Things You Need on an Island #3

A Camera ...


Looking East from the original light house keeper's house, towards the two outbuildings. The original is built of limestone, bricks and whatever else was at hand. However it would have been quite a beautiful home once; plastered walls, sash windows, baltic pine ceilings, ornate fireplaces and mantle pieces. The green penny that I found must have spent a century under the floor boards there.


Lugged my swag two and a half kilometres up hill tonight, to sleep in the shelter of the second building. The hill wheels with muttonbirds. There's thousands of them.
The lighthouse optic does not turn, just flashes its warm, yellow incandescent light, the same colour of the rising moon.
flash flash ...
flash flash ...
flash flash ..
Car lights along the beach at Nanarup. The sky is big up here.


Penguin hollows and their tracks, leaving home. I never see them but I hear them cry at dusk and I found two corpses, the irridescent perfection of their wings so precious and gem-like and sad.




Michaelmas Island, named for being 'discovered' on Christmas day. This is where the Menang men were marooned for five or six weeks by the sealers.



A little house at the end of a jetty with no walls, although I'm sure it once did. At night, in the dark, the swell seems to suck in and surge so much further up those rocks, about to engulf me and float me away! In the morning, bleary eyed from communing with dodo-ish muttonbirds, or waking to the distressed-baby calls of fairy penguins, I check out the tide line and it's ten feet below my bed. Just feels close, you know?

I visited the seals every day and rediscovered the phototheraputic value of lying on sun
warmed granite.


An Osprey's Eyrie. I could reach up and touch it. The highest natural point on the island is
a gnarled, stunted peppermint tree


Being alone