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Maria Island is for the intrepid
Maria Island is a special place with historic ruins, sweeping bays, rugged cliffs and mountains with remarkable wildlife
By: Anonymous
Maria Island, a 40-minute ferry crossing from Hobart, Tasmania, is breathtaking.
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It has soaring cliffs, impregnated with fossils from the last Ice Age. It has mountains and long stretches of deserted beaches. It is a complex place with a deeply-layered history. Its relative isolation has been the key to its evolution, in terms of its wildlife and its history as one of Van Diemens Land’s first penal settlements.
The entire figure eight-shaped island is a National Park, about 12 miles in length from north to south and, at its widest, about eight miles west to east. The northern section of the island is significantly larger than the southern: both have quite rugged relief and they are joined by a tombolo about two miles long known as McRaes Isthmus. The highest point, Mt Maria, on the northern part of the island, rises to 1,823 feet above sea level.
Once a penal colony - among the prisoners were Irish political prisoner William Smith O’Brien and Lord Tennyson’s brother Horatio - it was declared a sanctuary for endangered species in 1971 and a National Park in 1972. As a result, the island is a ’Noah’s Ark’ of Tasmanian endemic wildlife within a setting of carefully conserved penitentiary architecture. A guided day trip, called ‘Once Upon Maria’, offers the opportunity for a close-up encounter with Tasmanian wildlife as explorers walk among the island’s interesting buildings and through the beautiful hinterland. It also includes a cruise around the stunning northern end of the island and through the Mercury Passage that separates Maria from the Tasmanian mainland.
Forester kangaroos and Cape Barren geese were introduced to the main settlement at Darlington in an effort to ensure their conservation. The Foresters had a shrinking habitat on mainland Tasmania, and the population of the geese on the Bass Strait islands was very low. Today they have been joined by a small group of Tasmanian devils in a bid to save them from the facial tumour disease that is striking the mainland population.
Over the years about 130 species of birds have been recorded on and around the island. Among the rare, endangered and threatened birds that find sanctuary on the island are the forty-spotted pardalote, swift parrot, hooded plover, wedge-tailed eagle, sacred kingfisher and fairy tern. There are breeding colonies of a number of sea bird species including fairy penguins and short-tailed shearwaters. Maria housed convicts years before the British established the main penal colony at Port Arthur.
Maria Island was from earliest times home to the Tyreddeme Aboriginal people, a band of the Oyster Bay tribe, who were among the southernmost people in the world after the last Ice Age. They called the island Toarra Marra Monah. They reached it from the Tasmanian mainland on canoe rafts built of rushes. They crossed to the island regularly and used the ochre from Bloodstone Point near the isthmus at the island’s centre to decorate their bodies and hair and to produce bark paintings. They built huts, hunted and gathered food and buried their dead there in a very unusual way.
The Dutch explorer Abel Janszoon Tasman sighted the island on 4 December 1642. The previous month he had made landfall on the Tasmanian west coast, naming present day Tasmania Van Diemens Land in honour of Antony van Diemen, Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies. Tasman named the new east coast island Maria Eylandt after Maria van Diemen, Antony’s wife. The first Europeans to land were from John Henry Cox’s brig Mercury on 8 July
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1789. They documented Aborigines on the island. Nicholas Baudin’s party, led by Charles Boullanger, stepped foot on Maria Island on 19 Feb 1802.
Maria became the British colony’s second penal settlement after Macquarie Harbour on the Tasmanian west coast. The first convicts arrived on the island in March 1825 to form a “soft” penal, agricultural settlement, made up of convicts who could be trusted to work with settlers. The settlement was closed in favour of Port Arthur in September 1832. Maria went to private lease in the 1830s but became a convict settlement again for a short period from 1842.
There were also two industrial eras on Maria featuring Diego Bernacchi, an Italian silk merchant who came to Australia in April 1884, aged 30, with a view to raising silk worms. He took a lease on the whole island but changed his plans and established a cement works. On the way, he developed 40 acres of vineyards, orange, lemon and mulberry plantations. There were fields of figs, mandarin trees, pomegranates, lemons, chestnuts and poplars. In 1887 the Maria Island Company was floated for fruit and wine growing, sheep and cattle raising, limestone and marble quarrying, agriculture, cement, timber, a sanatorium, land allotments and a fishery.
Bernacchi’s enterprise saw the island’s population rise to 250. The main settlement at Darlington had the Grand Hotel, shops, a butcher, baker, blacksmith, shoemaker and post office. In the same year a coffee palace was built on the site of the separate apartment cells, using the bricks.
In February 1892 the Maria island Company sadly was placed in liquidation. A new company, the Land Development and Cement Company of Tasmania, was formed but it eventually failed. The Bernacchi family left for London to sell the limestone potential. Son Louis sailed with Captain Robert Scott to the Antarctic. In 1920 Bernacchi returned, bought the township and the 400,000 tonne limestone deposit. He built a cement works and a wharf to ship the cement. In 1930 the company was taken over by Australian Cement Co of Geelong and much of the plant removed to Port Fairy in Victoria. Many of the island’s buildings were moved to Triabunna or to Hobart, to Maria St in New Town, including the Twelve Apostles cottages that had lined one of the streets on the island. In June 1971 it was declared a wildlife sanctuary. A year later it became a national park
The logistics:
A ferry provides a 40-minute daily service from the town of Triabunna to the jetty in Darlington Bay at the northern end of Maria Island, - in summer the service is twice daily. Very basic accommodation is available in Darlington in "the Penitentiary", a former place of internment, built during the first convict era in 1825. There are ten rooms with bunk beds. There is now electricity or running water but washrooms, hot showers and barbecues are nearby (you need to bring all cooking gear, food and bedding with you). This island is for the intrepid extreme hiker and naturalist, and the real enthusiast may well want to sign on for four day hikes with Ian and Bronwyn Johnstone. www.mariaisland.com.au
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