Spotlight: Jewels of Tasmania

For unenlightened mainlanders, Tasmania can be an afterthought, like a mislaid jigsaw piece on Australia's southern tip. It first hit my radar in a real way in the 1990s. A friend and I were having coffee in Sydney when she told she was starting afresh by moving to Launceston, enrolling in a jewellery design course and hopefully finding a wild Tasmanian man. I egged her on, while silently fearing the outcome. Tasmania, after all, was still a good decade off making The New York Times hot list. Forget Carrie Bradshaw in Manhattan, my friend was trying her dating game luck in a distant former penal colony. Next stop, Antarctica.

Then in 2000, an invitation arrived from her – to her nuptials, no less. A gang of us headed down on an expensive, multi-stop flight, falling upon our old classmate and marvelling at her handsome Taswegian boat-builder with his proud, Scottish-felon ancestry. After a perfect Tassie weekend (cosy candlelit dinners, weatherboard B&Bs, bushwalks and pub-hopping), we ended up dancing like a pack of savages around a roaring bonfire at the Tamar Valley vineyard where they wed, she in a red velvet cheongsam, he in a kilt.

My next visit wasn't until 2012, this time flying into Hobart. I was filled with excitement, not least as this flight was two hours direct, paid for by work, and included a night at MONA's new pavilions.

Again, the experience ended up being about discovering Tasmania through the eyes of an informed mainlander: this time, the remarkable Joan Masterman. She helped start Cradle Mountain Huts Walk, and owns Friendly Beaches Lodge, tucked away off a windswept beach in the Freycinet National Park. She too had discovered Tassie by pleasing accident, when her late husband, George, urged her to accompany him to Hobart for a legal conference in the late 1980s. One taste was all it took.

Over the past 30 years, Joan has split her time between Sydney and Freycinet, where her eco lodge has attracted some of the biggest creative names, including the late A.A. Gill. British novelist Nicholas Shakespeare loved it so much, he eventually bought a house up the road. By day, Joan led our small group on long, satisfying walks along the windy foreshore, up over cliffs and down dales. By night, we piled around her generous kitchen table, enjoying craft beers and nourishing meals, soaking up Joan's tales and those of her guides.

After that trip, I became a Tassie bolter. Any excuse to get over Bass Strait would do, be it for an evening of cheese-tasting at Hobart's Henry Jones Art Hotel, a lavender farm workshop, or trail-riding through northern Tassie's Meander Valley. I even ended up getting engaged in Tasmania, when my now-husband was swept away by the beauty of the Bay of Fires and my athleisure-wear during the ultimate romantic mini-break.

Walking along Hobart's Salamanca Wharf after my most recent trip – in September to walk the Three Capes Track – the red icebreaker Aurora Australis was in dock, straining against her ropes. Gulls screeched overhead and Macquarie Harbour was bathed in a forlorn end-of-winter light. I pondered how nowhere else combines Tassie's brutal history of outcasts, misfits and human cruelty. It remains the outlaw breakaway piece of the Australian puzzle that will never quite fit. Thank heavens for that.

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