Hiking a wondrous, isolated Aussie island where dreams lived and died

You can see it in the portraits hanging on the dining room wall of a restored heritage house on remote Maria Island.

Dark-eyed Diego Bernacchi is the doomed optimist consumed by a fantastical vision to transform this forsaken place of exile into an empire on the east coast of Tasmania.

His petite Belgian bride, Barbe, wears an expression of weary forbearance stranded at the edge of the world, wondering how it will all end.

We know now how it ends. The mulberry trees fail, the grapes wither on the vine, the cement works crumble away, but it’s thanks to Bernacchi’s legendary enterprise in the late 1800s that we have a roof over our heads tonight.

For the last two nights we’ve slept rough in camp beds – well, rough-ish – zipped into safari tents in meadows of shady bracken. Taking bush showers in the open air at the soft-edge of nature and enjoying three courses paired with Tasmanian wines is, in fact, as close as we’ve come to roughing it with Wild Bush Luxury on the Maria Island Walk.

We are six strangers seeking the contradictory gifts of solitude and companionship on this hike. We’ve settled back into civilisation at Bernacchi’s house in Darlington, on the north-western tip of the island, having covered about 40 kilometres over four days.

Our guides have outdone themselves again, conjuring the last supper of blue-eyed trevalla with roasted garlic and watercress mash, recounting details of the newly recovered 19th-century oil paintings hanging on the wall.

The portraits were returned by Diego’s descendant Clare Bernacchi, who made her pilgrimage to Maria Island for the first time last year. Her cherished family heirlooms are now on permanent loan here.

“My children thought they were kind of creepy because their eyes follow you around the room,” she tells me from Auckland later. “That trip, bringing them to the island, was one of the most incredible things I’ve done in my entire life: I mean, who gets to stay in the house that their great-great-grandparents built and lived in?”

Clare Bernacchi came to Darlington by boat on a short sea voyage from the fishing village of Triabunna (an hour’s drive north-east of Hobart). We take the same passage, pressed close to the weather, watching scrubby dolerite peaks rising from the grey-green swell of the Tasman Sea.

Our barefoot landing at Riedle Bay on day one leads southward. It’s afternoon as we reach Haunted Bay to navigate a steep descent onto pink granite boulders daubed with vivid orange lichen. Water gleams like sapphires, and time stretches away to the distant Tasman Peninsula.

By twilight, we have found comfort in a candlelit dinner, in the coastal scrub at Casuarina Beach camp. Netted canvas sides are rolled up to let in the sound of breaking waves, and I’m already wondering how the guides double as bush chefs preparing saffron risotto with Tasmanian scallops and fresh asparagus after leading us so energetically along this jagged coastline for most of the day.

Morning is leisurely but soon brings forth the red-brick remnants of a convict probation station at Point Lesueur and then, Bloodstone Point, cliffs glowing like embers at water’s edge.

On our third day, we’re weaving towards Darlington, passing the century-old quarry and the Painted Cliffs, swirled like caramel ice-cream rimmed by beaches pale as ash. Pademelons skitter through forests of blue gum dark against the sky and Cape Barren geese graze in abundance nearing the Darlington settlement, founded in 1825 before being abandoned, then revived for another failed convict experiment in 1842.

Diego Bernacchi became a family afterthought after he died in Melbourne in 1925. Attention was focused on his son, Louis, a pioneering polar scientist with Scott’s Discovery Expedition to Antarctica (1901-04), yet Diego remains an enduring presence on Maria Island.

“After seeing how beautiful the island is, you think: Oh my gosh, why would you not want to live there?” Clare says. She’s right. It’s an incredible place. The isolation of this far-flung outpost is now an exploitable natural resource all on its own.

“I can understand why my ancestor tried for the vast majority of his adult life to make industry work on Maria Island.”

Our final day’s climb to a peak they call Bishop and Clerk perhaps reveals most about Bernacchi’s persistence, into his 70s, with schemes most reasonable men would have abandoned sooner. At the top, the view spreads over the sea to the Freycinet Peninsula and the endless horizon beyond.

If Bernacchi ever made it this high, then surely it was from here that he saw the potential of a wondrous place where dreams are not only possible, but inevitable.

THE DETAILS

The four-day walk is available October-April for $3350 a person twin-share ($5850 single occupancy). The guided journey includes accommodation, meals with beverages, return transfers from Hobart and optional loan of essential equipment such as 50-litre backpacks. Pack-free options are available. See mariaislandwalk.com

The writer was a guest of Maria Island Walk.