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Where’s King Island again? It’s in Bass Strait, the island on the left, a hundred kilometres south of Cape Otway. Shaped a bit like Taiwan but much smaller, it’ll take you just 90 minutes to drive north-south and 30 minutes east-west. Seventeen hundred people live there, about the same number typically waiting at the Genius Bar in an Apple store.
You get to King Island by flying 40 minutes in a 19-seat twin turboprop from Essendon Airport to Currie, the capital. I am away from my wife and kids for a couple of days – the first time in years – which might explain my jaunty manner as I skip off the plane. The car rental lady gives me the keys to ‘‘The Beast’’ – a grey, late '90s manual HiLux – and tells me I can drive on gravel roads, ‘‘but not off-road’’.
Two hours after creeping out of my house in pre-dawn Footscray, I’m doing 100km/h up North Road, King Island, wind in my hair, cutting through grassy dunes and farms, wishing I’d taken a Zyrtec. It’s a warm, high-20s day and my right arm gets burnt hanging out of the window. That day I pass 11 cars, total. I soon realise that it’s practically criminal not to acknowledge the oncoming cars with a lift of the finger, no matter how ridiculous I feel doing it.
Over the roar of the diesel engine I hear the mournful, hollow calls of what surely couldn’t be peacocks? I pull over and see four of them skimming across a vast, windswept meadow, their technicolour trains bouncing behind them, like the Bronte sisters in cumbersome dresses.
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All day I drive around with no radio reception down white gravel roads, bisecting broad farms, more grassy dunes, wind-warped saltbush and tea-tree scrublands, past a green and white weatherboard church with a tiny cross and an abandoned primary school. Farms, fences, cows, flatness. I feel a mix of agoraphobia and euphoria, with an edge of encroaching madness. What psychological qualities must one have to spend any length of time here? Could I cope with not being able to Uber-in Korean chicken? Or buy comfortable underwear? Up north at the Cape Wickham Golf Links car park a gardener tells me there’s no need to lock my car. ‘‘If someone steals something where can they go? We’ll get them at the airport!’’
From Wickham I take a dirt track (off-road?) over to Martha Lavinia beach. Google ‘‘King Island surf’’ and you will see photos taken here of perfect A-frame peaks , but today there is barely a ripple. I am unnervingly alone on this stunning white stretch. I feel like that guy at the end of the original Planet of the Apes, expecting to see the Melbourne Star Ferris wheel sticking out of the sand. What the heck, time for a skinny dip! But as I’m wading out I see an old guy getting his rod and tackle out the back of a ute up on the dunes, so I bob down behind a rock.
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An hour later I have backtracked down to Currie (there’s no ring road) and am on the road to pretty Naracoopa on the east coast, crunching through the gears, under what seems like the island’s only eucalyptus forest. It’s a relief to see something taller than a heifer. I turn down a track expecting a temperate rainforest picnic spot with ferns, like you get in the Otways, but I’m slapped in the face with the sight and stench of the King Island tip.
Back in Currie I catch up with my old mate Duncan (recent mayor, rainwater farmer and erstwhile tuba player) for crayfish and booze. It’s way past my bedtime when he suggests we take his 4WD down to his block 20 minutes south of the capital. Wallabies scatter like cockroaches as our high beam ploughs up and down and around saltbush-walled tracks. When we get out we hear the hiss of a puncture; a branch has stabbed one of his $400 tyres. We let it deflate while we stand on an absurdly windy hilltop and drink cheap whisky.
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In the cloudless, pitch-black night we try to visualise the monstrous waves we can hear punching the west-coast rocks half a kilometre away. A feeble glow from Currie and a solitary red light from a wind turbine are the only clues we are not in some inter-dimensional void. But in an instant a gap opens in the clouds and the Milky Way is so bright, so truly awesome and radiant, I believe it might cast a shadow.
After changing the tyre, and with my road trip now including the obligatory puncture story, we head back, filthy and tired. When a wallaby bounds out just as we round a corner, the car’s superb air suspension barely registers the impact (the next day we spot the motionless animal by the side of the road, as if waiting for a bus).
Heading back down the gravel roads to the southern tip of King Island, the car throws up white cumulonimbi of dust into the blue sky. We pass a solitary, uniformed policeman walking awkwardly down an ugly swathe of ripped-out bush that is now apparently a road. He removes one of his earbuds and tells us he is just out for some exercise. He stumbles over the destruction and miniaturises in the rearview mirror, looking like the sole survivor of a plane crash.
At Seal Rocks, a viewing platform offers spectacular views of the Southern Ocean and clouds in continual time lapse. The next landfall west is Argentina. No one here is kite surfing or getting aggro over parking spots or jumping off coaches to take pouty selfies. Just isolation, wind in the face and big, gaping nature. It’s the best kind of mad, euphoric agoraphobia I’ve felt in years.
Oslo Davis travelled as a guest of King Island Tourism.
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