“Riles, check out this one.” I’m crouching over a rockpool. A mangled, tumbled conch is thrust into my sightline. My father looks pleased with his find, a sunbleached coil that barely resembles the shell it once was.
“I’ve always preferred the inside of shells to the outside,” Dad says, turning it over. “Isn’t it incredible that a creature builds all of this around themselves?”
We keep combing the pocked, tessellated shore of Picnic Island, a one-hectare seabird rookery and private rustic luxury escape a kilometre offshore from Coles Bay on Tasmania’s east coast. Dad gently picks up a small crab that sits unfazed in his hand until it scurries away, then collects fractures of a sea urchin dome smashed between cairns.
The last time we were in Coles Bay together was over two decades ago, when we visited with my mother and American aunt. There’s a picture of me as tall as Dad’s knee, in rolled-up denim overalls, splashing in the rocky pools off nearby Muirs Beach. Dad was still in the navy, kept away for long stretches on ships as big as small towns. This morning, we watched seals from leather benches on a gun-metal- grey Van Diemen speedboat with Sam Graudins, Picnic Island’s adept and accommodating host, before mooring at one of two timber jetties on the island, which hosts up to eight people in all-inclusive comfort.
Dad joined the military at 15 and traversed the globe for 23 years. He and Mom, who left rural Illinois at 17 and worked around the world before I was born, taught me how to travel. Dad sent postcards from Vietnam, Hong Kong and Europe. He took us on adventures near and far, and impressed upon me the importance of packing an extra zip-lock into my bag, turning my undies inside out when delays became days, and unashamedly pocketing an apple from the hotel buffet for mid-afternoon fuel. By the time I left home at 17, I’d been to over a dozen countries, typically with a carry-on, surplus socks and Dad a few paces ahead of me.
On the island, bar the boat squeaking against rubber buoys or the occasional helicopter flying above en route to Wineglass Bay, our peace is uninterrupted. It’s Dad, me and the penguins for six rounds of cards, a deep-dive into the state of the world, and stretches of companionable fireside silence.
By the time I left home at 17, I’d been to over a dozen countries, typically with a carry-on, surplus socks and Dad a few paces ahead of me.
RILEY WILSON
I wake to blindingly crisp skies. In the communal lodge, known as the Birdhouse due to its elevation and large louvred windows, I make coffee for Dad and tea for me and stroll to his newly built one-bedroom suite (my studio suite, designed within the structure of the island’s old shacks, is on the other side of the island). True to form, Dad is already dressed and prepared for the day.
We loop the walking track before breakfast, marvelling at the pink granite Hazards sparkling in the morning sun. This view alone could surely convince a jet-setting traveller to purchase an island while on holidays – exactly how Picnic Island’s latest ownership resulted. Dad tops homemade chai Bircher with berries while I juice carrots, oranges and apples. He’s sliced blueberries on top of my muesli, like he did with grapes for me as a kid. Some things, wonderfully, never change.
Our plans, however, do. Sam had scheduled us in for a whisky tasting, winery visit and guided tour of a local oyster lease, but we forgo the tasting for a trek to the rocky, peach-coloured cove of Sleepy Bay in Freycinet National Park. Studying lichen-covered rock faces and the ocean’s surface, Dad spots textures invisible to me.
“Look into the land, not at it. That’s how you see things, Riles,” he says.
“See its soul?” I quip.
He replies with grave seriousness. “Exactly.”
After lunch at Devil’s Corner winery, we head to Melshell Oyster Shack in Dolphin Sands, where owner Cassie Melrose proffers a chain-mail glove and her knife. I owe my obsession with oysters to Dad, who would hoist me onto his shoulders for jaunts through Melbourne’s Queen Victoria Market, and Dad’s beloved uncle, who taught me to love the taste of raw oysters. I shuck the final bivalve and pass it to Dad, who declines.
“I know how much you love them. All yours.”
This picnic table, surrounded by discarded shells, reminds me of a lunch in France. Driving through the countryside, we paused next to a pétanque court. Dad sliced tomatoes and fat burrata with a pocketknife he kept in his sock while my brother picked leaves off a basil plant we’d bought and Mom tore bread. The sun-kissed memory remains one of my fondest.
Back in our island retreat, private chef Mark Jensen (of Sydney’s now-closed Red Lantern) chats with us as he stacks Bass Strait scallops – two to a shell – in homemade XO sauce and serves rich, vibrant fish curry with rounds of crisp roti. An indulgent tiramisu and three-cheese platter await us after the table is cleared.
Sated, Dad and I lie on parallel couches, me nursing a postprandial hot chocolate and him a dram. Penguins rustle outside.
“Shall we explore?” I ask, waving a red-light torch.
He swings his legs off the couch.
“Absolutely.”
I follow him into the dark.
The writer travelled as a guest of Picnic Island and Tourism Tasmania.
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Riley Wilson is a freelance journalist and editor specialising in travel, food, architecture and agriculture. She is a former desk editor at The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, and the creator of the Greater Good newsletter.Connect via email.
