Seal Bay - sea lions
Cape Jervis was chilly, about 14 degrees and blowing hard when we checked in. The short, stout woman behind the counter laughed at the weather and said not to worry, the information centre on Kangaroo Island sold jackets. Her eyes, magnified behind glasses, suggested staff at the info centre were used to dealing with idiots.
In the morning we discovered the ferry had been postponed by two hours. The Sealink reception girls said a message had been left but it became clear one hadn’t. At the counter I spilled coffee all over the floor, unseen, not on purpose, the lid was faulty, but it seemed a fair trade when we walked out. Someone would need to clean that coffee up. It made me feel better.
Two hours were spent driving and stopping in Yankalilla, a small beach side town. It was cold despite the sun, busy despite the size. We bought organic vegetables for three nights, ate at a bakery, spent time in a second hand bookstore without buying anything then drove back to Cape Jervis.
The 13 kilometre trip to Kangaroo Island takes 45 minutes aboard the Sealink ferry, a huge boat capable of carrying cars, buses, trucks and houses. The journey across the Backstairs Passage was up and down, choppy. We sat inside the cabin, clad in jumpers, watching the island draw nearer. Despite the chill, air conditioners chugged away. Passengers were cold.
Although there were threats of nausea Kristine exhibited no such malady. Having never been sea sick, the condition rates as mystifying, but witnessing friends and family suffer badly makes me a believer.
Kangaroo Island is Australia’s third largest island behind Tasmania and Melville Island. About 157 kilometres long, it is 57 kilometres wide at its fattest point. Indigenous Australians named the island Karta, Island of the Dead. There hasn’t been an Aboriginal population on the island for thousands of years, though their middens are still found and studied. There might be other reasons for the Aboriginal name. Almost 30 percent of the people living on Kangaroo Island are aged 55 or over, and the ratio is growing each year.
Despite the proximity of the mainland, Kangaroo Island became South Australia’s first European settlement in 1836. Decades later the settlement was regarded as failure. The island wasn’t abandoned, but the settlers didn’t enjoy much prosperity. There isn’t much rainfall. The island is cold and windy, with ferocious bays and natural rocky reefs. Dozens of boats sunk in bad weather on the south coast, hundreds of lives lost. Though the trees, mainly scrub, were easy to clear, building material was scarce. Livestock prospered but the humans didn’t. Shipping supplies to the island was expensive and troublesome.
Today, the island has a static population of about four thousand people. There are limited employment opportunities, not unless one invests in farming, honey or tourism, and the island seems about full in regards to those industries.
Don’t be fooled by history, though. Setting foot on Kangaroo Island is beautiful and dangerous. Thinking it is just another island is folly, because the beauty is compelling, which is apparent before getting off the ferry. Kangaroo Island, though, could be so much more, and man’s impact could’ve been so much less obvious.
Human evolution ensured roads were made, land cleared for farming, animals introduced and natural resources consumed. Kangaroo Island is home to magnificent animals far beyond the obvious kangaroos and wallabies. Man, as he does everywhere he goes, did the best he could to drive those animals to oblivion.
An unofficial sealing colony hunted sea lions and fur seals relentlessly. It took 34 years, from 1802 to 1836, for mankind to render extinct the Kangaroo Island Emu, a squat version of Australia’s mainland emu. The bird exists only in drawings. No one alive has seen one. In an unforgiving climate, when the sealers wanted food other than seal meat, the emu was easy fodder, bigger than chicken, just as tasty and gone rapidly. The bird was also burned to death when the settlers lit fires to clear land for livestock.
Kangaroos, too, were almost completely wiped out in the mid 1800s.
Of course, the early settlers wouldn’t have been doing their wrecking properly if they didn’t wipe out everything that was easy to kill. By 1937, a once thriving colony of fur seals, about 30,000, had been absent for 40 years, feared extinct. Fortunately they weren’t, but it was close. There was no reported breeding of fur seals on Kangaroo Island until the 1980s, almost fifty years after they were feared wiped out. Fishers were still shooting seals for shark bait in the 1950s.
The settlers took plenty of humpbacks and right whales, processing the meat and blubber at Point Tinline. Those magnificent whales remained unseen in the cool waters off Kangaroo Island for about fifty years, finally making their reappearance along with the fur seals in the 1980s.
Man’s influence on the island, killing everything that moves, didn’t end by harpoon or bullet. Introduced species, pigs, goats and cats run feral, just as they do on the mainland. There is, officially at least, an absence of wild dogs, foxes and rabbits. That seems a fluke, though legend has it a few locals have gathered the occasional dead rabbit on the mainland and dropped it on the side of an island road. Whenever it happens, the incident is investigated by Parks South Australia…
In the past few years, goats were caught and fitted with a GPS collar then set free. Hunters crouched in helicopters tracked the goats to the herd and slaughtered them, death from above. Locals will tell you the goats have been wiped out.
As I drove the car off the Sealink ferry, a man held a Labrador on a short lead, perhaps a sniffer dog inspecting cars, checking for anything that smelled odd, like an animal that could disrupt the balance of nature long altered by man’s influence on an island that might’ve, at the birth of the nation, been one of the greatest segregated pieces of land in the world.
Today, Kangaroo Island is less than it could be, but it is so much more than I thought it would be. Passes to the national parks and black fleece lined jackets to kill the chill were bought at the information. The centre sells more $70 jackets than any other piece of memorabilia. Most tourists are silly, as we were, and turn up to the island expecting warmer weather.
Kangaroo Island is extraordinary. If you’ve never seen it, you should. We were there three nights. That first night I couldn’t resist an attempt at humour, a text message sent in hope due to dodgy reception, about what we’d encountered.
Hey, how you doing? We are on Kangaroo Island – the first night of three. We have seen lots of kangaroos. In all their splattered glory. It’s a reminder. Be careful or be road kill… The weather is typical for the island. I’m glad we bought singlets and shorts. Might get to wear them when we get back to Brisbane. It’s freezing and windy. Went fishing today. The water was too cold for fish. Kristine did well to hold the surf rod. The house we are staying in is rustic. Or rusty, depending on your perspective. Sandy too. And isolated. Can’t see the neighbour’s house though it is about five metres away and not really a house. The tv works but doesn’t pick up any channels. It is for decoration only, which adds to the rusty charm. Tomorrow we are going to look at some rocks, some sand and a few fur seals. Then some more rocks and sand. Hope you’re warm and you don’t need to catch fish for dinner like we do. We are hungry.
Rocks, sand and seals… In simplicity, and if one is honest, those three words sum up much of Kangaroo Island, which shouldn’t surprise people who have been there. The grandeur of those rocks, sand and seals is what separates Kangaroo Island from the rest of Australia, if only for the time a tourist remains on the island.
A few people misinterpreted my text message. From the jetty near Vivonne Bay we fished in the afternoon. Only lucky and skilled people catch fish, we were neither. In anticipation of failure, flathead fillets had been purchased.
The house at Vivonne Bay is beautiful, fully furnished, linen supplied, cookware too. A split system air conditioner supplied the heat, the pot belly stove could only be used during the winter months due to the lack of rain in spring and summer. Our first day on the island was 14 degrees and it didn’t get much warmer.
The only disappointing thing about the house was the complete lack of coffee. On Thursday morning, out of bed early to make the second seal bay tour at 9:30am, we went without a brew. I was angry. Kristine swore. It was hours before we had a cup.
About 180 thousand people visit Kangaroo Island each year. It’s safe to say each tourist spends an hour at Seal Bay. Our small group of six contained two women from America and a couple from outback South Australia. The tour group before us were all Italian, the guide fluent in Italian and English. When our tour finished the next group consisted of Europeans and Asians.
People pay more money to look at seals than hunters ever received for killing them. Mankind can learn, even if it’s a slow process often taking a century.
There is no need to remind anyone it was cold and windy, about 13 degrees. Our new jackets were zipped up when Toni, the tour guide, took the group along the boardwalk. It didn’t take long before the first seals, a mum and pup, greeted us with sleepy indifference high above the beach in the sand dunes.
‘They come up this far to get out of the wind,’ Toni said. Beyond the beach, the ocean hammered the coast, breakers far off shore, dangerous to put a toe in the water, the sound of waves military.
Toni said not to make loud noises or approach the seals. If one made an approach, get out of its way, and never go near the pups or you might get killed by the females. We laughed. Toni didn’t, but suggested they might bite.
As the boardwalk opened up to the beach, seals were everywhere, hundreds of them. We were about to get close. Most of the seals were sleeping, mums and pups alone or in scattered groups huddled together for warmth. The idle appearance, though, was a ruse. There was activity everywhere, some seals sitting up high, chest out, chin in the air, pups barking for their mums, who were far off shore.
Bulls bandied about, frisky as mating season approached, arguing with other bulls for territory. A pup emerged from the dunes beside us, howling for mum, rolling sideways down the sand then righting itself, sliding belly-first to a group of seals.
Toni, portly in heavy clobber and older than her name suggests, taught us about seals. The females are constantly pregnant, feeding one pup and growing another at the same time. They give birth then two weeks later they’re pregnant again. The cows will protect another pup but will not feed it. If the pup starves to death, the cows don’t care.
Their 18 month gestation period is the longest for any mammal that gives birth on land, which ensures the population is endangered. Scientists estimate a four percent annual decline in numbers.
‘If it keeps going the seals could be gone by 2030,’ Toni said. ‘Last year there were a lot of still born seals and we’re not sure why.’
Most people, myself included, thought seals ate fish and penguins, but the sea lions living on Kangaroo Island mostly eat squid and molluscs, along with small fish. They’re bottom feeders, so pollution and fishing equipment is a real problem.
Seals get nets, fishing line and plastic bags stuck around their necks. As the seal grows, their foreign necklace cuts into flesh, which is often fatal due to infection or starvation. Scientists along with the tour guides will treat a seal wrapped in pollution, a dangerous exercise which involves isolating the seal while others use t-shaped prongs to ward off cows intent on protection. The unfortunate seal can’t be sedated, it has to be subdued, held down tight while the crap is cut off.
‘If a seal comes ashore with rubbish around its neck we’ll help it,’ Toni said. ‘We don’t interfere if a seal turns up with a shark bite.’
The pup that rolled from the dunes called out for mum, a hungry, repeated howl ignored by all other seals. Hair seals, bulls and cows, go to sea for three days to feed then spend the next three days on shore resting and digesting. After three days alone the pups are ravenous and will wander the beach searching for mum, howling, hustling up to any female who emerges from the water, hoping it is mum.
Most seals look the same. When cow emerges from the water, she can’t tell her pup from another by eyesight, so they touch noses and smell each other. If the stink is right, the pup gets fed. If it isn’t, the pup waits longer.
A mother emerged from the ocean. The pup who provided humour by rolling sideways from the dunes sped to her side and began suckling metres above the water line. The mother, exhausted from three days at sea, didn’t move as waves lapped at her flippers.
Often the mums don’t come back. There is a natural rocky reef at Seal Bay about five hundred metres off shore, where the breakers start. The six metre great whites don’t swim inside the reef, but the seals, during those three days at sea, go far beyond the reef to feed, where they’re vulnerable.
Six metre great white sharks don’t fill up on fish, they’re too slow and cumbersome to be bothered by mullet. Seals, with their high fat content, provide the best food. The old or inexperienced seals become shark food. Back on shore, the pups howl for their dead mums until they die.
‘It’s the six metre great whites that determine the seal’s retirement date,’ Toni said.
When a shark kills a cow, three seals die, the mum, the pup waiting on shore and the unborn calf. Sharks, by nature, are cruel. The scientists don’t interfere if a pup is abandoned because her mother is killed by a shark. There is no hand feeding. The males, of course, exhibit no paternal instincts.
A bull seal emerged from the water after three days at sea, shook himself free from excess water and chased a bevy of seagulls sitting idle on the sand, just like a dog chases seagulls. It was hilarious.
Two bulls argued for territory, a rather lacklustre affair, more posturing than attack. Seals observe hierarchy, elders are submitted too, and the vanquished bull fled into the water to get away, looking over his shoulder as he went.
Nationally there are about 15,000 sea lions. The population used to thrive at numbers above 50,000. Now they’re classed as endangered. There are several bays on Kangaroo Island where the seals congregate. Two are closed to visitors, to give the seals peace.
When the tour was over, we walked the boardwalk, the wind howling madly, a constant battering, looking down on a whale skeleton, a juvenile humpback which crossed the natural reef in the 80s and couldn’t get out. After it died on the beach the carcass was dragged into the dunes where it was left to rot. Kristine said it looked like steel.
It is probably the most photographed whale, or what once was, in Australia.
At the Rustic Blue café the coffee was disappointing, a Mexican blend made in a plunger ensuring plenty of sediment, which is great in home brewed beer but otherwise avoided in coffee.
The proprietor of the Rustic Blue, Smiley, is an artist. His real name is Davy Smillie, hence the nickname. The café was long a shearing shed until Smiley and his wife renovated it years ago, a great job. Where once it held sheep and fleece, it is filled with art and memorabilia. Smiley is a renowned air brush artist who also paints abstract. His photography has won awards. Silver jewellery he makes for men is on display in the Rustic Blue.
Before our coffee arrived he gave us a copy of his book to look at. We flicked through the pages, seeing the shearing shed conversion, marvelling at his work and photographs. Kangaroos lounged nearby, some hand reared by Smiley. He told us to go fishing at Hansen’s Bay, then offered his pots so we could catch some fresh water marron, otherwise known as yabbies.
His service was extraordinary, and all we’d bought was a nine dollar pot of coffee.
At a storage shed which doubles as an art studio, he gave us the pots, explained how to use them and the creek to drop them in. ‘If the café is closed when you’re done just drop them over the fence,’ he said.
We went to Hansen’s Bay, which, like all bays on the south side of the island, was rocky, dangerous and windswept. In the small bay a medium sized fishing boat lurched in the swell. A four wheel drive hitched to a boat trailer sat idle on the beach. Somehow the skipper had guided the fishing boat through the reef, into Hansen’s Bay. Two men in the four wheel drive waited while another delivered a barrel of diesel to the stricken vessel in a tinny.
While walking to the point, an old man came running up behind us. Figuring he wanted to talk, I stopped. He smiled and raised his eyebrows in mock surprise.
‘I’m just running,’ he said.
‘What happened to the boat,’ I asked.
‘Got low on diesel,’ the old man said, running by.
‘How did they get the boat through the reef,’ I asked.
‘Luck,’ the old man said. ‘I’m running up to the point to watch them get out.’ He smiled, as though it wasn’t a sure thing, and if the boat was to sink, he wanted to see it.
Kristine and I watched, fascinated as the boat motored steadily into the breakers, a man in an orange coat standing astern, guiding the skipper. When the breakers got too rough, the navigator slipped inside the cabin. The old man stood on the point, watching the boat get hammered by waves as it found gaps through the reef.
Not long after it was out to sea, out of sight.
The soft sand walk to the point took about five minutes. Smiley said there was a gutter on the opposite side where people regularly caught salmon. Looking down from the point, I found the gutter, another five minutes on. Gazing at the water, I figured the conditions would need to be calm to catch fish. The breakers hit the reef offshore, causing turmoil into the gutter, a strong current. It’d take a big cast to get into the gutter, which meant good quality fishing gear, something we didn’t have.
Walking back to the car, the four wheel drive was still on the beach, the tinny loaded and locked. The empty diesel barrel floated slowly to shore. When it made sand it was gathered and the men drove off.
The operation to deliver fuel seemed professional, as though it’d been done before. While it was fine navigation to get the fishing boat through the reef, it was poor skippering to run low on fuel.
At Kelly Hill caves we went underground into limestone caverns, gawking at the shapes and stalactites. The atmosphere was cool, 16 degrees perpetually, no matter what happened on the surface. The caves were discovered by tragedy, named after a mare called Kelly who plunged to death through a natural opening not long after the island was settled and was never found.
Naming the caves after a horse seemed quirky, making her story interesting. The caves were interesting too, the kooky guide less so. He took us into the chambers, described how the caves were formed and provided other rudiments, then looked at the group and asked if we had any questions. The tour was five minutes old. People from across the world looked at each other.
Our guide was about 30, an odd red beard decorating an uninteresting face. His voice had a high pitch. Having completed thousands of tours, the caves probably bored him, but it didn’t mean he should bore the tourists. Questions were asked, which brightened his attitude, ensuring answers about the depth and length of the caves. If a passage could be found or excavated, he said the caves would lead to the ocean.
‘In the old days the explorers went as far as how many candles they could carry,’ he said. The caves are now illuminated by electricity, lights turned on in each different section. To find a path to the ocean would require much work, about eight kilometres of tunnelling, and no one had found a natural passage yet.
Across the centuries thousands of animals had fallen into the caves and never gotten out. Scientists have studied the bones. Our guide described finding the skull of an ancient giant macropod, a big kangaroo thought to be ten thousand years old, in a bevy of soft sand.
‘The macropod is thought to become extinct 30,000 years ago,’ the guide said. ‘They might have to rewrite history.’
There was no evidence of aboriginal occupation or use of the caves. No one had ever found human remains. Though other caves on the island are wet caves, holding fresh water in places, the Kelly caves are dry. He suggested it took about 40 years for a droplet of water to penetrate the limestone.
That’s dry, as our guide was.
In the afternoon we went to Flinders Chase National Park to look at more rocks and seals. Admirals Arch was breathtaking, so beautiful it attracts thousands of fur seals, a different breed, bigger and darker to the sea lions at Seal Bay. Dozens of tourists took pictures of the famous arch and lazy seals. We toured the park, almost running over a goanna eking out warmth from the asphalt. Kristine took a photo as it scurried away.
At Remarkable Rocks we stood in awe, walked around them, took pictures, touched the rocks and huddled in small caves away from the wind. Signs warned tourists from getting too close to the edge, a sheer drop to death. In 2003, two people drowned trying to save a dense German tourist who ignored the signs and slipped into the water. The 22-year old German lived, ironic considering his idiocy claimed two lives.
A fishing boat gathered the bodies and took them to Vivonne Bay, near where Kristine and I were staying. A statement from the South Australia Police said a man was injured when he got into difficulty.
‘Two others assisted the injured man. The two men who went to the injured man’s aid were washed into the sea. Both came into difficulties and drowned,’ the statement read.
Sergeant Bob Pain, then officer in charge of Kangaroo Island police, said the deaths were tragic. ‘Kangaroo Island coasts are treacherous. The signs are there and they are there to be obeyed.’
Janet Wickham, who worked for a local tour company said the incident was shocking. ‘If you heed the directions of the tour guide then the Rocks are not unsafe. You know the Rocks and the areas that you should restrict yourself to.’
Standing at Remarkable Rocks, it seemed remarkable that someone went beyond the edge, beyond the warning signs. Looking down on the ocean was captivating but it wasn’t alluring. The waves pounded the coast, the spray reaching far up the cliff. It is likely the men who went to save the German were knocked unconscious against the rocks, such is the savagery of the sea.
Then they drowned.
Earlier this year, in April, two Indian tourists drowned at Point Ellen on Vivonne Bay while having their photo taken. With their backs to the ocean, a freak wave said to be six metres high knocked them down and sucked them into the water. Not long after they were dead.
It’s a foreboding coastline on Kangaroo Island. The waves are big and quick, the undercurrent strong and vast. The south side of the island is nowhere people want to swim. I didn’t want to put my toe in the ferocious water.
On Friday we climbed Little Sahara, a shifting series of sand dunes. Kristine tried sand surfing on cardboard. It didn’t work. She shifted about a metre and wound up with sand in her pants. In the afternoon we set the marron traps where Smiley suggested then wasted bait at Hansen’s Bay. The gutter he’d described was there, but conditions were too rough, the fishing gear too fragile. I couldn’t cast beyond the breakers without the line snapping. When I went low, occasionally on a fluke, the line was set in the gutter until the breakers dragged it to shore.
Desperate for Kristine to catch a fish, I stubbornly refused to leave until our bait was gone. We both got bites, but the line was generally slack because of the current, and nothing hooked.
A seal provided humour, popping up about five metres offshore, observing us then putting on a show, diving, twisting and dashing through the water before slinking away, fishing with more success than we did. When the bait expired, we left. Later that night we ate whiting fillets for dinner, bothered by the small bones.
They would’ve been easier to deal with if we’d caught the fillets.
