Coast Australia (2013) s01e04 Episode Script
Tasmania
Coast is on its biggest expedition ever.
I've arrived in Australia.
It feels like this ancient land has been there done that and still has loads of energy for more.
Around every corner, every bay you go into there's something more spectacular, more fascinating, more immense.
But the true marvel of the coast is its power to inspire the imagination, the endless possibilities it holds for those who know it, love it, and return again and again to rediscover it.
Australia's only island state, Tasmania, is defined by its coastline.
Separated from the mainland to the north by the formidable Bass Strait, to the east by the Tasman Sea, and rolling in uninterrupted all the way from Antarctica, the chilling vastness of the Great Southern Ocean.
Three Western empires put this island on the map.
Dutchman Abel Tasman was the first European to step ashore in 1642.
Then came the French surveyors who made several expeditions here, but, of course, it was the British who claimed it, settling here in 1803.
We've come here to explore how Tasmania's geographic isolation has steered its history and shaped the people along its south-eastern shores.
Brendan Moar journeys to remote rugged Tasman Island to understand the dramatic grip of lighthouse life on our coastal culture.
This would have to be one of the most beautiful places I think I've ever seen But you can feel the isolation.
Marine ecologist, Dr Emma Johnston dives into the battle between alien sea urchins and giant rock lobsters.
Oi! Palaeontologist, Professor Tim Flannery, reveals Hobart's crucial role in Antarctic exploration.
In the footsteps of Scott and Amundsen and Mawson.
They were tiny, weren't they? Anthropologist, Dr Xanthe Mallett is grateful that fashion changes.
Oh, I do not fancy wearing this! And I discover the enormous effort to restore a grand dame of the sea.
This is definitely in the once-in-a-lifetime category of opportunities.
This is Coast Australia.
On this journey, we explore a coastline that starts at Wineglass Bay, on the Freycinet Peninsula, continues on to Port Arthur, into Hobart, and crosses over to Bruny Island in the south.
The majesty of this coastal landscape and its flora and fauna cannot fail to inspire.
but its natural beauty belies a dark past.
From the European perspective, this island outpost was, from the outset, the realm of hard men.
Given how perfect it looks today, it's hard to imagine the scene down there when the whaling industry was at its height.
But when that bay was completely full of whales' blood lapping against that perfectly circular rim, it was said to resemble a wine glass full of claret.
As if coloured by such a past, the rare pink granite, characteristic of the region, forms nearly 40km of pristine coastline.
As we head south, the rock changes colour, but not the history.
I'm heading to Port Arthur on the Tasman Peninsula, the showpiece of Australia's convict past.
In Britain, the initial fear of transportation was waning, so the British government had to up its game.
What was needed was a new penal colony.
A place who's very name would inspire fear and dread in all who heard it.
The new Governor, George Arthur, was tasked with creating a sophisticated new penal system designed to become the ultimate deterrent for the Empire's most wayward malcontents.
What he createdwas this.
From small beginnings as a convict timber-camp in 1830 Port Arthur's settlement expanded into new industries of both hard and light labour, and new methods of punishment to replace the bloody practice of flogging.
By the time the last convict left in 1877, around 7,000 men had served time here.
At Port Arthur, the creed was simple To grind rogues into honest men.
Now, it sounds unpleasant, and I'm sure it was.
What I want to understand, though, is just how successful they were at the business of reform through punishment.
I'm meeting colonial historian, Dr Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, who has spent years studying this place, and the people who worked their way through it.
Hamish, I have to say, on a day like today, this place looks beautiful.
It's hard to imagine it as a place of suffering, punishment.
It's gorgeous, isn't it? One of the interesting things is that the convicts that were here, at least some of them, said exactly the same thing.
So they wrote in memoires about the strangeness of being a prisoner in a penal station, the worst sinkhole in the British Empire, in a location that was so beautiful.
And what kind of prisoners ended up in this colony? Secondary offenders, largely, so these are people who had committed an offence in the colony, but not serious offences.
So you did anything really bad you got topped.
The largest single group of people who came here were absconders, so convicts who ran away from other locations and also, really interestingly, some people who commit crimes that are so spectacular in the British Isles that they're singled out for special punishment.
So who are these spectaculars? Well, if you threw a stone at George III, for example, that might get you here.
That goes in the box marked "asking for trouble.
" Hamish is taking me into the penitentiary building, in which 484 desperate lives were once cramped.
How have you gone about, you know, understanding this place? You know, how do you make sense of so much human misery? Well, I think that's a really, really important question because all we've got here is walls, but one of the fascinating things about this site is the records for this place are just insane.
You can actually track individuals through this place? We know the colour of their eyes.
'Hamish has brought with him the very detailed records 'of Scotsman William Irving, a 40-year-old fabric printer, 'convicted for assault and sentenced to 21 years in the colonies.
' Complexion, head, hair, whiskers.
How many people are recorded like thisto this level of detail? 72,000.
72,000? 72,000 prisoners.
And you've got this level of detail down to the colour of their whiskers and whatever? Some of them we know species of the worm that infested their gut.
Of those 72,000 lives preserved in Tasmania's convict records, almost 10% spent time in these grounds.
In 1850, a new building was opened at Port Arthur, modelled on the panopticon design developed in Britain and America.
Where once flogging was the ultimate penalty for unruly convicts, isolation was the new weapon.
Having being transported to Tasmania, how does William Irving end up in the complex of buildings at Port Arthur? It's a really sad story, see, he almost gets his freedom, but he can't get work and he ends up as a pauper/invalid.
And one of the places that pauper/invalids were sent was Port Arthur.
And he's in the invalids establishment where he's done for being absent without leave and he goes into this building.
And this building here is Well, you were in a panopticon, so an all-seeing prison.
And this point here is you know the heart of the panopticon, it's where the warden sat and he can see down every corridor.
All of these cells are just single occupancy? Yes.
This is a claustrophobic space, isn't it? This is where a convict spent their time during the day, but if they had to go outside at all, they had to wear one of these.
Why do you put that on? So if they did happen to be seen by another prisoner, the other prisoner couldn't recognize them.
So, no name, no face? Just a number.
Gosh.
This only half of it.
When William Irving is in this building, he again messes up and he transitions into yet one more level below this.
Oh, this is the heart of darkness in here.
It's a full-blown solitary confinement cell.
And it would have been dark? It would have been pitch-dark, and you've got four doors in this one between you and the outside world.
So, meter thick walls.
So it's sensory deprivation.
Absolutely.
I'm struck by how strong the desire to escape this place would have been.
But beyond the mental torture, the natural, physical boundaries have created a formidable challenge for the daring.
The only escape by land was 20km north, across the 30m wide neck called Eaglehawk.
But even here, there was an even more fearsome, and hungry, line of defence.
I've come here to meet Port Arthur archaeologist, Dr Jodie Steele, to discover what the chances were of surviving a desperate attempt at freedom.
Who's your ferocious friend? He's part of the line of defence that protected the gateway to the penal peninsula.
Um, but he didn't act alone.
I've bought a little postcard from our collection for you to have a look at.
Oh, that's great, isn't it? It is.
A team of between 11 and 18 dogs, lined up between here all the way across this isthmus out into the bay.
If you wanted to make a break for it, pretty much the ocean was your best bet but that meant swimming.
But for all that, I presume men were trying to get out.
There were a lot of people attempting it, but usually they wouldn't make it very far.
Everything about it is just a challenge for the convict, isn't it? Oh, it would have been, and they were constantly wearing leg irons in the chain gang, and I've brought a pair to show you.
So anyone who's out in the in the environment, in the landscape has got their legs shackled? They were, yep.
They were usually in gangs and they would have been wearing these heavy irons.
And these are, these are the real deal? These aren't replicas? They are the real deal.
And you can see they're slightly burrowed, in an oval shape, so they've had a fair amount of damage done to them to try and get them off.
Right so that's Someone has sat on a beach somewhere and just thumped away at them with a rock or whatever.
Most likely a rock or whatever they could get their hands on.
What about William Irving that I've been hearing about? At Port Arthur he just seems to disappear.
A number of things could've happened to him.
Um, you can assume that he got out, made it to the mainland, um, might have changed his name and then lived happily ever after.
But, unfortunately, not many of them did.
We have records of the absconders ending up in the bush.
Several decades later people finding them still with their leg irons on, nothing but a skeleton.
And I suppose any one of those could have been William Irving.
Any of them could have been.
Old stories are aplenty here.
Born of a daunting coastline, and living in the minds of those who watched over the ebb and flow of history's seafarers.
Brendan Moar wants to know why at this very forbidding tip of Tasmania the memory of it all is worth preserving.
In Australia today, all lighthouses are automated, but they remain as beacons of a bygone era, much-loved and cared for by small armies of devoted volunteers.
I'm on a mission to find out why lighthouses occupy such a romantic and dramatic place in our coastal culture.
But before I can board my ride out, I've got to scrub down! I'm joining a working bee at the legendary Tasman Island Lighthouse.
It stands in a particularly pristine environmental which means no bugs or weeds from the mainland.
Tasman Island.
.
off the rugged south-eastern tip of the Tasman Peninsula, topped by that familiar sentinel of maritime safety.
Oh, my God! This is a rare privilege.
I'm joining a very dedicated group of volunteers who come here three times a year to maintain the Tasman Lighthouse and surrounding buildings.
If anyone can explain the fascination with lighthouses, these guys can.
Good morning.
Good morning.
Hope your boots are clean! They are very clean.
You must be Carol.
I am.
Welcome.
Welcome to the island.
Great to meet you.
The Tasman Island lighthouse was opened in 1906.
It was de-manned in 1977, and has run on automated solar power ever since.
The homes too have stood empty since then.
But why do the memories remain strong? Carol Jackson spent her childhood here.
For a lighthouse kid it's different to being a keeper or a keeper's wife.
As kids, Mum used to always say to us that, you know, we grew up with too much wind in our heads.
So you have this freedom, you have an independence, you have a resilience.
You had to make do.
You had to make your own fun.
We didn't have TV.
There were no shops.
There were no doctors.
You had a life that was pure and simple.
With such strong family connections she formed The Friends of Tasman Island eight years ago to preserve its heritage, in partnership with the Parks and Wildlife Service.
Why is this important for anyone to do this? People love wild places.
We have aa motley crew each working bee.
So some people are ex-keepers, or like myself, a keeper's kid, and know the history and love the history behind it.
The stories behind the light station here.
Others are pharophiles.
They just love anything to do with lighthouses.
The volunteers arrived with a diverse range of skills to repair, paint and maintain the ageing buildings and gardens, which cop the full force of mother nature.
This is a much bigger house.
Enormously important bit of maritime heritage in a stunning, spectacular spot, and they deserve to be preserved.
There are four brick keepers' cottages and the remains of several other smaller buildings that dot the plateau that's just over 1.
5km long by 1km wide.
And here we are arriving at what we call the wim, the top of the haulage way.
It's beyond stunning.
This is the most extraordinary viewlandscapething.
It's amazing.
It's just breathtaking.
My back yard.
Your back yard? It's a helluva back yard.
Before helicopters, ships were used and it made for a hazardous landing.
People and supplies could only travel up the steep tramway from the small wharf All the way down there.
It's about 45 degrees most of the way down.
But the last couple of hundred feet are one over one, so you're actually laying on the trolley but you're standing up almost, so That's me.
Oh, that's you there? My mother.
That's your mum.
Yeah, and this is how we got on the island.
Gosh.
So, the basket would be dropped.
So down on the landing.
There was a flying fox shed and the flying fox would send the basket down and drop it into the boat.
The boat would go back out.
You'd clamber into the basket and then boat would come back on, hook you up onto the flying fox and you'd be battered back and forth until you got onto the landing.
Sheep, cattle, all the coal briquettes everything came up this haulage way.
Were there ever any accidents? Oh, yes.
There's been a couple of deaths on the haulage way.
When the crane wasn't working on the landing, one of the workers there fell into the sea, never to be found again.
Memories that linger on in the rusted wheels and old homes that stand against the windswept landscape.
It was a solitary life with just one purpose to keep the light burning bright.
As Tasman Island's last permanent keeper, Karl Rowbottom, tells me, it's always an emotional time when he returns.
Can you smell the kerosene? No.
Oh, I still can.
The place was full of kerosene once.
Let's go up.
This is the first landing, Brendan, and we're still going to keep going.
Right, Brendan.
Come out and have bit of a look, mate.
See what you reckon of this for a view.
Oh, wow! My God! Yeah.
It's amazing.
It didn't matter if anyone was sick or someone died, or somesome catastrophe happened.
This light would have to go every night.
It would have to go and everyone was secondary to the light.
The light was God around here.
You're basically the last man standing.
How does it feel for you lightkeeping is now a thing of the past? It's a sad thing that that history is gone from our society because they were menmen of a special calibre and so were their families to live out in these places.
The day I had to leave here was the worst part.
That really hurt.
I think my heart died that day.
I went back to the mainland.
I couldn't settle there.
I Oh, I became a rebel Wonder I didn't end up in jail, but anyway, it's funny as I was going down in basket for last time, I could feel my heart going down and down with it and, um So that was a bit sad really and then when I saw John Davey, see that he's still relief keeping um, went up in the basket and that's when I thought the job's gone.
Bit sad.
This will have to be one of the most beautiful places I think I've ever seen.
But you can feel the isolation.
And to think of the people spending up to two years here, which was the maximum posting, I have no idea how they did it.
I don't think I could do it.
They're certainly made of sterner stuff that I am, that's for sure.
Memories and traditions are well preserved in Tasmania, particularly when it involves the sea.
I'm going to meet the people who have committed to cultivating a renaissance of Australia's wooden maritime culture.
They have a really big get-together every two years to show off their precious vessels.
It's called the Australian Wooden Boat Festival, and they've invited me along.
I'm in Oyster Cove on a special day.
It's the ninth and last morning of a little boat raid called Tawe Nunnegah.
Ros.
Good morning.
How are you? Ros Barnett is a member of the Living Boat Trust, a community devoted to keeping Tasmania's maritime heritage alive.
Ros, what is Tawe Nunnegah? It's an expedition of small boats.
It's aa raid, we call it.
And the idea is that's a lot of these boats are so small that they wouldn't be safe going alone so they go together in a group.
How important is it to keep the boat-making skills alive? Oh, just incredibly important.
And to build a boat, you need the knowledge, the skill, and the timber.
So Tasmania's got the best boat-building timber.
We've still got some of these precious people that really know how to build a boat really well, and we've got these enthusiastic people that want to sail them.
We're out there in boats.
Best water than you'll ever get anywhere else in the world and we're just having fun.
With over ten nautical miles of water to travel before I jump ship, I'm happy not to be relying on oar-power.
We get the good boat .
.
with coffee and everything.
I've scored a lift north on one of the biggest boats in the Tawe Nunnegah raid.
How you doing? Hi.
It's a genuinely pleasing sight, isn't it? To see so many vessels on the water together.
It's just lovely.
But I'm trying to spot my date to the festival An elegantly restored three-masted barque, the tallest ship of the fleet heading into to Hobart for the opening of the festival.
Ah-ha! I've clocked her.
I make my way onto the 140-year-old James Craig, to discover the extraordinary story of her salvage.
Thank you.
Take in the main Bringing in the 'Alan Edenborough has been a member of the Sydney Heritage Fleet 'since 1969, and fascinated by tall ships since a teenager.
' So all this madness is yours.
Initially, yes, yes.
A lot of people have helped since.
Built in England in 1874 she ploughed the world's oceans as a merchant ship.
Later reduced to transporting coal and abandoned in 1932 in Recherche Bay, this is what Allan discovered in 1972.
How did I've seen the photograph of theof the rusting hulk.
Well, somebody told us in Sydney.
They said, "We want one tall ship to Sydney," and I was silly enough to take up the challenge to see if we could find one.
So how did you finally come across? I found a little magazine which, uh, had written an article from a Sydney sailor who'd been down to Hobart, and he'd seen the hull.
I said, "That's the best looking wreck I've seen.
" And the rest is history.
That was the best looking wreck.
Absolutely.
And when you saw that hulk in that tragic condition, you knew that this was achievable? Not immediately, but we did two surveys.
We went down and we spent, uh, a total of about two weeks on board the ship.
Living on board this hulk.
We go down to the keel, and once we got to the keel we realised that she was salvageable.
The frames and the ship and the fabric of the ship was intact.
That that's the critical thing.
I must admit we had to pour about two bottles of scotch down the surveyor's throat before he'd sign the letter to say it could be salvaged, but he was a nice chap.
And then it was a 20-year slog to get it back into working condition.
She is one of only four barques from the 19th century still sailing anywhere in the world.
A true masterpiece of restoration, a 30-year labour of love for those devoted to her.
I'm going up to that little white deck up there.
Absolutely thrilled.
It is a bit good up here.
How often does a person get the chance to look out at Hobart, from this far up the mast of the James Craig.
This is definitely in the once-in-a-lifetime category of opportunities.
Since the early 1960s, Hobart's Tasman Bridge has been the vital link between the city and its eastern suburbs.
But, on a calm night in 1975, fate shattered the peace and quiet of a sleeping city.
A wayward bulk load carrier struck the bridge and sank, bringing down pylons and concrete spans.
Seven crew were killed and five motorists died when their vehicles plunged 60m from the top.
The city was left with a bridge to nowhere for almost three years.
Hobart has never forgotten its night of adversity, and today, it builds bridges of a different kind.
This is the heart of Australia's enduring exploration of Antarctica.
Palaeontologist, Professor Tim Flannery, discovers a heroic blend of science and adventure.
There are more Antarctic scientists here than anywhere else in the world because Hobart's the gateway to the Southern Ocean and beyond.
So I want to discover what a modern day expedition to the ice involves.
And to do that, you really have to understand what happened in the past and you simply can't disregard the greatest Antarctica story of them all.
It begins when a raggedy, exhausted man walks into this city hotel fresh off the boat after an 18-month expedition.
Just over a century ago, a disreputable looking figure made his way into this rather grand hotel lobby.
The duty clerk mistook him for a tramp and gave him an inferior room at the back of the hotel.
But the following day, that man would be recognised as a great international hero.
He was Roald Amundsen, the first person to reach the South Pole.
And here he is after a well deserved shave and shower.
He had just travelled 5,250km from his triumph to Hobart.
The papers proclaimed, "The hero Amundsen had conquered the South Pole.
" The race was over.
His long time rival, Robert Scott, had died trying.
And back then, the voyage out must have been a hazardous one.
But scientists are still going south and they're discovering great things, and I'm really keen to learn what the journey's like today.
I'm returning port-side to meet Australian Antarctic Division Chief Scientist, Dr Nick Gales.
So, tell me was it really all a race to the Poles? Well, back then it really was.
That was where the attention of the whole globe was.
They were the they were the rock stars of the age.
Just like I and people of my generation and older remember the lunar landing and where they were.
That was the scale of attention and it was a huge race to get the first person into the South Pole of this great unknown land.
And one of them was this great Tasmanian, um, Lewey Vanacky, who came down here in the late 19th century with his family, and went down as part of the very first expedition ever to over winter in Antarctica.
And he went down as a scientist, so he was starting to measure a whole lot of the science that was fascinating to him, and to the scientists that followed him, like Edgeworth David and Mawson.
So, Mawson was a geologist, wasn't he? He was a great geologist but he was more than that.
He really was a renaissance man, if you like, because he recognised the importance of the science in Antarctica above and beyond everything else.
And like the science that he was doing back then, is that still the sort of thing that's ongoing today, or has he nature of it all changed? Well, we do things very differently now because we have all these wonderful new tools to do our science, but the drivers were the same.
What happens in the Southern Ocean? What happens with the ice cap? It's the engine room of global climate.
So it's relevant to us all.
Modern day expeditions to the ice remain physically and mentally challenging for everyone.
I'm fortunate to be here just at the right time to witness Australia's all-purpose Antarctic flagship, preparing to head south.
The Aurora Australis is Australia's only icebreaker.
Since 1990, she's been transporting faculties of scientists to Australia's three bases in Antarctica to examine the ice continent.
On board, is Dr Tas Van Ommen, an Antarctic Division scientist who specialises in ice cores.
So, how old is the oldest ice down there? Well, we've got good reason to believe that the oldest ice is probably over a million years old and there are some real puzzles that we want to access one day by getting that old ice.
But, for the moment, we're satisfied trying to build up our network of younger ice records, as well.
Antarctic has 18,000 km of coast and most of it's actually hidden beneath ice.
And the exact configuration of that ice-water interface is so important for determining how the ice responds in a warming climate.
In a sense, you could say the coast of Antarctica hold the key to the changing coast to the rest of the planet.
When you're down there on the ice, do you ever think about the heroic age of exploration and the conditions Mawson and those other explorers faced down there? Yeah, I do.
And I marvel at the fact they went into the unknown, whereas we're going into something that we've got some experience and knowledge about.
And they achieved such amazing things with such basic equipment.
BOAT HORN HONKS Bridge, fore and aft, let go.
Copy that, let go, over.
Bridge to aft, letting go all lines.
BOAT HORN HONKS Thank you.
The boat just moves so gracefully and slowly as it comes down the Derwind here.
It's more like a ballet than anything I would have expected.
I wish I was heading south with them, but it's time for me to bid bon voyage to the Aurora Australis for her 96th journey to Antarctica.
And there she goes, a veteran polar explorer in the footsteps of Scott, Amundsen, and Mawson.
While those heroic explorers venture south, there were pioneers of a different hue further north.
Freycinet Peninsula is famously frequented by visitors in search of its wildlife.
I'm heading to the site of particularly large nature fest over 100 years ago.
These naturalists, as they were known, were forerunners in Tasmania's now famous green movement.
In Easter 1910, Coles Bay became the base for the naturalists' field camp after nearly 100 naturalists, men and women, sailed here from Hobart.
I'm going to meet local historian Maureen Martin Ferris, to see what all the fuss was about.
They really were very interested in studying some of the botany, some of the beautiful granite, and also the marine animals because they were botanists, you had zoologists.
One of them, of course, was Errol Flynn's father.
Really? He was a zoologist.
Gosh, right.
OK.
And he actually wrote a wonderful report, and in the report it says that they actually discovered 60 new Tasmanian species and 25 Australian species.
So here's some of them and you can see them in their wonderful the women in their hats and their long gowns.
I'm so relieved that it's the kind of naturalists that study wildlife and not the naturalists that play naked table tennis.
Well, actually, that's what I imagined they were like.
And you can seeyes.
And this is this bay here? Yes, it is.
Oh, that's the is that the headland there? That's the headland.
You can see it right there.
Oh, right.
Fantastic.
What always gets me about these photos is the way that nobody's dressed for the beach.
No, none of them.
They're all dressed as if they were going down town.
Yeah.
Look at that.
They look as if they've arrived in the primordial jungle there, with tents dotted about.
Such simple kit as well, I mean, they were just canvases is thrown over ropes.
Perhaps the greatest legacy of those early naturalists was the creation of Tasmania's first national park, here in 1916 to protect Freycinet's natural beauty for generations.
Preserving nature is a fine thing, but what if nature changes? Further south, the tide is turning.
Australia's east ocean current has been delivering some uninvited visitors to the area, turning it into an underwater battlefield.
Marine ecologist, Dr Emma Johnston is diving into the fight to pick the winners from the losers.
What's the relationship between this and this? Both are featured on expensive menus around the world.
But one is an unwelcome visitor, and the other one wants to eat it.
I'm here to find out what's gone wrong in the neighbourhood.
Traditionally, the peaceful waters of Dunalley have had a thriving marine ecosystem producing loads of seafood.
But that's now under threat, since the East Australian Current has been bringing warmer waters from the north, and with it, armies of long spined urchins.
G'day! 'Marine ecologist, Dr Scott Ling, from the University of Tasmania, 'has promised to take me to the battle ground.
' We're travelling to North Bay where these invasive urchins are eating their way through the native sea kelp at an alarming rate, leaving the sea beds increasingly barren and unproductive.
I'm keen to see the evidence, and discover the creative solutions that might just save them.
OK, we'll head down to eight and then swim across until we hit the Swim across and then we'll we should see a lot of the kelp bed through here, and then some of the barren areas will start to emerge.
There you go.
Set to go.
Thank you.
Generally, we've got a fairly healthy kelp bed system here.
This is showing the first signs of these urchins overgrazing the system.
The barren patches that are really just starting to form.
Look at that! Beautiful.
They're just like little eating machines, aren't they? That's right.
Munching away.
If you look at how long these spines are here, really good protection from any lobster that's trying to eat them.
So purple! It looks black under the water.
Pretty bright.
You can see their five teeth.
His mouth's opening up there slightly.
These are the This is what's doing all the damage to the kelp.
See their teeth are extremely hard.
And, um, they use a rasping type action to strip the rock clear of all the algae.
Like a plague of marine locusts, the prickly invaders are eating the sea bed bare.
The evidence of their destruction is overwhelming.
But, no more! Enter the local hero the Tasmanian rock lobster.
Here we have the southern rock lobster.
This is obviously a larger specimen.
It's these larger specimens that are able to prey on things like sea urchins.
Obviously you've got all those protective spines.
It takes quite a large predator to be able to deal with that and roll the urchin over and eat it Ah! Oi! .
.
on the underside.
With the support of local fishermen, Scott and his team are returning to this area the once over-fished giant rock lobsters, to take on their opponent.
Heading back to shore, Scott is going to show me some rare and exclusive footage of an urchin kill.
OK, so if you have a look here, we've got some infrared remote monitoring of a sea urchin.
Is that the urchin? That's the urchin there.
This is at night.
You can see spines are quite relaxed until the lobster turns up.
And then the lobster goes about trying to grapple the urchin.
It rolls it and starts attacking the urchin through the weaker underside where there's less protection from the spines.
So, is it working? Yeah, well, certainly it was a bit of a surprise as to how well the lobsters actually took up residence on these sea urchin barrens.
So what we're looking at here is, um first of all, there's really obvious yellowy coloured structure.
That's thethe roe or the gonad.
So that's the eggs, and for a lobster he cracks open an urchin and the first thing he goes for is the roe.
You've got a lot more calories in there than anything else.
I'm not sure whether you want to try some, but why not? Oh, gosh.
Really? Fresh? Yeah.
Give it a go.
Give it a go.
Fresh.
OK.
Taste like the ocean? That is delicious.
That's like ocean butter.
But a small platoon of lobsters is no guarantee against a battalion of voracious urchins.
So, I wonder whether our growing taste for urchin roe may become another defence against the spiny invaders.
On the final leg of my investigation, I'm returning to Dunalley Bay to meet diver and entrepreneur Dave Allen.
Wow, that looks like a huge haul.
How much have you got here? Oh, probably 3/4 of a tonne.
How much roe do you get out of, say, 3/4 of a tonne? About 80kg of roe.
And that's the premium product.
And at peak of the season that can bring as much as 400 a kilo in the Japanese market.
Can we eat our way out of this problem? UmI think it's been proven most of the way through the northern hemisphere, the only way to control a sea urchin problem is with a commercially viable industry.
So, with a serve of science and industry, we may not only rejuvenate an ailing ecosystem but also sustain a peaceful and profitable underwater neighbourhood.
For decades, Bruny Island's small community has enjoyed a peaceful and exquisite environment.
But as anthropologist, Dr Xanthe Mallet discovers, 200 years ago, the island's fortunes were built upon a grim and bloody business.
I'm walking along what's called the Neck, which links north Bruny Island behind me, and south Bruny Island in front of me.
To the west, the tranquil waters of Great Bay, and to the east, the sweeping indigo arc of Adventure Bay, naturally sheltered against the Tasman Sea.
Adventure Bay is an idyllic setting, sought out by nature loving tourists, proud locals, and urban escapees.
But I'm here on a very different journey to find out why this bay was flushed red with blood.
Soon after colonisation in 1803, Tasmanians discovered a vast whale population in Adventure Bay during the winter months.
And so, the hunt for whale oil began here in 1826.
The oil had a huge market in Britain where it fuelled the country's street lamps and factory lighting.
Everyone wanted to be in on the game and the slaughter.
I'm heading to the remains of a whaling station at the bay's eastern most tip.
In its day, about 150 whalers were stationed here.
Good morning.
'Maritime archaeologist, Michael Nash, has studied the whaling rush, 'and says the bay is the perfect inlet for the harpooning of whales.
' In the winter months, they'd come in here to calve and to breed.
Um, it's nice and shallow, it's a pretty protected bay.
It's very big, sort of straight access to the ocean out there.
Why are they called Southern Right Whale? Um, well, it's because they were the right whale to hunt.
Oh, really? Yeah, because where they located themselves.
They were easy to access.
They were fairly big rotund animals.
Had a lot of blubber on them.
They were reasonably slow at that time of year, and also the carcass floated when it when they were killed, so they could tow them back into here.
When a whale was spotted, it just wasn't the boats from one station going out to get it.
There was maybe four or five stations and they're all competing because the one that actually harpooned it first, had the claim on the whale.
So, once they'd actually harpooned it.
The whale would tow the boat around for a while, get exhausted and then they'd come in here to lance.
Did people die doing this? Oh, they did and I mean occasionally.
Not a huge number but, you know, boats got upset, you know, and the bad weather, or the whales, or the whale line as it was going out would get caught around someone's leg or something.
It was a dangerous occupation.
They'd bring the carcass about 50 yards off shore and set up a basically a platform where they cut the blubber off.
They'd draw it up with a block and tackle and they'd roll the whale, basically.
They'd draw the whole whale up and then kind of peel it like an orange? Yeah, they do.
One of the characteristics of these sites is we get these, what we call, blubber bricks.
So they have this really thick residue.
They used to use the scraps of blubber to actually put back into the fire.
So it gave off this really greasy residue, which actually sticks to the bricks.
If it leaves this black stuff when you burn it when they were making the actual oil it would have been giving off a black smoke, then? Oh, it would have been disgusting.
You know it would have been this big, thick, greasy thing.
And they actually reckon with the whaling ships, especially, even if you couldn't see the ships, you could actually smell them from a couple of miles away.
And this was what it was all about whale oil.
An average 15m whale could yield about 8,000 litres.
So, what happened, why did it all stop? Basically because the whale numbers just declined so dramatically from over overfishing.
They dropped, ah, the 1840s to the 1850s there was virtually no whales being caught here.
In a sense, it was an industry that burned brightly but consumed itself over a couple of decades.
So, what remains of that time? Hello.
'On the final stop of my journey, I'm meeting Margaret Wise, 'a descendent of Adventure Bay whalers, 'and she's got a couple of interesting artefacts 'she wants to show me.
' And this is a pair of whale's teeth.
The sailors would etch pictures 'This is Scrimshaw.
'The intricate design and etching was no mean feat given the pitch 'and yaw of ocean waves.
' Very fine detail.
There was another product that we obtained from the whale that was part of women's fashion and this was the baleen, from the mouth of the whale through which they sieved.
It's fairly firm and thin and became very, very useful in inserting into a lady's corset.
And in the early days this is a corset that ladies used to wear.
Right.
To keep their waists trim, taut, and terrific.
Shall we give it a go? Would you like to? Not having much faith that's going to fit, but The lace is at the back.
They were tiny weren't they? Well I think we need to bring it down just a little.
I don't think this going to go around me.
No, they had such tiny, tiny waists.
Oh, I do not fancy wearing this.
I'm sure it would have been much bigger had I had to wear one in those days.
Oh, can we take it off now? Yeah.
Fortunately, fashion changes, as did the fate of whaling.
Commercial whaling was banned in 1986.
At its peak between 1835 and 1839, about 12,000 right whales were taken in Australian waters.
Today, worldwide, they number just 8,000.
150 years after the whaling stopped, do you think we'll ever see whales back in Adventure Bay? Earlier this year we had at least eight whales at one time in Adventure Bay.
And we believe that one of them calved as well.
So, the evidence is showing that each year there are more and more whales obvious to us out in the bay, and I didn't think that I would ever live to see the day when so many whales were there.
But, yes, they're coming back.
I call thatforgiveness.
Our journey through Tasmania is at an end for now.
This island may have begun its colonial life as a severe penal corner of the British empire, but even the convicts recognised the paradox of doing time in a patch of Eden.
Next time, Dr Xanthe Mallet discovers an abandoned fort that had the job of protecting the nation.
Professor Tim Flannery explores Fraser Island, a world-famous sanctuary, but is it edible? It's like tasting history, really.
Dr Emma Johnston finds that to save the dugong, you have to capture it first.
What we're looking for is when they pop up and their nose pops out of the water.
Brendan Moar reveals the true history of the great Australian prawn.
This is a strange and unsettling place.
And I investigate an outpost for outcasts.
I've arrived in Australia.
It feels like this ancient land has been there done that and still has loads of energy for more.
Around every corner, every bay you go into there's something more spectacular, more fascinating, more immense.
But the true marvel of the coast is its power to inspire the imagination, the endless possibilities it holds for those who know it, love it, and return again and again to rediscover it.
Australia's only island state, Tasmania, is defined by its coastline.
Separated from the mainland to the north by the formidable Bass Strait, to the east by the Tasman Sea, and rolling in uninterrupted all the way from Antarctica, the chilling vastness of the Great Southern Ocean.
Three Western empires put this island on the map.
Dutchman Abel Tasman was the first European to step ashore in 1642.
Then came the French surveyors who made several expeditions here, but, of course, it was the British who claimed it, settling here in 1803.
We've come here to explore how Tasmania's geographic isolation has steered its history and shaped the people along its south-eastern shores.
Brendan Moar journeys to remote rugged Tasman Island to understand the dramatic grip of lighthouse life on our coastal culture.
This would have to be one of the most beautiful places I think I've ever seen But you can feel the isolation.
Marine ecologist, Dr Emma Johnston dives into the battle between alien sea urchins and giant rock lobsters.
Oi! Palaeontologist, Professor Tim Flannery, reveals Hobart's crucial role in Antarctic exploration.
In the footsteps of Scott and Amundsen and Mawson.
They were tiny, weren't they? Anthropologist, Dr Xanthe Mallett is grateful that fashion changes.
Oh, I do not fancy wearing this! And I discover the enormous effort to restore a grand dame of the sea.
This is definitely in the once-in-a-lifetime category of opportunities.
This is Coast Australia.
On this journey, we explore a coastline that starts at Wineglass Bay, on the Freycinet Peninsula, continues on to Port Arthur, into Hobart, and crosses over to Bruny Island in the south.
The majesty of this coastal landscape and its flora and fauna cannot fail to inspire.
but its natural beauty belies a dark past.
From the European perspective, this island outpost was, from the outset, the realm of hard men.
Given how perfect it looks today, it's hard to imagine the scene down there when the whaling industry was at its height.
But when that bay was completely full of whales' blood lapping against that perfectly circular rim, it was said to resemble a wine glass full of claret.
As if coloured by such a past, the rare pink granite, characteristic of the region, forms nearly 40km of pristine coastline.
As we head south, the rock changes colour, but not the history.
I'm heading to Port Arthur on the Tasman Peninsula, the showpiece of Australia's convict past.
In Britain, the initial fear of transportation was waning, so the British government had to up its game.
What was needed was a new penal colony.
A place who's very name would inspire fear and dread in all who heard it.
The new Governor, George Arthur, was tasked with creating a sophisticated new penal system designed to become the ultimate deterrent for the Empire's most wayward malcontents.
What he createdwas this.
From small beginnings as a convict timber-camp in 1830 Port Arthur's settlement expanded into new industries of both hard and light labour, and new methods of punishment to replace the bloody practice of flogging.
By the time the last convict left in 1877, around 7,000 men had served time here.
At Port Arthur, the creed was simple To grind rogues into honest men.
Now, it sounds unpleasant, and I'm sure it was.
What I want to understand, though, is just how successful they were at the business of reform through punishment.
I'm meeting colonial historian, Dr Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, who has spent years studying this place, and the people who worked their way through it.
Hamish, I have to say, on a day like today, this place looks beautiful.
It's hard to imagine it as a place of suffering, punishment.
It's gorgeous, isn't it? One of the interesting things is that the convicts that were here, at least some of them, said exactly the same thing.
So they wrote in memoires about the strangeness of being a prisoner in a penal station, the worst sinkhole in the British Empire, in a location that was so beautiful.
And what kind of prisoners ended up in this colony? Secondary offenders, largely, so these are people who had committed an offence in the colony, but not serious offences.
So you did anything really bad you got topped.
The largest single group of people who came here were absconders, so convicts who ran away from other locations and also, really interestingly, some people who commit crimes that are so spectacular in the British Isles that they're singled out for special punishment.
So who are these spectaculars? Well, if you threw a stone at George III, for example, that might get you here.
That goes in the box marked "asking for trouble.
" Hamish is taking me into the penitentiary building, in which 484 desperate lives were once cramped.
How have you gone about, you know, understanding this place? You know, how do you make sense of so much human misery? Well, I think that's a really, really important question because all we've got here is walls, but one of the fascinating things about this site is the records for this place are just insane.
You can actually track individuals through this place? We know the colour of their eyes.
'Hamish has brought with him the very detailed records 'of Scotsman William Irving, a 40-year-old fabric printer, 'convicted for assault and sentenced to 21 years in the colonies.
' Complexion, head, hair, whiskers.
How many people are recorded like thisto this level of detail? 72,000.
72,000? 72,000 prisoners.
And you've got this level of detail down to the colour of their whiskers and whatever? Some of them we know species of the worm that infested their gut.
Of those 72,000 lives preserved in Tasmania's convict records, almost 10% spent time in these grounds.
In 1850, a new building was opened at Port Arthur, modelled on the panopticon design developed in Britain and America.
Where once flogging was the ultimate penalty for unruly convicts, isolation was the new weapon.
Having being transported to Tasmania, how does William Irving end up in the complex of buildings at Port Arthur? It's a really sad story, see, he almost gets his freedom, but he can't get work and he ends up as a pauper/invalid.
And one of the places that pauper/invalids were sent was Port Arthur.
And he's in the invalids establishment where he's done for being absent without leave and he goes into this building.
And this building here is Well, you were in a panopticon, so an all-seeing prison.
And this point here is you know the heart of the panopticon, it's where the warden sat and he can see down every corridor.
All of these cells are just single occupancy? Yes.
This is a claustrophobic space, isn't it? This is where a convict spent their time during the day, but if they had to go outside at all, they had to wear one of these.
Why do you put that on? So if they did happen to be seen by another prisoner, the other prisoner couldn't recognize them.
So, no name, no face? Just a number.
Gosh.
This only half of it.
When William Irving is in this building, he again messes up and he transitions into yet one more level below this.
Oh, this is the heart of darkness in here.
It's a full-blown solitary confinement cell.
And it would have been dark? It would have been pitch-dark, and you've got four doors in this one between you and the outside world.
So, meter thick walls.
So it's sensory deprivation.
Absolutely.
I'm struck by how strong the desire to escape this place would have been.
But beyond the mental torture, the natural, physical boundaries have created a formidable challenge for the daring.
The only escape by land was 20km north, across the 30m wide neck called Eaglehawk.
But even here, there was an even more fearsome, and hungry, line of defence.
I've come here to meet Port Arthur archaeologist, Dr Jodie Steele, to discover what the chances were of surviving a desperate attempt at freedom.
Who's your ferocious friend? He's part of the line of defence that protected the gateway to the penal peninsula.
Um, but he didn't act alone.
I've bought a little postcard from our collection for you to have a look at.
Oh, that's great, isn't it? It is.
A team of between 11 and 18 dogs, lined up between here all the way across this isthmus out into the bay.
If you wanted to make a break for it, pretty much the ocean was your best bet but that meant swimming.
But for all that, I presume men were trying to get out.
There were a lot of people attempting it, but usually they wouldn't make it very far.
Everything about it is just a challenge for the convict, isn't it? Oh, it would have been, and they were constantly wearing leg irons in the chain gang, and I've brought a pair to show you.
So anyone who's out in the in the environment, in the landscape has got their legs shackled? They were, yep.
They were usually in gangs and they would have been wearing these heavy irons.
And these are, these are the real deal? These aren't replicas? They are the real deal.
And you can see they're slightly burrowed, in an oval shape, so they've had a fair amount of damage done to them to try and get them off.
Right so that's Someone has sat on a beach somewhere and just thumped away at them with a rock or whatever.
Most likely a rock or whatever they could get their hands on.
What about William Irving that I've been hearing about? At Port Arthur he just seems to disappear.
A number of things could've happened to him.
Um, you can assume that he got out, made it to the mainland, um, might have changed his name and then lived happily ever after.
But, unfortunately, not many of them did.
We have records of the absconders ending up in the bush.
Several decades later people finding them still with their leg irons on, nothing but a skeleton.
And I suppose any one of those could have been William Irving.
Any of them could have been.
Old stories are aplenty here.
Born of a daunting coastline, and living in the minds of those who watched over the ebb and flow of history's seafarers.
Brendan Moar wants to know why at this very forbidding tip of Tasmania the memory of it all is worth preserving.
In Australia today, all lighthouses are automated, but they remain as beacons of a bygone era, much-loved and cared for by small armies of devoted volunteers.
I'm on a mission to find out why lighthouses occupy such a romantic and dramatic place in our coastal culture.
But before I can board my ride out, I've got to scrub down! I'm joining a working bee at the legendary Tasman Island Lighthouse.
It stands in a particularly pristine environmental which means no bugs or weeds from the mainland.
Tasman Island.
.
off the rugged south-eastern tip of the Tasman Peninsula, topped by that familiar sentinel of maritime safety.
Oh, my God! This is a rare privilege.
I'm joining a very dedicated group of volunteers who come here three times a year to maintain the Tasman Lighthouse and surrounding buildings.
If anyone can explain the fascination with lighthouses, these guys can.
Good morning.
Good morning.
Hope your boots are clean! They are very clean.
You must be Carol.
I am.
Welcome.
Welcome to the island.
Great to meet you.
The Tasman Island lighthouse was opened in 1906.
It was de-manned in 1977, and has run on automated solar power ever since.
The homes too have stood empty since then.
But why do the memories remain strong? Carol Jackson spent her childhood here.
For a lighthouse kid it's different to being a keeper or a keeper's wife.
As kids, Mum used to always say to us that, you know, we grew up with too much wind in our heads.
So you have this freedom, you have an independence, you have a resilience.
You had to make do.
You had to make your own fun.
We didn't have TV.
There were no shops.
There were no doctors.
You had a life that was pure and simple.
With such strong family connections she formed The Friends of Tasman Island eight years ago to preserve its heritage, in partnership with the Parks and Wildlife Service.
Why is this important for anyone to do this? People love wild places.
We have aa motley crew each working bee.
So some people are ex-keepers, or like myself, a keeper's kid, and know the history and love the history behind it.
The stories behind the light station here.
Others are pharophiles.
They just love anything to do with lighthouses.
The volunteers arrived with a diverse range of skills to repair, paint and maintain the ageing buildings and gardens, which cop the full force of mother nature.
This is a much bigger house.
Enormously important bit of maritime heritage in a stunning, spectacular spot, and they deserve to be preserved.
There are four brick keepers' cottages and the remains of several other smaller buildings that dot the plateau that's just over 1.
5km long by 1km wide.
And here we are arriving at what we call the wim, the top of the haulage way.
It's beyond stunning.
This is the most extraordinary viewlandscapething.
It's amazing.
It's just breathtaking.
My back yard.
Your back yard? It's a helluva back yard.
Before helicopters, ships were used and it made for a hazardous landing.
People and supplies could only travel up the steep tramway from the small wharf All the way down there.
It's about 45 degrees most of the way down.
But the last couple of hundred feet are one over one, so you're actually laying on the trolley but you're standing up almost, so That's me.
Oh, that's you there? My mother.
That's your mum.
Yeah, and this is how we got on the island.
Gosh.
So, the basket would be dropped.
So down on the landing.
There was a flying fox shed and the flying fox would send the basket down and drop it into the boat.
The boat would go back out.
You'd clamber into the basket and then boat would come back on, hook you up onto the flying fox and you'd be battered back and forth until you got onto the landing.
Sheep, cattle, all the coal briquettes everything came up this haulage way.
Were there ever any accidents? Oh, yes.
There's been a couple of deaths on the haulage way.
When the crane wasn't working on the landing, one of the workers there fell into the sea, never to be found again.
Memories that linger on in the rusted wheels and old homes that stand against the windswept landscape.
It was a solitary life with just one purpose to keep the light burning bright.
As Tasman Island's last permanent keeper, Karl Rowbottom, tells me, it's always an emotional time when he returns.
Can you smell the kerosene? No.
Oh, I still can.
The place was full of kerosene once.
Let's go up.
This is the first landing, Brendan, and we're still going to keep going.
Right, Brendan.
Come out and have bit of a look, mate.
See what you reckon of this for a view.
Oh, wow! My God! Yeah.
It's amazing.
It didn't matter if anyone was sick or someone died, or somesome catastrophe happened.
This light would have to go every night.
It would have to go and everyone was secondary to the light.
The light was God around here.
You're basically the last man standing.
How does it feel for you lightkeeping is now a thing of the past? It's a sad thing that that history is gone from our society because they were menmen of a special calibre and so were their families to live out in these places.
The day I had to leave here was the worst part.
That really hurt.
I think my heart died that day.
I went back to the mainland.
I couldn't settle there.
I Oh, I became a rebel Wonder I didn't end up in jail, but anyway, it's funny as I was going down in basket for last time, I could feel my heart going down and down with it and, um So that was a bit sad really and then when I saw John Davey, see that he's still relief keeping um, went up in the basket and that's when I thought the job's gone.
Bit sad.
This will have to be one of the most beautiful places I think I've ever seen.
But you can feel the isolation.
And to think of the people spending up to two years here, which was the maximum posting, I have no idea how they did it.
I don't think I could do it.
They're certainly made of sterner stuff that I am, that's for sure.
Memories and traditions are well preserved in Tasmania, particularly when it involves the sea.
I'm going to meet the people who have committed to cultivating a renaissance of Australia's wooden maritime culture.
They have a really big get-together every two years to show off their precious vessels.
It's called the Australian Wooden Boat Festival, and they've invited me along.
I'm in Oyster Cove on a special day.
It's the ninth and last morning of a little boat raid called Tawe Nunnegah.
Ros.
Good morning.
How are you? Ros Barnett is a member of the Living Boat Trust, a community devoted to keeping Tasmania's maritime heritage alive.
Ros, what is Tawe Nunnegah? It's an expedition of small boats.
It's aa raid, we call it.
And the idea is that's a lot of these boats are so small that they wouldn't be safe going alone so they go together in a group.
How important is it to keep the boat-making skills alive? Oh, just incredibly important.
And to build a boat, you need the knowledge, the skill, and the timber.
So Tasmania's got the best boat-building timber.
We've still got some of these precious people that really know how to build a boat really well, and we've got these enthusiastic people that want to sail them.
We're out there in boats.
Best water than you'll ever get anywhere else in the world and we're just having fun.
With over ten nautical miles of water to travel before I jump ship, I'm happy not to be relying on oar-power.
We get the good boat .
.
with coffee and everything.
I've scored a lift north on one of the biggest boats in the Tawe Nunnegah raid.
How you doing? Hi.
It's a genuinely pleasing sight, isn't it? To see so many vessels on the water together.
It's just lovely.
But I'm trying to spot my date to the festival An elegantly restored three-masted barque, the tallest ship of the fleet heading into to Hobart for the opening of the festival.
Ah-ha! I've clocked her.
I make my way onto the 140-year-old James Craig, to discover the extraordinary story of her salvage.
Thank you.
Take in the main Bringing in the 'Alan Edenborough has been a member of the Sydney Heritage Fleet 'since 1969, and fascinated by tall ships since a teenager.
' So all this madness is yours.
Initially, yes, yes.
A lot of people have helped since.
Built in England in 1874 she ploughed the world's oceans as a merchant ship.
Later reduced to transporting coal and abandoned in 1932 in Recherche Bay, this is what Allan discovered in 1972.
How did I've seen the photograph of theof the rusting hulk.
Well, somebody told us in Sydney.
They said, "We want one tall ship to Sydney," and I was silly enough to take up the challenge to see if we could find one.
So how did you finally come across? I found a little magazine which, uh, had written an article from a Sydney sailor who'd been down to Hobart, and he'd seen the hull.
I said, "That's the best looking wreck I've seen.
" And the rest is history.
That was the best looking wreck.
Absolutely.
And when you saw that hulk in that tragic condition, you knew that this was achievable? Not immediately, but we did two surveys.
We went down and we spent, uh, a total of about two weeks on board the ship.
Living on board this hulk.
We go down to the keel, and once we got to the keel we realised that she was salvageable.
The frames and the ship and the fabric of the ship was intact.
That that's the critical thing.
I must admit we had to pour about two bottles of scotch down the surveyor's throat before he'd sign the letter to say it could be salvaged, but he was a nice chap.
And then it was a 20-year slog to get it back into working condition.
She is one of only four barques from the 19th century still sailing anywhere in the world.
A true masterpiece of restoration, a 30-year labour of love for those devoted to her.
I'm going up to that little white deck up there.
Absolutely thrilled.
It is a bit good up here.
How often does a person get the chance to look out at Hobart, from this far up the mast of the James Craig.
This is definitely in the once-in-a-lifetime category of opportunities.
Since the early 1960s, Hobart's Tasman Bridge has been the vital link between the city and its eastern suburbs.
But, on a calm night in 1975, fate shattered the peace and quiet of a sleeping city.
A wayward bulk load carrier struck the bridge and sank, bringing down pylons and concrete spans.
Seven crew were killed and five motorists died when their vehicles plunged 60m from the top.
The city was left with a bridge to nowhere for almost three years.
Hobart has never forgotten its night of adversity, and today, it builds bridges of a different kind.
This is the heart of Australia's enduring exploration of Antarctica.
Palaeontologist, Professor Tim Flannery, discovers a heroic blend of science and adventure.
There are more Antarctic scientists here than anywhere else in the world because Hobart's the gateway to the Southern Ocean and beyond.
So I want to discover what a modern day expedition to the ice involves.
And to do that, you really have to understand what happened in the past and you simply can't disregard the greatest Antarctica story of them all.
It begins when a raggedy, exhausted man walks into this city hotel fresh off the boat after an 18-month expedition.
Just over a century ago, a disreputable looking figure made his way into this rather grand hotel lobby.
The duty clerk mistook him for a tramp and gave him an inferior room at the back of the hotel.
But the following day, that man would be recognised as a great international hero.
He was Roald Amundsen, the first person to reach the South Pole.
And here he is after a well deserved shave and shower.
He had just travelled 5,250km from his triumph to Hobart.
The papers proclaimed, "The hero Amundsen had conquered the South Pole.
" The race was over.
His long time rival, Robert Scott, had died trying.
And back then, the voyage out must have been a hazardous one.
But scientists are still going south and they're discovering great things, and I'm really keen to learn what the journey's like today.
I'm returning port-side to meet Australian Antarctic Division Chief Scientist, Dr Nick Gales.
So, tell me was it really all a race to the Poles? Well, back then it really was.
That was where the attention of the whole globe was.
They were the they were the rock stars of the age.
Just like I and people of my generation and older remember the lunar landing and where they were.
That was the scale of attention and it was a huge race to get the first person into the South Pole of this great unknown land.
And one of them was this great Tasmanian, um, Lewey Vanacky, who came down here in the late 19th century with his family, and went down as part of the very first expedition ever to over winter in Antarctica.
And he went down as a scientist, so he was starting to measure a whole lot of the science that was fascinating to him, and to the scientists that followed him, like Edgeworth David and Mawson.
So, Mawson was a geologist, wasn't he? He was a great geologist but he was more than that.
He really was a renaissance man, if you like, because he recognised the importance of the science in Antarctica above and beyond everything else.
And like the science that he was doing back then, is that still the sort of thing that's ongoing today, or has he nature of it all changed? Well, we do things very differently now because we have all these wonderful new tools to do our science, but the drivers were the same.
What happens in the Southern Ocean? What happens with the ice cap? It's the engine room of global climate.
So it's relevant to us all.
Modern day expeditions to the ice remain physically and mentally challenging for everyone.
I'm fortunate to be here just at the right time to witness Australia's all-purpose Antarctic flagship, preparing to head south.
The Aurora Australis is Australia's only icebreaker.
Since 1990, she's been transporting faculties of scientists to Australia's three bases in Antarctica to examine the ice continent.
On board, is Dr Tas Van Ommen, an Antarctic Division scientist who specialises in ice cores.
So, how old is the oldest ice down there? Well, we've got good reason to believe that the oldest ice is probably over a million years old and there are some real puzzles that we want to access one day by getting that old ice.
But, for the moment, we're satisfied trying to build up our network of younger ice records, as well.
Antarctic has 18,000 km of coast and most of it's actually hidden beneath ice.
And the exact configuration of that ice-water interface is so important for determining how the ice responds in a warming climate.
In a sense, you could say the coast of Antarctica hold the key to the changing coast to the rest of the planet.
When you're down there on the ice, do you ever think about the heroic age of exploration and the conditions Mawson and those other explorers faced down there? Yeah, I do.
And I marvel at the fact they went into the unknown, whereas we're going into something that we've got some experience and knowledge about.
And they achieved such amazing things with such basic equipment.
BOAT HORN HONKS Bridge, fore and aft, let go.
Copy that, let go, over.
Bridge to aft, letting go all lines.
BOAT HORN HONKS Thank you.
The boat just moves so gracefully and slowly as it comes down the Derwind here.
It's more like a ballet than anything I would have expected.
I wish I was heading south with them, but it's time for me to bid bon voyage to the Aurora Australis for her 96th journey to Antarctica.
And there she goes, a veteran polar explorer in the footsteps of Scott, Amundsen, and Mawson.
While those heroic explorers venture south, there were pioneers of a different hue further north.
Freycinet Peninsula is famously frequented by visitors in search of its wildlife.
I'm heading to the site of particularly large nature fest over 100 years ago.
These naturalists, as they were known, were forerunners in Tasmania's now famous green movement.
In Easter 1910, Coles Bay became the base for the naturalists' field camp after nearly 100 naturalists, men and women, sailed here from Hobart.
I'm going to meet local historian Maureen Martin Ferris, to see what all the fuss was about.
They really were very interested in studying some of the botany, some of the beautiful granite, and also the marine animals because they were botanists, you had zoologists.
One of them, of course, was Errol Flynn's father.
Really? He was a zoologist.
Gosh, right.
OK.
And he actually wrote a wonderful report, and in the report it says that they actually discovered 60 new Tasmanian species and 25 Australian species.
So here's some of them and you can see them in their wonderful the women in their hats and their long gowns.
I'm so relieved that it's the kind of naturalists that study wildlife and not the naturalists that play naked table tennis.
Well, actually, that's what I imagined they were like.
And you can seeyes.
And this is this bay here? Yes, it is.
Oh, that's the is that the headland there? That's the headland.
You can see it right there.
Oh, right.
Fantastic.
What always gets me about these photos is the way that nobody's dressed for the beach.
No, none of them.
They're all dressed as if they were going down town.
Yeah.
Look at that.
They look as if they've arrived in the primordial jungle there, with tents dotted about.
Such simple kit as well, I mean, they were just canvases is thrown over ropes.
Perhaps the greatest legacy of those early naturalists was the creation of Tasmania's first national park, here in 1916 to protect Freycinet's natural beauty for generations.
Preserving nature is a fine thing, but what if nature changes? Further south, the tide is turning.
Australia's east ocean current has been delivering some uninvited visitors to the area, turning it into an underwater battlefield.
Marine ecologist, Dr Emma Johnston is diving into the fight to pick the winners from the losers.
What's the relationship between this and this? Both are featured on expensive menus around the world.
But one is an unwelcome visitor, and the other one wants to eat it.
I'm here to find out what's gone wrong in the neighbourhood.
Traditionally, the peaceful waters of Dunalley have had a thriving marine ecosystem producing loads of seafood.
But that's now under threat, since the East Australian Current has been bringing warmer waters from the north, and with it, armies of long spined urchins.
G'day! 'Marine ecologist, Dr Scott Ling, from the University of Tasmania, 'has promised to take me to the battle ground.
' We're travelling to North Bay where these invasive urchins are eating their way through the native sea kelp at an alarming rate, leaving the sea beds increasingly barren and unproductive.
I'm keen to see the evidence, and discover the creative solutions that might just save them.
OK, we'll head down to eight and then swim across until we hit the Swim across and then we'll we should see a lot of the kelp bed through here, and then some of the barren areas will start to emerge.
There you go.
Set to go.
Thank you.
Generally, we've got a fairly healthy kelp bed system here.
This is showing the first signs of these urchins overgrazing the system.
The barren patches that are really just starting to form.
Look at that! Beautiful.
They're just like little eating machines, aren't they? That's right.
Munching away.
If you look at how long these spines are here, really good protection from any lobster that's trying to eat them.
So purple! It looks black under the water.
Pretty bright.
You can see their five teeth.
His mouth's opening up there slightly.
These are the This is what's doing all the damage to the kelp.
See their teeth are extremely hard.
And, um, they use a rasping type action to strip the rock clear of all the algae.
Like a plague of marine locusts, the prickly invaders are eating the sea bed bare.
The evidence of their destruction is overwhelming.
But, no more! Enter the local hero the Tasmanian rock lobster.
Here we have the southern rock lobster.
This is obviously a larger specimen.
It's these larger specimens that are able to prey on things like sea urchins.
Obviously you've got all those protective spines.
It takes quite a large predator to be able to deal with that and roll the urchin over and eat it Ah! Oi! .
.
on the underside.
With the support of local fishermen, Scott and his team are returning to this area the once over-fished giant rock lobsters, to take on their opponent.
Heading back to shore, Scott is going to show me some rare and exclusive footage of an urchin kill.
OK, so if you have a look here, we've got some infrared remote monitoring of a sea urchin.
Is that the urchin? That's the urchin there.
This is at night.
You can see spines are quite relaxed until the lobster turns up.
And then the lobster goes about trying to grapple the urchin.
It rolls it and starts attacking the urchin through the weaker underside where there's less protection from the spines.
So, is it working? Yeah, well, certainly it was a bit of a surprise as to how well the lobsters actually took up residence on these sea urchin barrens.
So what we're looking at here is, um first of all, there's really obvious yellowy coloured structure.
That's thethe roe or the gonad.
So that's the eggs, and for a lobster he cracks open an urchin and the first thing he goes for is the roe.
You've got a lot more calories in there than anything else.
I'm not sure whether you want to try some, but why not? Oh, gosh.
Really? Fresh? Yeah.
Give it a go.
Give it a go.
Fresh.
OK.
Taste like the ocean? That is delicious.
That's like ocean butter.
But a small platoon of lobsters is no guarantee against a battalion of voracious urchins.
So, I wonder whether our growing taste for urchin roe may become another defence against the spiny invaders.
On the final leg of my investigation, I'm returning to Dunalley Bay to meet diver and entrepreneur Dave Allen.
Wow, that looks like a huge haul.
How much have you got here? Oh, probably 3/4 of a tonne.
How much roe do you get out of, say, 3/4 of a tonne? About 80kg of roe.
And that's the premium product.
And at peak of the season that can bring as much as 400 a kilo in the Japanese market.
Can we eat our way out of this problem? UmI think it's been proven most of the way through the northern hemisphere, the only way to control a sea urchin problem is with a commercially viable industry.
So, with a serve of science and industry, we may not only rejuvenate an ailing ecosystem but also sustain a peaceful and profitable underwater neighbourhood.
For decades, Bruny Island's small community has enjoyed a peaceful and exquisite environment.
But as anthropologist, Dr Xanthe Mallet discovers, 200 years ago, the island's fortunes were built upon a grim and bloody business.
I'm walking along what's called the Neck, which links north Bruny Island behind me, and south Bruny Island in front of me.
To the west, the tranquil waters of Great Bay, and to the east, the sweeping indigo arc of Adventure Bay, naturally sheltered against the Tasman Sea.
Adventure Bay is an idyllic setting, sought out by nature loving tourists, proud locals, and urban escapees.
But I'm here on a very different journey to find out why this bay was flushed red with blood.
Soon after colonisation in 1803, Tasmanians discovered a vast whale population in Adventure Bay during the winter months.
And so, the hunt for whale oil began here in 1826.
The oil had a huge market in Britain where it fuelled the country's street lamps and factory lighting.
Everyone wanted to be in on the game and the slaughter.
I'm heading to the remains of a whaling station at the bay's eastern most tip.
In its day, about 150 whalers were stationed here.
Good morning.
'Maritime archaeologist, Michael Nash, has studied the whaling rush, 'and says the bay is the perfect inlet for the harpooning of whales.
' In the winter months, they'd come in here to calve and to breed.
Um, it's nice and shallow, it's a pretty protected bay.
It's very big, sort of straight access to the ocean out there.
Why are they called Southern Right Whale? Um, well, it's because they were the right whale to hunt.
Oh, really? Yeah, because where they located themselves.
They were easy to access.
They were fairly big rotund animals.
Had a lot of blubber on them.
They were reasonably slow at that time of year, and also the carcass floated when it when they were killed, so they could tow them back into here.
When a whale was spotted, it just wasn't the boats from one station going out to get it.
There was maybe four or five stations and they're all competing because the one that actually harpooned it first, had the claim on the whale.
So, once they'd actually harpooned it.
The whale would tow the boat around for a while, get exhausted and then they'd come in here to lance.
Did people die doing this? Oh, they did and I mean occasionally.
Not a huge number but, you know, boats got upset, you know, and the bad weather, or the whales, or the whale line as it was going out would get caught around someone's leg or something.
It was a dangerous occupation.
They'd bring the carcass about 50 yards off shore and set up a basically a platform where they cut the blubber off.
They'd draw it up with a block and tackle and they'd roll the whale, basically.
They'd draw the whole whale up and then kind of peel it like an orange? Yeah, they do.
One of the characteristics of these sites is we get these, what we call, blubber bricks.
So they have this really thick residue.
They used to use the scraps of blubber to actually put back into the fire.
So it gave off this really greasy residue, which actually sticks to the bricks.
If it leaves this black stuff when you burn it when they were making the actual oil it would have been giving off a black smoke, then? Oh, it would have been disgusting.
You know it would have been this big, thick, greasy thing.
And they actually reckon with the whaling ships, especially, even if you couldn't see the ships, you could actually smell them from a couple of miles away.
And this was what it was all about whale oil.
An average 15m whale could yield about 8,000 litres.
So, what happened, why did it all stop? Basically because the whale numbers just declined so dramatically from over overfishing.
They dropped, ah, the 1840s to the 1850s there was virtually no whales being caught here.
In a sense, it was an industry that burned brightly but consumed itself over a couple of decades.
So, what remains of that time? Hello.
'On the final stop of my journey, I'm meeting Margaret Wise, 'a descendent of Adventure Bay whalers, 'and she's got a couple of interesting artefacts 'she wants to show me.
' And this is a pair of whale's teeth.
The sailors would etch pictures 'This is Scrimshaw.
'The intricate design and etching was no mean feat given the pitch 'and yaw of ocean waves.
' Very fine detail.
There was another product that we obtained from the whale that was part of women's fashion and this was the baleen, from the mouth of the whale through which they sieved.
It's fairly firm and thin and became very, very useful in inserting into a lady's corset.
And in the early days this is a corset that ladies used to wear.
Right.
To keep their waists trim, taut, and terrific.
Shall we give it a go? Would you like to? Not having much faith that's going to fit, but The lace is at the back.
They were tiny weren't they? Well I think we need to bring it down just a little.
I don't think this going to go around me.
No, they had such tiny, tiny waists.
Oh, I do not fancy wearing this.
I'm sure it would have been much bigger had I had to wear one in those days.
Oh, can we take it off now? Yeah.
Fortunately, fashion changes, as did the fate of whaling.
Commercial whaling was banned in 1986.
At its peak between 1835 and 1839, about 12,000 right whales were taken in Australian waters.
Today, worldwide, they number just 8,000.
150 years after the whaling stopped, do you think we'll ever see whales back in Adventure Bay? Earlier this year we had at least eight whales at one time in Adventure Bay.
And we believe that one of them calved as well.
So, the evidence is showing that each year there are more and more whales obvious to us out in the bay, and I didn't think that I would ever live to see the day when so many whales were there.
But, yes, they're coming back.
I call thatforgiveness.
Our journey through Tasmania is at an end for now.
This island may have begun its colonial life as a severe penal corner of the British empire, but even the convicts recognised the paradox of doing time in a patch of Eden.
Next time, Dr Xanthe Mallet discovers an abandoned fort that had the job of protecting the nation.
Professor Tim Flannery explores Fraser Island, a world-famous sanctuary, but is it edible? It's like tasting history, really.
Dr Emma Johnston finds that to save the dugong, you have to capture it first.
What we're looking for is when they pop up and their nose pops out of the water.
Brendan Moar reveals the true history of the great Australian prawn.
This is a strange and unsettling place.
And I investigate an outpost for outcasts.