The basket lurched and bounced off the railing as I clung to the canvas sides, while the ocean rose to meet the base of the bamboo basket before surging and sucking back from where it came.

My love for nature, adventure and discovering remote getaways was born of high seas travel in salty old cray fishing boats, helicopter dashes and light plane voyages. That, and dangling from the end of a steel cable thirty feet above a roiling ocean in a heavy cane basket no bigger than a standard cargo pallet.

I was seven years old when my dad became a lighthouse keeper and my family island hopped some of the most remote islands off the Tasmanian coast for several years. Island hopping usually conjures tropical islands and exotic cocktails, not gale force winds and battened hatches. Not a pina colada or palm tree in sight on this family adventure.

Dad would work shifts watching the light around the clock, winding the Dioptric clockwork apparatus that turned the prism and reporting the weather every three hours. I became very adept at recognising cumulonimbus and stratus clouds and predicting wind speed and direction.

The ‘flying fox’ on Tasman Island was not for the faint hearted. Controlled by a winch that sat on the landing jetty, the operator would scoop cargo and passengers from the (usually) heaving cray boat beneath. Close calls and almost capsizing into the ocean were frequent.

The basket only took passengers and cargo as far as the landing, 1000 feet below the top of the island. A haulage system controlled from above by a chugging diesel engine hoisted people and cargo to the top, vertically on a railway track. Nothing but a base board for your feet and hold on tight!

Once on top of this 1.2 square kilometres of dolerite rock that sits off the point of Cape Pillar on Tasmania’s southeast coast, every step was potentially fatal. Walking near sheer cliffs and watching for crevices that had claimed the lives of an entire flock of sheep, according to legend, made the most relaxed parents worried.

I recall sitting close to the cliff edge one day swinging a stuffed animal on a piece of string. I was very much a child of the 70s – left to my own devices. We had no telephones, TV or contact with the outside world apart from a two-way radio to the mainland. I did correspondence schooling and wrote to pen pals I’d never met.

In cases of emergency where the fishing boat couldn’t get to the landing and it was too wild for a helicopter (that happened) there was a path named the ‘zig zag’ on the most sheltered side of the island. While I was there, we never used it, but we explored the path and reached the bottom once. Pretty hairy!

Supplies arrived fortnightly on the cray fisher’s boat, when possible. Mail, library, books and food, the staples for a life of isolation. Sometimes we would get films from the library and project them in our lounge room. Families gathered in the evenings for a movie night.

Winds at Tasman Island were relentless. One Christmas morning, I stepped outside the front door to be swept away by a gust. Dad had to rugby tackle me to the ground.
Maatsuyker Island
Tasman Island was wild, but the place where we transferred to next was even wilder! Maatsuyker Island, 10 kilometers off the most southern point of Tasmania, is Australia’s most southerly lighthouse. Lashed by the Roaring Forties from the Southern Ocean, Maat was flat for a reason.

Unlike Tasman Island, which is bereft of trees, Maatsuyker is covered in tea trees that grow horizontally and flower white in spring. Constant wind flattens them to a low canopy.

The landscape reminded me of a fantasy forest. The twisted and dense trees sheltered you from the wind and rain. Tortured tree trunks and small winding paths covered the island. Living creatures included seals on the rocky shoreline, pelagic seabirds, antechinus minimus – small marsupial mice that bite very hard should you pick them up (I discovered the hard way!) and skinks.

With 250 days a year of rain and the gale force Roaring Forties, it doesn’t sound like a dream location, but I loved it. There was something exotic about the island. The few days of sunshine were so glorious they canceled out the 250 days where there was none.

I was sad to leave Maatsuyker, but such was the life of lightkeepers, always on the move. We went on to experience fairy penguins nesting under our floorboards at Low Head, snakes slithering through our yard on Swan Island and piles of bull kelp to plunge into on Bruny Island beaches. Being a lighthouse kid was pretty special.

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