When I was young, I thought Tasmania was another country and not part of Australia at all. Every year at Christmas, my parents would pack us into our claptrap Kombi van bound for the heart-shaped island; 15 hours, one boat trip and many tantrums later we’d arrive at my grandparent’s farm in Tarraleah, set in the rugged highlands of central Tasmania north of Hobart. 

 

The people, if you saw any, sounded different here; the countryside was all rolling hills, no skyscrapers; and the weather was always dramatic – one minute, there would be blue skies and the next, a ferocious storm would snap the landscape into a gothic melange of rain clouds, the wind lifting the corrugated tin roofs off my grandpa’s pig pens and scaring the horses into the stables. 

 

And the food? Well, even back then I knew that Tasmania was onto a good thing. Year after year, my sister and I would spend the summer dipping our fingers into bowls of clotted King Island cream so thick it resembled putty. We’d devour punnets of piercingly sweet blueberries and pick strawberries so large you’d swear they were raised on a diet of steroids. And if I was to go back to Tarraleah today, chances are I could do the same things. Life doesn’t happen in a hurry here – and that’s exactly why I love it. 

 

But it’s Hobart and the east coast of the island, not Tarraleah, that are on my mind as I pack for my first trip to Tasmania in a decade. Unlike the sleepy highlands, the state’s capital has undergone a renaissance while I’ve been away, thanks largely to the opening of a number of high-profile galleries, restaurants and hotels. 

 

“We’re becoming quite groovy, aren’t we?” my now eightysomething grandma chuckles when I tell her I’m on my way south. It’s a groove I’m about to settle in to for the next five days, on a brand-new tour with a brand-new tour company, Inspiring Journeys. 

 

Banjo towers over me when I stumble out of Hobart airport, her hubcaps and Mercedes-Benz badge gleaming in the midday sun. Banjo is, of course, our transport for the next week. I’d call her a bus, but that would be like saying Heston Blumenthal can cook – the description doesn’t do either justice. Imagine, instead, the business-class cabin of an airplane (pimped out by Jay-Z, no less) crossed with a semitrailer and you’ll begin to get the picture: leather seats, disco lights and a very nice snack basket and minibar being just some of the comforts. Guides Dan and “Smiley” are on hand to ensure anything we don’t find on board is made available in a matter of minutes.

 

In many ways, Banjo sums up the Inspiring Journeys ethos: intimate and exceptionally comfortable experiences in some of the Antipodes’ most ravishing landscapes, from the Kimberley at the top end of Australia to this, highlights from the “Forgotten Coast,” journey at the bottom. 

 

When Banjo roars into Hobart, people stop and stare, the all-terrain 4WD slowing considerably to navigate the city’s narrow, hilly streets. When I first visited Hobart some 30 years ago, the best restaurant in town was the corner-shop Chinese, dishing up soggy dim sims and fluorescent-pink sweet-and-sour pork in plastic containers. Today, we pass hip harbourside restaurants and bijou bars rather than the nondescript fleet of fast-food eateries I remember from my youth.  

 

And then there are the hotels: The Henry Jones Art Hotel, its 56 art-filled rooms occupying a row of 1820s sandstone warehouses (once a jam factory) overlooking the busy harbour; and the Lenna of Hobart, where we check in to light-filled rooms adjoining a handsome 1874 homestead, wrapped in gardens of lavender and rose. 

 

From here, it’s a short downhill stroll to Salamanca Place, a waterside strip of old port buildings converted into smart restaurants and cafés and craft shops; come back on the weekends and you’ll find the road transformed into a pedestrian-friendly market selling everything from ceramic wind chimes to carrots. 

 

We pull up heavy wooden chairs in Rockwall Bar + Grill restaurant, where the offerings read like a naturalist’s handbook to the region: Bruny Island oysters, Tasmanian rock lobster, and mushrooms plucked from the Huon Valley all star on a decidedly simple menu – produce is clearly king here, and my crispy-skinned salmon with burnt-orange glaze and citrus “confetti” is the perfect introduction to the region’s flavours. 

 

Arguably the biggest, and certainly the most controversial, thing to happen to Tasmania in recent years was the opening of MONA (Museum of Old and New Art), a dramatic riverside gallery dedicated to sex and death. Getting there is very genteel, however, aboard a luxury catamaran that departs from Hobart’s wharf. 

 

An icy wind whips across the water as we make our way up the Derwent River, reminding me just how close we are to the bottom of the earth – from here, icebreakers such as the Aurora Australis head south for about three weeks to reach the next landfall: Antarctica. 

 

Birds of prey circle overhead as we pass the eerie Pasminco Hobart zinc smelter, which might well have been plucked straight from a Tim Burton movie. When it appears on the horizon, MONA is equally arresting, its rust-and-mirror buildings somewhat akin to a corroded Transformers helmet jutting into the grey sky. The structures come courtesy of Nonda Katsalidis – also behind Melbourne’s Eureka Tower – and sit beside heritage-listed buildings by the late Sir Roy Grounds. But it’s what lies below the earth that has the global art community excited. 

 

Buried in a warren of rooms 17 metres beneath our feet are around 2,210 artworks from the private collection of millionaire David Walsh. Some pieces make you want to smile; others will have you wanting to flee the premises. But that’s the point – Walsh expects visitors to love or hate the collection, and sees no in between. 

 

You could easily lose a day in the subterranean space, daring yourself on to ogle the next arresting installation or painting. But we’re ushered into the adjacent Source restaurant, where tables draped in starched white cloth sit beside floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking a hillside of stringybark and grape vines – MONA is part of Moorilla Estate, also home to a winery, micro-brewery and eight diamond-shaped villas that take inspiration from Australian artists and architects. 

 

The Source chef Philippe Leban’s inspiration is decidedly local when it comes to produce, though his dishes are given French twists in the kitchen – think silky-smooth onion veloute and roasted duck topped with caramelised almonds, turnip and ginger. As I devour the last of my brioche pain perdu with perfumed eggnog, a storm rolls up the river, turning the sky from day to night in a matter of minutes.

 

Back on board Banjo, we roar north along the Tasman Highway, passing towns so small that each is little more than a woolshed and a general store, enveloped by rolling green farmland speckled with cows and sheep. Less than 30 minutes’ drive outside of Hobart we do a lap of Richmond, its early 19th-century buildings clinging to the banks of the Coal River where gaggles of ducks and black swans laze under droopy willow trees. The only thing reminding me that we’re in Tasmania and not the Cotswolds is a sign advertising Cascade Pale Ale. 

 

After Swansea, we take a looping drive along the Freycinet Peninsula, a finger of national park jutting into the Tasman Sea. Gnarled eucalypts trees and fields of button grass line the roadside, the latter rich in tannins that seep into the soil and give the region’s rivers a dark, rusty hue. 

 

Freycinet Lodge sits on the western arm of the peninsula, its aspect making it one of the few spots along Tasmania’s east coast where you can watch the sun set over the water. When we check in, dusk is falling, casting a glow over the pink-granite Hazard Range that frames the property. From the lobby, you can gaze out over the beaches and knuckles of granite studding the Coles Bay coastline, from which local kayaking expeditions set out. On the other side of the isthmus is the much-photographed white-sand crescent of Wineglass Bay, where we are headed tomorrow.

 

Currently being remodelled, the lodge’s 60 log cabins are comfortable but rustic, and I’m unprepared for the extravagance of food and wine that awaits us in the dining room. A small army of staff parades around our fireside table, depositing dishes piled high with lobster, oysters and scallops as well as a tasting plate of venison and kangaroo. It’s fresh and just a little bit festive, and like Tasmania on a plate. 

 

More than a third of Tasmania is protected parkland but for many visitors to the island, Freycinet is their first and only taste of the wilderness. It certainly deserves its reputation: the national park is home to a seemingly endless string of azure inlets with dreamy names like Sleepy Bay and the Friendly Beaches. We begin our hike at Hazards Beach, a windswept stretch of sand that would have stolen my heart if I didn’t know that better was coming. 

 

Wineglass Bay is a 20-minute trek across the isthmus. The cove is so named not for its shape or the boozy encounters it inspires but, rather bleakly, for the fact that back in the 1820s, when the bay was a base for whalers, the water here ran red with blood. It’s hard to reconcile that grim history with the glorious scene that sparkles before us: sand so white, air so clean, water so blue that it’s as if someone took the spectacles off your nose and gave them a good clean for the first time in their life before returning them. Small wonder that it regularly tops lists of the world’s prettiest beaches. And the best bit? We have the entire stretch to ourselves.  

 

The walk back to Coles Bay takes just a couple of hours but within that time we see rain, hail and sunshine. We also spot a pair of wallabies, a yellow-tailed black cockatoo and a flock of green rosellas – less commonly sighted creatures in the park include quolls, fairy penguins and even Tasmanian devils. 

 

The morning’s exercise gives us the perfect excuse for indulging in a post-lunch whisky tasting, a new offering from the Freycinet Lodge team that pays homage to Tasmania’s up-and-coming status on the world whisky map. The industry is still young here – distilling has only been legal on the Apple Isle since 1992 – but the three local single malts we taste are exciting, almost on par with the trio of Scottish drops we sip. The similarities are hardly surprising, given the environmental parallels between the two regions: both have an abundance of fresh air and clean water, fertile fields of barley, abundant peats and bogs. 

 

Of Australia’s two dozen or so distilleries, six are in the Apple Isle (with a seventh on the way) and one, in particular, is making waves overseas: the Nant Distillery sells most of its highland single malt to France. If you can find a bar serving it locally, expect to pay around AU$30 for a 30ml nip. 

 

Strolling along the beach at sunset, I discover another commonality between Tasmania and Scotland: bone-chilling winds. As darkness sets in, I can just make out a smattering of lights in the distance, curving around a slinky silver object not dissimilar to a UFO. It is, in fact, the sweeping roof of the island’s newest and most lauded resort, Saffire Freycinet: a string of 20 timber-panelled suites overlooking the iridescent-blue waters of Great Oyster Bay and the five pink peaks of the Hazards. 

 

After one visit to Tarraleah, when I was 10, I returned to Melbourne with hands stained violet from all the berries I’d picked from the bushes that grew wild on my grandparents’ estate. Arriving at Eureka, I’m pleased to find that the hard work’s been done for me. 

 

Around 90 kilometres north of Freycinet, just outside the town of Falmouth, the Eureka Farm is planted with more than 3,000 fruit trees, from apricots to quince, blackberries to currants. The fruit is turned into ice cream that’s sold on site by the property’s sea-change owners, Ann and Denis Buchanan. 

 

Chickens, ducks and pots of lavender vie for my attention as I’m led into the property’s small café by the promise of homebaked rhubarb-and-ginger cake and warmed apple-and-date slice topped with toasted coconut. The only thing getting me back on Banjo is another promise: freshly shucked oysters. 

 

Just up the road, Anthony Blunt has been farming Pacific oysters at Lease 65 for more years than his leathery hands care to remember; he doesn’t even flinch when we ask him to shuck a dozen or so for our morning tea. The company turns out around 2.4 million every year, after all – what’s another 12? We take away a couple more to see us through a picnic lunch – mounds of cheese, smoked salmon, Tasmanian bubbles and strawberries with that insanely thick clotted cream – that Dan and Smiley prepare on a grassy verge overlooking Binalong Bay, one of many inlets carved into 35-kilometre-long Bay of Fires. 

 

Postcards don’t prepare you for the drama of this stretch of coastline, its deserted powder-white beaches broken only by the pates of massive boulders dusted in orange lichen. The whole setting is a bit like a Fred Williams painting, with little pause between the green fields, impossibly blue water and russet-hued rocks that, at dusk, glow like pink lanterns lining the water. 

 

As we drive inland, the countryside fades from softly undulating dunes covered in banksia and bearded heath into rainforest dotted with Jurassic ferns and then a blanket of pine clinging to cliffs so steep that the trees regularly tumble over like tenpins after heavy rain. The road is mostly deserted save for the odd wallaby, reminding me just how isolated this part of the world really is. 

 

It’s this isolation that gives the island the cleanest air and some of the purest water in the world, which no doubt contributes to the fact that you can grow or harvest virtually anything here: nuts, olives, truffles, caviar, abalone, king crabs, wagyu beef. And much of it, we’ve been told, is on offer at Stillwater restaurant, our dinner destination in Launceston. 

 

At the junction of the North and South Esk rivers, where they become the Tamar, sits Launceston; it’s home to only about 100,000 people, and they all seem to be in bed when we pull in at 6 p.m. The sleepy country-town swagger is amplified by the fact that “Launnie” is located on the verge of Cataract Gorge – within minutes of leaving the CBD you can be standing in the shadow of jagged grey-and-white cliffs criss-crossed with walking trails shaded by old pine, oak and cypress.

 

Our hotel, the Peppers Seaport, is perched on the banks of the North Esk River, a 15-minute walk from Stillwater through a park guarded by yet more stands of pine and oak. The water is lined with old mansions and historic buildings including the restored 1830s Ritchie’s Mill the restaurant calls home. 

 

The menu is modern Australian and is highlighted by dishes described with terms like “grass fed,” “organic” and “local”: Rannoch Farm quail topped with a poached quail egg, stout sabayon and macadamia nuts, perhaps, or an oyster blade of grass-fed wagyu from Robbins Island with a nori omelette, sautéed lettuce and ponzu. 

 

If we were enjoying a long lunch, we could have popped in to the adjacent providore, its shelves stacked high with jars and pots of beetroot marmalade, spiced-pear chutney, lemon-myrtle rub, Tasmanian honey and handmade fudge. But at the dinner table inside Stillwater’s bluestone wine cellar, we end the evening with an abbreviated flight of local liquors before reluctantly stumbling back to Peppers. Where’s Banjo when you need her?

 

The island’s devils got their name, so the story goes, for the blood-curdling screeches they emit, usually in the dead of night and always during storms. But the ones we visit at Tasmania Zoo on our last day are awfully quiet and docile – deceptively so, as the dog-sized carnivores are indeed feisty, having the strongest bite per unit of body mass of any living mammal. 

 

Occupying nearly 365 hectares of private bush, the zoo is a haven for the endangered species, whose population has been on the decline since the discovery of DFTD (Devil Facial Tumour Disease). Operations here began with just six devils, all of them with DFTD, a population that has since grown to a healthy 40. While we watch one little devil tear into the arm of a zookeeper, Dan and Smiley make plans to sponsor two of the animals, ensuring they’ll receive the care they need in the future. 

 

Our Inspiring Journeys tour ends much the same way it started: with an oyster in one hand and a glass of wine in the other. Glancing at my watch as the staff at Josef Chromy Wines pour flutes of Pepik sparkling rosé, I barely flinch at the fact that it’s only 10:30 a.m. 

 

Tasmania’s 250 or so vineyards are gaining something of a reputation for their cool-climate varietals – yes, another thing they grow well – and Josef Chromy is no exception, producing extremely drinkable pinot noir, riesling and chardonnay, among others. I have five glasses lined up in front of me by 11 a.m., as well as a hunk of King Island Dairy blue cheese drizzled with local leatherwood honey. It’s rich and earthy, with just a hint of nectar, and I’m beginning to think it’s the best thing I’ve ever tasted. Well, apart from the berries, and the lobster, and my grandpa’s clotted cream, that is. • 

 

Photography by Natasha Dragun.


TRAVEL TALK

Jetstar flies from Sydney and Melbourne to Hobart; Virgin Australia has services from Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra and Brisbane to Hobart. Qantas also flies from Melbourne to Launceston and the Sydney and Melbourne to Hobart. 

• Jetstar. 131-538; jetstar.com

• Qantas. 131-313; qantas.com

• Virgin Australia. 136-789; virginaustralia.com

 

Inspiring Journeys runs its “Forgotten Coast” tour from January through April/May and October through December to avoid the colder months. 

 

The complete “Forgotten Coast” journey lasts 11 days and begins and ends in Hobart, taking in Freycinet National Park, the Bay of Fires, Launceston, Cradle Mountain National Park, the Tarkine and Strahan, along with several other destinations. While most activities and many meals are included in the program, the itinerary allows for a number of optional activities including boat cruises, guided walks, horse-rides, spa treatments and kayaking tours. 1800-467-747; inspiringjourneys.com 

 

Book “The Forgotten Coast” tour and you’ll be lucky enough to check in to the following hotels: 

• Corinna Wilderness Experience. 61-3/6446-1170; corinna.com.au

• Cradle Mountain Lodge. 61-3/6492-2100; cradlemountainlodge.com.au

• Franklin Manor. 61-3/6471-7311; franklinmanor.com.au

• Freycinet Lodge. 61-3/6257-0101; freycinetlodge.com.au 

• Lenna of Hobart. 61-3/ 6232 3900; lenna.com.au

• Peppers Seaport Hotel. 61-3/6345-3333; peppers.com.au/seaport

 

Talk to Tourism Tasmania for tips on visiting the Apple Isle. discovertasmania.com.au