was it really all
a race to the Poles?
Well, back then, it really was.
That was where the attention
of the whole globe was.
They were the rockstars of the age.
Just like I and people
of my generation and older
remember the Lunar landing
and where they were.
That was the scale of attention
and it was a huge race
to get the first person
into the South Pole
of this great unknown land.
And one of them was this
great Tasmanian, Lewey Vanacky,
who came down here in the late 19th
century with his family and went down
as part of the very first expedition
ever to over winter in Antarctica.
And he went down as a scientist,
so he was starting to measure
a lot of the science
that was fascinating to him
and to the scientists
that followed him,
like Edgeworth, David
and Mawson.
So, Mawson was a geologist,
wasn't he?
He was a great geologist
but he was more.
He really was a renaissance
man if you like,
because he recognised
the importance of science
in Antarctica above and beyond
everything else.
And the science that he was
doing back then, is that still
ongoing today or has the nature of it
all changed?
We do things very differently now
because we have all these wonderful
new tools to do our science,
but the drivers were the same.
What happens in the southern oceans?
What happens with the ice cap,
It's the engine room of global
climate so it's relevant to us all.
Modern day
expeditions to the ice
remain physically and mentally
challenging for everyone.
I'm fortunate to be here
just at the right time
to witness Australia's all-purpose
Antarctic flagship,
preparing to head south.
The Aurora Australis
is Australia's only icebreaker.
Since 1990, she's been transporting
faculties of scientists
to Australia's three bases
in Antarctica
to examine the ice continent.
On board, is Dr. Tas Van Ommen,
an Antarctic Division scientist
who specialises in ice cores.
So, how old is
the oldest ice down there?
We've got good reason
to believe that the oldest ice
is probably over a million years old
and there are real puzzles
that we wanna access one day
by getting that old ice.
But for the moment we're satisfied
trying to build up our network
of younger ice records as well.
Antarctic has
18,000 kilometres of coast
and most of it is actually
hidden beneath ice.
And the exact configuration
of that ice water interface
is so important for determining
how the ice responds
in a warming climate.
In a sense you could say
the coast of Antarctica
hold the key to the changing coast
to the rest of the planet.
When you're down there
on the ice,
do you ever think about
the heroic age of exploration
and the conditions Mawson and those
other explorers faced down there?
Yeah, I do and I marvel at the fact
that they went into the unknown,
whereas we're going into something
that we've got some experience
and knowledge about.
And they achieved such amazing things
with such basic equipment.
Bridge, fore and aft, let go.
Copy that, let go, over.
Bridge to oft,
letting go all lines.
Thank you.
The boat
just moves so gracefully and slowly
as it comes down the Derwind here.
It's more like a ballet
than anything I would have expected
I wish I was
heading south with them
but it's time for me
to bid bon voyage
to the Aurora Australis
for her 96th journey to Antarctica.
And there she goes,
a veteran polar explorer
in the footsteps of Scott,
Amundsen and Mawson.
While those heroic explorers
ventured south,
there were pioneers
of a different hue further north.
Freycinet Peninsula is famously
frequented by visitors
in search of its wildlife.
I'm heading to the site
of a particularly large nature-fest
over a hundred years ago.
These naturalists,
as they were known,
were forerunners of Tasmania's
now famous green movement.
In Easter 1910, Coles Bay
became the base
for the Naturalists' field camp
after nearly a hundred naturalists,
men and women,
sailed here from Hobart.
I'm going to meet local historian,
Maureen Martin Ferris,
to see what all the fuss was about.
They really were very interested
in studying some of the botany,
some of the beautiful granite
and also the marine animals.
Because they were botanists,
you had zoologists.
One of them of course,
was Errol Flynn's father.
- Really?
- He was a zoologist.
Gosh, right. Okay.
And he actually wrote
a wonderful report and in the report,
it says that they actually discovered
60 new Tasmanian species
and 25 Australian species.
Here's some of them and you can
see the women in their wonderful--
The women in their hats
and their long gowns.
I'm relieved that it's the kind
of naturalists that study wildlife
and not the ones that
play naked table tennis.
Well, actually, that's what
I imagined they were like.
And you can see.
- And this is this bay here.
- Yes, it is.
- Is that the headland, there?
- That's the headland.
- You can see it right there.
- Right. Fantastic.
What always gets me is that nobody
is dressed for the beach.
No, none. They're all dressed
as if they were going downtown.
Yeah, look at that.
They look as if they've arrived
in the primordial jungle there,
with tents dotted about.
Such simple kit as well,
I mean, they're just canvases
thrown over ropes.
Perhaps the greatest legacy
of those early naturalists
was the creation of Tasmania's
first national park here in 1916,
to protect Freycinet's
natural beauty for generations.
Preserving nature is a fine thing
but what if nature changes?
Further south the tide is turning.
Australia's East Ocean Current
has been delivering some
uninvited visitors to the area,
turning it into
an underwater battlefield.
Marine Ecologist, Dr. Emma Johnston,
is diving into the fight
to pick the winners from the losers.
What's the relationship
between this and this?
Both are featured on expensive menus
around the world.
But one is an unwelcome visitor,
and the other one wants to eat it.
I'm here to find out what's gone
wrong in the neighbourhood.
Traditionally,
the peaceful waters of Dunalley
have had a thriving marine ecosystem
producing loads of seafood.
But that's now under threat,
since the East Australian Current
has been bringing warmer waters
from the north, and with it,
armies of long spined urchins.
Good day.
Marine ecologist, Dr. Scott Ling,
from the University of Tasmania,
has promised to take me
to the battleground.
We're traveling to North Bay
where these invasive urchins
are eating their way
through the native sea kelp
at an alarming rate,
leaving the sea beds
increasingly barren and unproductive.
I'm came to see the evidence,
and discover the creative solutions
that might just save them.
We'll head down to eight and then
swim across until we hit the--
We should see a lot of the kelp bed
through here and then,
some of the barren areas
will start to emerge.
- There you go. Set to go.
- Thank you.
Emma, we've got a fairly
healthy kelp bed system here.
This is showing
the first sign of these
urchins overgrazing the system.
The barren patches that are really
just starting to form.
Look at that! Beautiful.
They're just like little eating
machines, aren't they?
That's right. If you look at
how long these spines are here,
really good protection from any
lobster that's trying to eat them.
So purple.
It looks black under the water.
Pretty bright.
You can see their five teeth.
His mouth's opening up
there slightly.
This what's doing
all the damage to the kelp.
See, their teeth are extremely hard.
And they use a rasping type action
to strip the rock clear
of all the algae.
Like a plague of marine locusts,
the prickly invaders
are eating the sea bed bare.
The evidence of their destruction
is overwhelming. But no more!
Enter the local hero,
the Tasmanian Rock Lobster.
Here we have
the Southern Rock lobster.
This is obviously a larger specimen.
And it's these larger specimens
that are able to prey on things
like sea urchins.
Obviously, you've got
all those protective spines.
It takes quite a large predator
to be able to deal with that.
And roll the urchin over
and eat it from--
- Hurray!
- It helps them survive.
With the support
of local fishermen,
Scott and his team
are returning to this area
the once over-fished
giant rock lobsters,
to take on their opponent.
Heading back to shore,
Scott is going to show me
some rare and exclusive footage
of an urchin kill.
Okay,
so if you have a look here.
We've got some infra-red remote
monitoring of a sea urchin.
- Is that the urchin?
- That's the urchin.
This is at night.
You can see spines are relaxed
until the lobster turns up.
Then the lobster goes
about trying to grapple the urchin,
it rolls it over and attacks the
urchin through the weaker underside
where there's less protection
from the spines.
- So, is it working?
- Yeah, well, certainly.
It was a bit of a surprise
as to how well the lobsters
actually took up residence
on these sea urchin barrens.
So what we're looking at here is,
first of all, there's really obvious
yellowy coloured structure.
That's the roe or the gonad.
So that's the eggs
and for a lobster,
he cracks open an urchin
and the first thing
he goes for is the roe.
You've got a lot more calories
in there than anything else.
I'm not sure whether you wanna
try some, but why not.
- Gosh. Really? Fresh.
- Yeah.
Give it a go. Give it a go. Fresh.
Okay.
- Taste like the ocean?
- That is delicious.
That's like ocean butter.
But a small platoon of lobsters
is no guarantee
against a battalion
of voracious urchins.
So I wonder whether our growing taste
for urchin roe
may become another defence
against the spiny invaders.
On the final leg of my investigation
I'm returning to Dunalley Bay
to meet diver
and entrepreneur, Dave Allen.
Wow, that looks like a huge haul.
How much have you got here?
Probably
three quarters of a ton.
How much roe do you get out of,
say, three quarters of a ton?
About 80 kilos of roe.
And that's the premium product.
And at peak of the season
that can bring
as much as 400 dollars a kilo
in the Japanese market.
Can we eat our way out
of this problem?
Um, I think it's been proven
most of the way
through the northern hemisphere,
the only way to control
a sea urchin problem
is with a commercially
viable industry.
So, with a serve
of science and industry,
we may not only rejuvenate
an ailing ecosystem
but also sustain a peaceful
and profitable
underwater neighbourhood.
For decades, Bruny Island's
small community
has enjoyed a peaceful
and exquisite environment.
But as anthropologist,
Dr. Xanthe Mallet discovers,
200 years ago, the island's fortunes
were built upon a grim
and bloody business.
I'm walking along
what's called The Neck
which links North Bruny Island
behind me
and South Bruny Island
in front of me.
To the west,
the tranquil waters of Great Bay.
And to the East, the sweeping
indigo arc of Adventure Bay
naturally sheltered
against the Tasman Sea.
Adventure Bay is an idyllic setting
sought out by nature-loving tourists,
proud locals and urban escapees.
But I'm here on a very
different journey
to find out why this bay
was flushed red with blood.
Soon after colonisation in 1803,
Tasmanians discovered
a vast whale population
in Adventure Bay
during the winter months.
And so, the hunt for whale oil
began here in 1826.
The oil had a huge market in Britain
where it fuelled the country's
street lamps and factory lighting.
Everyone wanted to be in
on the game and the slaughter.
I'm heading to the remains
of a whaling station
at the Bay's eastern most tip.
In its day about 150 whalers
were stationed here.
Good morning.
Maritime archaeologist,
Michael Nash, has studied
the whaling rush and says the bay
was a perfect inlet
for the harpooning of whales.
In the winter months, they'd come
in here to calve and to breed.
It's nice and shallow,
it's a pretty protected bay.
It's very big sort of straight access
to the ocean out there.
Why are they called
the southern right whale?
It's because they were
the right whale to hunt.
- Really!
- Yeah.
Because where they located
themselves.
They were easy to access.
They were fairly big rotund animals.
Had a lot of blubber on them.
They were reasonably slow
at that time of year
and also the carcass floated
when they were killed,
so they could tow them
back into here.
When a whale was spotted,
it wasn't just the boats
from one station going out to get it,
there was four or five stations
and they're all competing
because the one that actually
harpooned it first,
had the claim on the whale.
So, once they'd actually
harpooned it,
the whale would tow
the boat around for a while,
get exhausted and then
they'd come in here to lance.
Did people die doing this?
They did but occasionally.
Not a huge number but boats got upset
and the bad weather or the whales
or the whale line would get caught
around someone's leg or something.
It was a dangerous occupation.
They'd bring the carcass
about 50 yards off shore
and set up a-- Basically, a platform
where they cut the blubber off.
They'd draw it up
with a block and tackle
and they'd roll the whale, basically.
They draw the whole whale up
and peel it like an orange?
Yeah, they do.
One of the characteristics
at these sites
is we get these
what we call blubber bricks.
So they have
this really thick residue
they used to use the scraps
of blubber to actually
put back into the fire.
So it gave off this
really greasy residue,
which actually sticks to the bricks.
If it leaves this black stuff
when you burn it,
when they were making the actual oil
it would have been giving off
a black smoke then?
It would have been disgusting.
It would've been
this big greasy thing
and they reckon
with the whaling ships,
even if you couldn't see the ships,
you could actually smell them
from a couple of miles away.
And this was what it was
all about, whale oil.
An average 15 metre whale
could yield about 8000 litres.
So, what happened?
Why did it all stop?
Basically, because the whale numbers
just declined so dramatically
from over overfishing.
They dropped
in the 1840's to the 1850's,
there was virtually no whales
being caught here.
In a sense it was an industry that
burned brightly but consumed itself
over a couple of decades.
So, what remains of that time?
Hello.
On the final stop of my journey,
I'm meeting Margaret Wise,
a descendent of Adventure Bay whalers
and she's got a couple of interesting
artefacts she wants to show me.
And this is a pair of whale's teeth.
The sailors would etch pictures.
This is scrimshaw.
The intricate design
and etching was no mean feat
given the pitch and yaw
of the ocean waves.
Very fine detail.
There was another product
that we obtained from the whale
that was part of women's fashion.
And this was the Baleen
from the mouth of the whale
through which they sieved.
It's fairly firm and thin
and became very, very useful
in inserting into a lady's corset.
And in the early days,
this is a corset
that ladies used to wear.
Right.
To keep their waists trim,
taught and terrific.
- Shall we give it a go?
- Would you like to?
Not having much faith
that's gonna fit, but--
The lace is at the back.
They were tiny, weren't they?
I think we need
to bring it down just a little.
I don't think
this is gonna go around me.
No, they had such tiny, tiny waists.
I do not fancy wearing this.
I'm sure it would have
been much bigger
had I had to wear one
in those days.
Can we take it off now?
Fortunately, fashion changes,
as did the fate of whaling.
Commercial whaling
was banned in 1986.
At its peak between 1835 and 1839,
about 12,000 right whales
were taken in Australian waters.
Today, worldwide,
they number just 8000.
One hundred and fifty years later,
after the whaling stopped,
do you think we'll ever see whales
back in Adventure Bay?
Earlier this year,
we had at least eight whales
at one time in Adventure Bay.
And we believe that one of them
calved as well.
So the evidence
is showing that each year
there are more and more whales
obvious to us out in the bay
and I didn't think that I would
ever live to see the day
when so many whales were there
but, yes, they're coming back.
I call that forgiveness.
Our journey through Tasmania
is at an end, for now.
This island may have begun
its colonial life
as a severe penal corner
of the British Empire
but even the convicts
recognised the paradox
of doing time in a patch of Eden.
Since then, Tasmanians have been busy
tending to their garden
with pride.
From a passionate marine culture,
to their reach of science
near and far,
there is that sense of loyalty
and imagination
that can only come
from the independence
and natural wonder
of an island girt by sea.
Australia's about as far
from Scotland as you can get.
Tasmania is a bit further on again.
And yet there's something
about this place...
Maybe the landscape?
Maybe the climate?
Definitely the rain
that reminds me of home.
Next time, Dr. Xanthe Mallet
discovers an abandoned fort
that had the job
of protecting the nation.
Professor Tim Flannery
explores Fraser Island.
A world famous sanctuary,
but is it edible?
It's like tasting history, really.
Dr. Emma Johnston finds that
to save the dugong,
you have to capture it first.
What we're looking for
is when they pop up
and their nose pops
out of the water.
Brendan Moar
reveals the true history
of the great Australian prawn.
This is a strange
and unsettling place.
And I investigate an outpost
for outcasts.
its biggest expedition ever.
I've arrived in Australia.
It feels like this ancient land
has been there, done that
and still has loads
of energy for more.
Around every corner,
every bay you go into,
there's something more spectacular
more fascinating, more immense.
But the true marvel of the coast
is its power to inspire
the imagination.
The endless possibilities it holds
for those who know it, love it.
And return again and again
to rediscover it.
Australia's only island state,
Tasmania is defined by its coastline.
Separated from the mainland
to the north
by the formidable Bass Strait,
to the East
by the Tasman Sea
and rolling in uninterrupted
all the way from Antarctica,
the chilling vastness
of the Great Southern Ocean.
Three western empires
put this island on the map.
Dutchman, Abel Tasman,
was the first European
to step ashore in 1642.
Then came the French surveyors
who made several expeditions here
but of course,
it was the British who claimed it,
settling here in 1803.
We've come here to explore
how Tasmania's geographic isolation
has steered its history
and shaped the people
along its South-Eastern shores.
Brendan Moar journeys
to remote rugged Tasman Island
to understand the dramatic
grip of lighthouse life
on coastal culture.
This would have to be one
of the most beautiful places,
I think I've ever seen
but you can feel the isolation.
Marine Ecologist,
Dr. Emma Johnston,
dives into the battle
between alien sea urchins
and giant rock lobsters.
Hurray!
Palaeontologist,
Professor Tim Flannery
reveals Hobart's crucial role
in Antarctic exploration.
In the footsteps of
Scott, Amundsen and Mawson.
They were tiny, weren't they?
Anthropologist,
Dr. Xanthe Mallett
is grateful that fashion changes.
I do not fancy wearing this.
And I discover
the enormous effort
to restore a grande dame of the sea.
This is definitely in the once in
a lifetime category of opportunities.
This is Coast Australia.
In this episode,
we explore a coastline
that starts at Wineglass Bay,
on the Freycinet Peninsula,
continues on to Port Arthur,
into Hobart
and crosses over
to Bruny Island in the South.
The majesty
of this coastal landscape
and its flora & fauna
cannot fail to inspire,
but its natural beauty
belies a dark past.
From the European perspective,
this island outpost
was from the outset,
the realm of hard men.
Given how perfect it looks today,
it's hard to imagine
the scene down there
when the whaling industry
was at its height.
But when that bay
was completely full of whales' blood
lapping against
that perfectly circular rim,
it was said to resemble
a wine glass full of claret.
As if coloured by such a past
the rare pink granite
characteristic of the region
forms nearly 40 kilometres
of pristine coastline.
As we head south, the rock
changes colour, but not the history.
I'm heading to Port Arthur
on the Tasman Peninsula,
the show-piece
of Australia's convict past.
In Britain, the initial fear
of transportation was waning,
so the British government
had to up its game.
What was needed
was a new penal colony.
A place whose very name would inspire
fear and dread in all who heard it.
The new Governor, George Arthur,
was tasked with creating
a sophisticated new penal system
designed to become
the ultimate deterrent
for the Empire's most
wayward malcontents.
What he created, was this.
From small beginnings
as a convict timber-camp in 1830,
Port Arthur's settlement
expanded into new industries
of both hard and light labour,
and new methods of punishment
to replace the bloody practice
of flogging.
By the time the last convict
left in 1877,
around 7,000 men
had served time here.
At Port Arthur the creed was simple,
"To grind rogues into honest men."
Now, it sounds unpleasant
and I'm sure it was.
What I want to understand though
is just how successful
they were at the business of reform
through punishment.
I'm meeting colonial historian,
Dr. Hamish Maxwell-Stewart,
who has spent years
studying this place,
and the people
who worked their way through it.
Hamish, I have to say, on a day like
today, this place looks beautiful.
It's hard to imagine it as a place
of suffering, punishment.
It's gorgeous, isn't it?
One of the interesting things
is that the convicts that were here,
some of them,
said exactly the same thing.
So they wrote in memoirs
about the strangeness
of being a prisoner
in a penal station,
the worst sink whole
in the British Empire
in a location that was so beautiful.
And what kind of prisoners
ended up in this colony?
Secondary offenders largely,
so these are people
who had committed an offence in
the colony, but not serious offences.
So you did anything really bad
you got topped.
The largest single group of people
who came here were absconders,
so convicts who ran away
from other locations and also,
really interestingly,
some people who commit crimes
that are so spectacular
in the British Isles
that they're singled out
for special punishment.
- So who are these spectaculars?
- Well, if you threw a stone
at George III for example,
that might get you here.
That goes in the box marked
"Asking for trouble."
Hamish is taking me
into the Penitentiary Building,
in which 484 desperate lives
were once cramped.
How have you gone
about your understanding this place?
You know, how do you make sense
of so much human misery?
I think that's a really
important question
because all we've got here is walls
but one of the fascinating things
about this site
is the records
for this place are just insane.
You can actually track
individuals through this place?
We know the colour of their eyes.
Hamish has brought with him
the very detailed records
of Scotsman, William Irving,
a 40-year old fabric printer,
convicted for assault
and sentenced to 21 years
in the colonies.
Complexion, head,
hair, whiskers.
And all of this
is his conduct record,
so we know exactly what happened
to him in the colony.
We can follow him
right the way through,
all of the work locations
that he was in.
Every encounter
with a magistrate's bench.
How many people are recorded
like this, to this level of detail?
- Seventy-two thousand.
- Seventy-two thousand?
- Seventy-two thousand prisoners.
- And you've got this level of detail
right into the colour
of their whiskers and their whatever.
Some of them we know the species
of the worm that infested their gut.
Of those 72,000 lives
preserved in
Tasmania's convict records,
almost 10 percent
spent time in these grounds.
We think these are the most
documented people
in the British Empire.
In 1850, a new building
was opened at Port Arthur,
modelled on the Panopticon design
developed in Britain and America,
where once flogging
was the ultimate penalty
for unruly convicts,
isolation was the new weapon.
Having being transported to Tasmania,
how does William Irving
end up in the complex of buildings
at Port Arthur?
It's a really sad story,
see, he almost gets his freedom
but he can't get work
and he ends up as a pauper/invalid
and one of the places
that pauper/invalids
were sent was Port Arthur.
And he's
in the invalids establishment
where he's done for
being absent without leave
and he goes into this building.
And this building here is...
It's like the epicentre
of this spider's web, isn't it?
If all else fails,
you end up in here?
Well, you were in a panopticon,
so an all-seeing prison
and this point here is, you know,
the heart of the panopticon,
it's where the warden sat
and he can see down every corridor.
All of these cells
are just single occupancy?
Yes.
This is a claustrophobic
space, isn't it?
This is where a convict
spent their time during the day,
but if they had to go outside,
they had to wear one of these.
Why do you put that on?
So if they did happen
to be seen by another prisoner,
the other prisoner
couldn't recognise them.
So no name, no face?
- Just a number.
- Gosh.
This only half of it. When
William Irving is in this building,
he again messes up and he transitions
into yet one more level below this.
This is the heart
of darkness in here.
It's a full-blown
solitary confinement cell.
And it would have been dark?
It would have been pitch dark,
and you've got four doors in this one
between you and the outside world.
- So, meter thick walls.
- So it's sensory deprivation.
Absolutely.
What was that supposed
to do to the man?
Reflect on the error of your ways.
And did they persuade
themselves that it worked?
No, and we've got no evidence that
it mediated convict behaviour at all.
I'm struck by how strong
the desire to escape this place
would have been.
But beyond the mental torture,
the natural, physical boundaries
have created a formidable challenge
for the daring.
The only escape by land
was 20 kilometres north,
across the 30-metre wide neck
called Eaglehawk.
But even here,
there was an even more fearsome,
and hungry, line of defence.
I've come here to meet Port Arthur
Archaeologist, Dr. Jody Steele,
to discover what the chances were
of surviving a desperate
attempt at freedom.
Who's your ferocious friend?
He's part of the line of defence
that protected the gateway
to the penal peninsula
but he didn't act alone.
I've bought a postcard from
our collection to have a look at.
- That's great, isn't it?
- It is.
A team of between 11 and 18 dogs,
lined up between here all the way
across this isthmus out into the bay.
If you wanted to make a break for it,
the ocean was your best bet
but that meant swimming.
But for all that I presume,
men were trying to get out.
There were a lot of people
attempting it,
but usually they wouldn't
make it very far.
Everything about it is just a
challenge for the convict, isn't it?
It would have been
and they were wearing leg irons
in the chain gain,
and I've brought a pair to show you.
So anyone who's out
in the environment,
in the landscape
has got their legs shackled?
They were, yep. They were usually
in gangs and they would
have been wearing these heavy irons.
And these are, the real deal?
These aren't replicas?
They are the real deal.
And you can see they're slightly
burrowed, in an oval shape,
so they had a fair amount of damage
done to them to try and get them off.
Right, so that's-- Someone has sat
on a beach somewhere
and just thumped away with a rock--
Most likely a rock or whatever
they could get their hands on.
What about William Irving
that I've been hearing about?
At Port Arthur
he just seems to disappear.
A number of things
could've happened to him.
You can assume that he got out,
made it to the mainland,
might have changed his name
and lived happily ever after.
But, unfortunately,
not many of them did.
We have records of the ascenders
ending up in the bush.
Several decades' later,
people finding them
still with their leg irons on,
nothing but a skeleton.
And I suppose any one of those
could have been William Irving.
Any of them could have been.
Little consolation to think
that William Irving
may have spent his last years
stranded in paradise.
We're traveling along
the south-east coast of Tasmania.
Old stories are aplenty here.
Born of a daunting coastline
and living in the minds
of those who watched over the ebb
and flow of history's seafarers.
Brendan Moar wants to know why,
at this very forbidding tip
of Tasmania,
the memory of it all
is worth preserving.
In Australia today,
all lighthouses are automated
but they remain as beacon
of a bygone era.
Much loved and cared for by small
armies of devoted volunteers.
I'm on a mission to find out why
lighthouses occupy such a romantic
and dramatic place
in our coastal culture.
But before I can board my ride out
I've got to scrub down!
I'm joining a working bee
at the legendary
Tasman Island Lighthouse.
It stands in a particularly
pristine environment
which means no bugs
or weeds from the mainland.
Tasman Island,
off the rugged south-eastern tip
of the Tasman Peninsula,
topped by that familiar sentinel
of maritime safety.
My God!
This is a rare privilege.
I'm joining a very dedicated
group of volunteers
who come here three times a year
to maintain the Tasman Lighthouse
and surrounding buildings.
If anyone can explain the fascination
with lighthouses these guys can.
- Good morning.
- Good morning.
- Hope your boots are clean!
- They are. You must be Carol?
- I am. Welcome to the island.
- Great to meet you.
The Tasman Island lighthouse
was opened in 1906.
It was de-manned in 1977
and has run on automated
solar power ever since.
The homes too have stood
empty since then.
But why do the memories
remain strong?
Carol Jackson
spent her childhood here.
For a lighthouse kid, it's different
to being a keeper or a keeper's wife.
As kids, Mum used
to always say to us that,
we grew up with
too much wind in our heads.
So you have this freedom,
you have an independence,
you have a resilience.
You had to make do.
You had to make your own fun.
We didn't have TV. There were
no shops. There were no doctors.
You had a life
that was pure and simple.
With such strong family connections
she formed The Friends of
Tasman Island eight years ago
to preserve its heritage,
in partnership
with the Parks and Wildlife Service.
Why is this important
for anyone to do this?
People love wild places. We
have a motley crew each working bee.
So some people are ex-keepers
or like myself, a keeper's kid
and know the history
and love the history behind it.
The stories
behind the light station here.
Other are pharophiles.
They just love anything to do
with lighthouses.
The volunteers arrive
with a diverse range of skills
to repair, paint and maintain
the ageing buildings and gardens,
which cop the full force
of mother nature.
This is a much bigger house.
Enormously important bit
of maritime heritage
in a stunning spectacular spot
and they deserve to be preserved.
There are four brick
keepers' cottages and the remains
of several other smaller buildings
that dot the plateau
that's just over one and a half
kilometres long
by one kilometre wide.
And here we are
arriving at what we call the WIM,
- the top of the haulage way.
- It's beyond stunning.
This is the most extraordinary
view, landscape, thing.
It's amazing.
It's just breath-taking.
- My backyard.
- Your backyard?
It's a hell of a backyard.
Before helicopters, ships were used
and it made
for a hazardous landing.
People and supplies could only travel
up the steep tramway
from the small wharf
all the way down there.
It's about
45 degrees most of the way down.
But the last couple of hundred feet
are one over one,
so you're actually
lying on the trolley
but you're standing up almost.
- That's me.
- That's you there?
- That's your mum.
- Yeah.
And this is how we got on the island.
- Gosh!
- So the basket
would be dropped,
so down on the landing,
there was a flying fox shed
and the flying fox
would send the basket
down and drop it into the boat.
The boat would go back out,
you'd clamber into the basket
and then boat would come back on,
hook you up onto the flying fox.
And you'd be battered back and forth
until you got onto the landing.
Sheep, cattle,
all the coal briquettes
everything came up this haulage way.
- Were there ever any accidents?
- Yes.
There's been a couple of deaths
on the haulage way.
When the crane wasn't
working on the landing,
one of the workers there fell into
the sea, never to be found again.
Memories that linger on
in the rusted wheels
and old homes that stand
against the windswept landscape.
It was a solitary life
with just one purpose
to keep the light burning bright.
As Tasman Island's last permanent
keeper, Karl Rowbottom, tells me,
It's always an emotional time
when he returns.
- Can you smell the kerosene?
- No.
I still can.
The place was full of kerosene once.
Let's go up.
This is the first landing, Brendan,
and we're still gonna keep going.
Right, Brendan. Come out
and have bit of a look, mate.
See what you reckon
of this for a view.
- My God!
- Yeah.
It's amazing.
It didn't matter
if anyone was sick
or someone died
or some catastrophe happened,
this light would have to go
every night.
It would have to go and everyone
was secondary to the light.
The light was God around here.
You're basically
the last man standing.
How does it feel for you that light
keeping is now a thing of the past?
It's a sad thing that
that history is gone from our society
because they were men--
Men of a special calibre
and so were their families
to live out in these places.
The day I had to leave here
was the worst part.
That really hurt. That really hurt.
I think my heart died that day.
I went back to the mainland.
I couldn't settle there.
I became a rebel.
Wonder I didn't end up in jail
but anyway, um...
It's funny, as I was going down
in the basket for the last time,
I could feel my heart
going down and down with it and...
So that was a bit sad really
and then when I saw
John Daly--
He's still relief keeping...
I went up in the basket and that's
when I thought, "The job's gone".
Bit sad.
This would have to be one
of the most beautiful places,
I think I've ever seen.
But you can feel the isolation.
And to think
of the people spending
up to two years here,
which was the maximum posting,
I have no idea how they did it.
I don't think I could do it.
They were certainly made of sterner
stuff than I am, that's for sure.
Memories and traditions
are well preserved in Tasmania,
particularly
when it involves the sea.
I'm going to meet the people
who are committed to cultivating
a Renaissance of Australia's wooden
maritime culture.
They have a really big get together
every two years
to show off their precious vessels,
it's called the Australian
Wooden Boat Festival
and they've invited me along.
I'm in Oyster Cove on a special day.
It's the ninth and last morning
of a little boat raid
called Tawe Nunnegah.
- Ros. How are you?
- Good morning.
Ros Barnett is a member
of the Living Boat Trust,
a community devoted to keeping
Tasmania's maritime heritage alive.
Ros, what is Tawe Nunnegah?
It's an expedition of small boats.
A raid, we call it.
And the idea is that
a lot of these boats are so small
that they wouldn't be safe going
alone so they go together in a group.
How important is it
to keep the boat-making skills alive?
Just incredibly important.
And to build a boat,
you need the knowledge,
the skill, and the timber.
So Tasmania's
got the best boat-building timber.
We've got some
of these precious people
that really know
how to build a boat well,
and we've got these enthusiastic
people that want to sail them.
We're out there in boats.
Best water than you'll ever get
anywhere else in the world
and we're just having fun.
With over 10 nautical miles
of water to travel
before I jump ship,
I'm happy not to be relying
on oar-power.
We get the good boat
with coffee and everything.
I've scored a lift north
on one of the biggest boats
in the Tawe Nunnegah raid.
- How you doing?
- Hi.
It's a genuinely
pleasing site, isn't it,
to see so many vessels on
the water together, it's just lovely.
But I'm trying to spot
my date to the festival,
an elegantly restored
three-masted barque.
The tallest ship of the fleet
heading into to Hobart
for the opening of the festival.
Aha! I've clocked her.
I make my way
onto the 140-year-old James Craig,
to discover the extraordinary story
of her salvage.
Thank you.
Again,
the main top mast stay still.
Alan Edenborough
has been a member
of the Sydney Heritage Fleet
since 1969,
and fascinated
by tall ships since a teenager.
So all this madness is yours?
Initially, yes, yes.
A lot of people have helped since...
Built in England in 1874,
she ploughed the world's oceans
as a merchant ship.
Later reduced to transporting coal
and abandoned in 1932
in Recherche Bay,
this is what Allan discovered
in 1972.
How did-- I've seen
the photograph of the rusting hulk.
Somebody told us in Sydney they said,
"We want one tall ship to Sydney",
and I was silly enough
to take up the challenge
to see if we could find one.
- How did you finally come across...
- I found a little magazine
which had written an article
from a Sydney sailor
who'd been down to Hobart,
and he'd seen the hull.
I said that's the best-looking wreck
I've seen and the rest is history.
- That was the best-looking wreck?
- Absolutely.
And when you saw
that hulk in that tragic condition,
you knew that this was achievable.
Not immediately
but we did two surveys.
We went down and we spent
a total of about two weeks
on board the ship.
Living on board this hulk,
we'd go down to the keel,
and once we got to the keel,
we realised that she was salvageable.
The frames and the ship and
the fabric of the ship was intact.
That's the critical thing.
I must admit we had to pour
about two bottles of scotch
down the surveyor's throat before
he'd sign the letter to say it could
be salvaged, but he was a nice chap.
And then it was a 20 year slog to
get it back into working condition.
She is one of only four barques
from the 19th Century
still sailing anywhere in the world.
A true masterpiece of restoration,
a 30-year labour of love
for those devoted to her.
I'm going up
to that little white deck up there.
Absolutely thrilled.
It is a bit good up here.
How often does a person
get the chance to look out at Hobart,
from this far up the mast
of the James Craig.
This is definitely in the once in
a lifetime category of opportunities.
A salute to hand-made history.
Since the early 1960's,
Hobart's Tasman Bridge
has been the vital link
between the city
and its eastern suburbs.
But on a calm night in 1975,
fate shattered the peace and quiet
of a sleeping city.
A wayward bulk ore carrier
struck the bridge and sank
bringing down pylons
and concrete spans.
Seven crew were killed
and five motorists died
when their vehicles plunged
60 metres from the top.
The city was left with a bridge
to nowhere for almost three years.
Hobart has never forgotten
its night of adversity.
And today, it builds bridges
of a different kind,
over distant horizons.
This is the heart of Australia's
enduring exploration of Antarctica.
Palaeontologist,
Professor Tim Flannery,
discovers a heroic blend
of science and adventure.
There are more
Antarctic scientists here
than anywhere else in the world
because Hobart's the gateway
to the Southern Ocean and beyond.
So I want to discover what a modern
day expedition to the ice involves.
And to do that,
you really have to understand
what happened in the past
and you simply can't disregard
the greatest Antarctica story
of them all.
It begins when a raggedy,
exhausted man
walks into this city hotel
fresh off the boat
after an 18-month expedition.
Just over a century ago,
a disreputable looking figure
made his way into this
rather grand hotel lobby.
The duty clerk
mistook him for a tramp
and gave him an inferior room
at the back of the hotel.
But the following day,
that man would be
recognised as a great
international hero.
He was Roald Amundsen,
the first person
to reach the south pole.
And here he is after
a well-deserved shave and shower.
He had just travelled 5250 kilometres
from his triumph to Hobart.
The papers proclaimed,
"The hero Amundsen had conquered
the South Pole, the race was over.
His long-time rival,
Robert Scott, had died trying."
And back then, the voyage out
must have been a hazardous one.
But scientists are still going south
and they're discovering great things
and I'm really keen to learn
what the journey's like today.
I'm returning port-side
to meet Australian Antarctic Division
Chief Scientist, Dr. Nick Gales.
So, tell me was it really all
a race to the Poles?
Well, back then, it really was.
That was where the attention
of the whole globe was.
They were the rockstars of the age.
Just like I and people
of my generation and older
remember the Lunar landing
and where they were.
That was the scale of attention
and it was a huge race
to get the first person
into the South Pole
of this great unknown land.
And one of them was this
great Tasmanian, Lewey Vanacky,
who came down here in the late 19th
century with his family and went down
as part of the very first expedition
ever to over winter in Antarctica.
And he went down as a scientist,
so he was starting to measure
a lot of the science
that was fascinating to him
and to the scientists
that followed him,
like Edgeworth, David
and Mawson.
So, Mawson was a geologist,
wasn't he?
He was a great geologist
but he was more.
He really was a renaissance
man if you like,
because he recognised
the importance of science
in Antarctica above and beyond
everything else.
And the science that he was
doing back then, is that still
ongoing today or has the nature of it
all changed?
We do things very differently now
because we have all these wonderful
new tools to do our science,
but the drivers were the same.
What happens in the southern oceans?
What happens with the ice cap,
It's the engine room of global
climate so it's relevant to us all.
Modern day
expeditions to the ice
remain physically and mentally
challenging for everyone.
I'm fortunate to be here
just at the right time
to witness Australia's all-purpose
Antarctic flagship,
preparing to head south.
The Aurora Australis
is Australia's only icebreaker.
Since 1990, she's been transporting
faculties of scientists
to Australia's three bases
in Antarctica
to examine the ice continent.
On board, is Dr. Tas Van Ommen,
an Antarctic Division scientist
who specialises in ice cores.
So, how old is
the oldest ice down there?
We've got good reason
to believe that the oldest ice
is probably over a million years old
and there are real puzzles
that we wanna access one day
by getting that old ice.
But for the moment we're satisfied
trying to build up our network
of younger ice records as well.
Antarctic has
18,000 kilometres of coast
and most of it is actually
hidden beneath ice.
And the exact configuration
of that ice water interface
is so important for determining
how the ice responds
in a warming climate.
In a sense you could say
the coast of Antarctica
hold the key to the changing coast
to the rest of the planet.
When you're down there
on the ice,
do you ever think about
the heroic age of exploration
and the conditions Mawson and those
other explorers faced down there?
Yeah, I do and I marvel at the fact
that they went into the unknown,
whereas we're going into something
that we've got some experience
and knowledge about.
And they achieved such amazing things
with such basic equipment.
Bridge, fore and aft, let go.
Copy that, let go, over.
Bridge to oft,
letting go all lines.
Thank you.
The boat
just moves so gracefully and slowly
as it comes down the Derwind here.
It's more like a ballet
than anything I would have expected
I wish I was
heading south with them
but it's time for me
to bid bon voyage
to the Aurora Australis
for her 96th journey to Antarctica.
And there she goes,
a veteran polar explorer
in the footsteps of Scott,
Amundsen and Mawson.
While those heroic explorers
ventured south,
there were pioneers
of a different hue further north.
Freycinet Peninsula is famously
frequented by visitors
in search of its wildlife.
I'm heading to the site
of a particularly large nature-fest
over a hundred years ago.
These naturalists,
as they were known,
were forerunners of Tasmania's
now famous green movement.
In Easter 1910, Coles Bay
became the base
for the Naturalists' field camp
after nearly a hundred naturalists,
men and women,
sailed here from Hobart.
I'm going to meet local historian,
Maureen Martin Ferris,
to see what all the fuss was about.
They really were very interested
in studying some of the botany,
some of the beautiful granite
and also the marine animals.
Because they were botanists,
you had zoologists.
One of them of course,
was Errol Flynn's father.
- Really?
- He was a zoologist.
Gosh, right. Okay.
And he actually wrote
a wonderful report and in the report,
it says that they actually discovered
60 new Tasmanian species
and 25 Australian species.
Here's some of them and you can
see the women in their wonderful--
The women in their hats
and their long gowns.
I'm relieved that it's the kind
of naturalists that study wildlife
and not the ones that
play naked table tennis.
Well, actually, that's what
I imagined they were like.
And you can see.
- And this is this bay here.
- Yes, it is.
- Is that the headland, there?
- That's the headland.
- You can see it right there.
- Right. Fantastic.
What always gets me is that nobody
is dressed for the beach.
No, none. They're all dressed
as if they were going downtown.
Yeah, look at that.
They look as if they've arrived
in the primordial jungle there,
with tents dotted about.
Such simple kit as well,
I mean, they're just canvases
thrown over ropes.
Perhaps the greatest legacy
of those early naturalists
was the creation of Tasmania's
first national park here in 1916,
to protect Freycinet's
natural beauty for generations.
Preserving nature is a fine thing
but what if nature changes?
Further south the tide is turning.
Australia's East Ocean Current
has been delivering some
uninvited visitors to the area,
turning it into
an underwater battlefield.
Marine Ecologist, Dr. Emma Johnston,
is diving into the fight
to pick the winners from the losers.
What's the relationship
between this and this?
Both are featured on expensive menus
around the world.
But one is an unwelcome visitor,
and the other one wants to eat it.
I'm here to find out what's gone
wrong in the neighbourhood.
Traditionally,
the peaceful waters of Dunalley
have had a thriving marine ecosystem
producing loads of seafood.
But that's now under threat,
since the East Australian Current
has been bringing warmer waters
from the north, and with it,
armies of long spined urchins.
Good day.
Marine ecologist, Dr. Scott Ling,
from the University of Tasmania,
has promised to take me
to the battleground.
We're traveling to North Bay
where these invasive urchins
are eating their way
through the native sea kelp
at an alarming rate,
leaving the sea beds
increasingly barren and unproductive.
I'm came to see the evidence,
and discover the creative solutions
that might just save them.
We'll head down to eight and then
swim across until we hit the--
We should see a lot of the kelp bed
through here and then,
some of the barren areas
will start to emerge.
- There you go. Set to go.
- Thank you.
Emma, we've got a fairly
healthy kelp bed system here.
This is showing
the first sign of these
urchins overgrazing the system.
The barren patches that are really
just starting to form.
Look at that! Beautiful.
They're just like little eating
machines, aren't they?
That's right. If you look at
how long these spines are here,
really good protection from any
lobster that's trying to eat them.
So purple.
It looks black under the water.
Pretty bright.
You can see their five teeth.
His mouth's opening up
there slightly.
This what's doing
all the damage to the kelp.
See, their teeth are extremely hard.
And they use a rasping type action
to strip the rock clear
of all the algae.
Like a plague of marine locusts,
the prickly invaders
are eating the sea bed bare.
The evidence of their destruction
is overwhelming. But no more!
Enter the local hero,
the Tasmanian Rock Lobster.
Here we have
the Southern Rock lobster.
This is obviously a larger specimen.
And it's these larger specimens
that are able to prey on things
like sea urchins.
Obviously, you've got
all those protective spines.
It takes quite a large predator
to be able to deal with that.
And roll the urchin over
and eat it from--
- Hurray!
- It helps them survive.
With the support
of local fishermen,
Scott and his team
are returning to this area
the once over-fished
giant rock lobsters,
to take on their opponent.
Heading back to shore,
Scott is going to show me
some rare and exclusive footage
of an urchin kill.
Okay,
so if you have a look here.
We've got some infra-red remote
monitoring of a sea urchin.
- Is that the urchin?
- That's the urchin.
This is at night.
You can see spines are relaxed
until the lobster turns up.
Then the lobster goes
about trying to grapple the urchin,
it rolls it over and attacks the
urchin through the weaker underside
where there's less protection
from the spines.
- So, is it working?
- Yeah, well, certainly.
It was a bit of a surprise
as to how well the lobsters
actually took up residence
on these sea urchin barrens.
So what we're looking at here is,
first of all, there's really obvious
yellowy coloured structure.
That's the roe or the gonad.
So that's the eggs
and for a lobster,
he cracks open an urchin
and the first thing
he goes for is the roe.
You've got a lot more calories
in there than anything else.
I'm not sure whether you wanna
try some, but why not.
- Gosh. Really? Fresh.
- Yeah.
Give it a go. Give it a go. Fresh.
Okay.
- Taste like the ocean?
- That is delicious.
That's like ocean butter.
But a small platoon of lobsters
is no guarantee
against a battalion
of voracious urchins.
So I wonder whether our growing taste
for urchin roe
may become another defence
against the spiny invaders.
On the final leg of my investigation
I'm returning to Dunalley Bay
to meet diver
and entrepreneur, Dave Allen.
Wow, that looks like a huge haul.
How much have you got here?
Probably
three quarters of a ton.
How much roe do you get out of,
say, three quarters of a ton?
About 80 kilos of roe.
And that's the premium product.
And at peak of the season
that can bring
as much as 400 dollars a kilo
in the Japanese market.
Can we eat our way out
of this problem?
Um, I think it's been proven
most of the way
through the northern hemisphere,
the only way to control
a sea urchin problem
is with a commercially
viable industry.
So, with a serve
of science and industry,
we may not only rejuvenate
an ailing ecosystem
but also sustain a peaceful
and profitable
underwater neighbourhood.
For decades, Bruny Island's
small community
has enjoyed a peaceful
and exquisite environment.
But as anthropologist,
Dr. Xanthe Mallet discovers,
200 years ago, the island's fortunes
were built upon a grim
and bloody business.
I'm walking along
what's called The Neck
which links North Bruny Island
behind me
and South Bruny Island
in front of me.
To the west,
the tranquil waters of Great Bay.
And to the East, the sweeping
indigo arc of Adventure Bay
naturally sheltered
against the Tasman Sea.
Adventure Bay is an idyllic setting
sought out by nature-loving tourists,
proud locals and urban escapees.
But I'm here on a very
different journey
to find out why this bay
was flushed red with blood.
Soon after colonisation in 1803,
Tasmanians discovered
a vast whale population
in Adventure Bay
during the winter months.
And so, the hunt for whale oil
began here in 1826.
The oil had a huge market in Britain
where it fuelled the country's
street lamps and factory lighting.
Everyone wanted to be in
on the game and the slaughter.
I'm heading to the remains
of a whaling station
at the Bay's eastern most tip.
In its day about 150 whalers
were stationed here.
Good morning.
Maritime archaeologist,
Michael Nash, has studied
the whaling rush and says the bay
was a perfect inlet
for the harpooning of whales.
In the winter months, they'd come
in here to calve and to breed.
It's nice and shallow,
it's a pretty protected bay.
It's very big sort of straight access
to the ocean out there.
Why are they called
the southern right whale?
It's because they were
the right whale to hunt.
- Really!
- Yeah.
Because where they located
themselves.
They were easy to access.
They were fairly big rotund animals.
Had a lot of blubber on them.
They were reasonably slow
at that time of year
and also the carcass floated
when they were killed,
so they could tow them
back into here.
When a whale was spotted,
it wasn't just the boats
from one station going out to get it,
there was four or five stations
and they're all competing
because the one that actually
harpooned it first,
had the claim on the whale.
So, once they'd actually
harpooned it,
the whale would tow
the boat around for a while,
get exhausted and then
they'd come in here to lance.
Did people die doing this?
They did but occasionally.
Not a huge number but boats got upset
and the bad weather or the whales
or the whale line would get caught
around someone's leg or something.
It was a dangerous occupation.
They'd bring the carcass
about 50 yards off shore
and set up a-- Basically, a platform
where they cut the blubber off.
They'd draw it up
with a block and tackle
and they'd roll the whale, basically.
They draw the whole whale up
and peel it like an orange?
Yeah, they do.
One of the characteristics
at these sites
is we get these
what we call blubber bricks.
So they have
this really thick residue
they used to use the scraps
of blubber to actually
put back into the fire.
So it gave off this
really greasy residue,
which actually sticks to the bricks.
If it leaves this black stuff
when you burn it,
when they were making the actual oil
it would have been giving off
a black smoke then?
It would have been disgusting.
It would've been
this big greasy thing
and they reckon
with the whaling ships,
even if you couldn't see the ships,
you could actually smell them
from a couple of miles away.
And this was what it was
all about, whale oil.
An average 15 metre whale
could yield about 8000 litres.
So, what happened?
Why did it all stop?
Basically, because the whale numbers
just declined so dramatically
from over overfishing.
They dropped
in the 1840's to the 1850's,
there was virtually no whales
being caught here.
In a sense it was an industry that
burned brightly but consumed itself
over a couple of decades.
So, what remains of that time?
Hello.
On the final stop of my journey,
I'm meeting Margaret Wise,
a descendent of Adventure Bay whalers
and she's got a couple of interesting
artefacts she wants to show me.
And this is a pair of whale's teeth.
The sailors would etch pictures.
This is scrimshaw.
The intricate design
and etching was no mean feat
given the pitch and yaw
of the ocean waves.
Very fine detail.
There was another product
that we obtained from the whale
that was part of women's fashion.
And this was the Baleen
from the mouth of the whale
through which they sieved.
It's fairly firm and thin
and became very, very useful
in inserting into a lady's corset.
And in the early days,
this is a corset
that ladies used to wear.
Right.
To keep their waists trim,
taught and terrific.
- Shall we give it a go?
- Would you like to?
Not having much faith
that's gonna fit, but--
The lace is at the back.
They were tiny, weren't they?
I think we need
to bring it down just a little.
I don't think
this is gonna go around me.
No, they had such tiny, tiny waists.
I do not fancy wearing this.
I'm sure it would have
been much bigger
had I had to wear one
in those days.
Can we take it off now?
Fortunately, fashion changes,
as did the fate of whaling.
Commercial whaling
was banned in 1986.
At its peak between 1835 and 1839,
about 12,000 right whales
were taken in Australian waters.
Today, worldwide,
they number just 8000.
One hundred and fifty years later,
after the whaling stopped,
do you think we'll ever see whales
back in Adventure Bay?
Earlier this year,
we had at least eight whales
at one time in Adventure Bay.
And we believe that one of them
calved as well.
So the evidence
is showing that each year
there are more and more whales
obvious to us out in the bay
and I didn't think that I would
ever live to see the day
when so many whales were there
but, yes, they're coming back.
I call that forgiveness.
Our journey through Tasmania
is at an end, for now.
This island may have begun
its colonial life
as a severe penal corner
of the British Empire
but even the convicts
recognised the paradox
of doing time in a patch of Eden.
Since then, Tasmanians have been busy
tending to their garden
with pride.
From a passionate marine culture,
to their reach of science
near and far,
there is that sense of loyalty
and imagination
that can only come
from the independence
and natural wonder
of an island girt by sea.
Australia's about as far
from Scotland as you can get.
Tasmania is a bit further on again.
And yet there's something
about this place...
Maybe the landscape?
Maybe the climate?
Definitely the rain
that reminds me of home.
Next time, Dr. Xanthe Mallet
discovers an abandoned fort
that had the job
of protecting the nation.
Professor Tim Flannery
explores Fraser Island.
A world famous sanctuary,
but is it edible?
It's like tasting history, really.
Dr. Emma Johnston finds that
to save the dugong,
you have to capture it first.
What we're looking for
is when they pop up
and their nose pops
out of the water.
Brendan Moar
reveals the true history
of the great Australian prawn.
This is a strange
and unsettling place.
And I investigate an outpost
for outcasts.