White wallabies and whale watching in bed? Tasmania's Bruny Island has the lot, writes James Jeffrey

TO get to Bruny Island from Hobart, you must first drive through Snug. That such a place exists lifts my heart, which less than an hour ago was palpitating as I stared out the plane window into a cave of black cloud. Inside the mouth of that cave, looking somewhere between small and insignificant, lay Hobart airport. I felt as if I were flying into Mordor, albeit in an aircraft seat and not on the back of a dragon.
All matters Tolkien slip from my mind as I pass through Snug, admiring the signs for the Snug fire brigade, the Snug Post Office and the irresistibly named Snug Exchange. Snug is true to its name and I have crossed its breadth in what feels like 20 seconds, and I'm soon in Kettering, driving onto the ferry to Bruny Island. (Incidentally, if I'd driven a little bit further down the road, I would have finished up in Flowerpot.)
The weather gods are having a grumpy time of it as we move across the dark waters of D'Entrecasteaux Channel. To the north, Mt Wellington's gloomy bulk vanishes into the cloud, while ahead Bruny is clad in sombre shades of green.
I find myself thinking about author Richard Flanagan, whose writing shack is there, somewhere. Apparently he likes to kayak over. I don't know how long it takes him, but the trip on the car ferry is short -- the channel there is so narrow, North Bruny all but nudges the southeast coast of Tasmania.
I'm soon zipping down through North Bruny past Great Bay and a flotilla of black swans, and reaching the Neck, a narrow isthmus of sand and rock that joins what are really two islands. A combination of mistimed roadworks and over-exuberant weather has turned the road into a soft, sandy, spongy adventure. As I struggle across, I think back to the touching pleas from the car rental company that I should not drive on unsurfaced road. There's a lookout halfway across. I climb 239 steps to the top where there is a superb view along the remarkable Neck to Fluted Cape and Adventure Bay on South Bruny. There's also a small monument to Truganini up there, her distinctive face glaring from a cairn of grey pebbles. Incorrectly referred to as the last Tasmanian Aborigine, Truganini had a bloody time of it, her kidnap and rape at 16 by sealers (who also took time out to kill her lover) setting the tone.
Feeling a little quieter, I reach my destination, Inala Sanctuary, a 202ha property owned by zoologist Tonia Cochran. My accommodation is a three-bedroom cottage bordered by a stream and trees quivering with small birds. A curl of smoke rises encouragingly from the chimney.
Cochran -- and what looks like roughly a half hectare of blonde hair -- arrives, and I hop into her four-wheel drive for the trip across to Adventure Bay, a place on the travel itinerary of many explorers, including Abel Tasman, Tobias Furneaux, James Cook and William Bligh, who incidentally planted Tasmania's first apple trees here. French explorer Joseph-Antoine Bruni d'Entrecasteaux disproved Cook's and Bligh's theories that the island was part of mainland Tasmania.
Fortified by cream of leek soup and apple strudel at the Bay Cafe, we wander through the Bligh Museum of Pacific Exploration, home to the astonishing maritime collection of Bruce Hamilton, a Hobart eye surgeon who died in the 1960s.
Cochran leads me to something even more surprising nearby -- a collection of white Bennett's wallabies. Almost but not quite true albinos (a bit of pigmentation gives them a yellow collar), they stand about plumply among the ferns, their overly sensitive pink eyes shielded under half-closed lids. All about us flit scarlet robins, honeyeaters and bumblebees, but it's hard to take my eyes off the wallabies. Cochran tells me there are also some golden possums about.
Away from the bone-coloured sand and the glassy green water of the bay, we head into the bush. South Bruny is on the receiving end of twice as much rainfall as its northern counterpart, allowing it to support far lusher bush than I'd ever expected. Wet sclerophyll and cool temperate rainforest abound and depending on where we stand, we find ourselves dwarfed by stringybarks, white gums, myrtles and sassafras.
We wander through the silence, plucking native currants off bushes and savouring their muted tang. On one side of the path, near an explosion of caramel-coloured toadstools, is a midden of snail shells. Cochran says these are the work of Bassian ground thrushes, which bring native snails there and prepare them for dinner by belting them against the rocks.
Feeling peckish ourselves, we call in at Hiba, which gives me almost as much of a start as the white wallabies. Imagine a 21st-century chateau, complete with turrets, a two-storey cottage for bed-and-breakfast guests, and an open garden stuffed with such a carefully chosen variety of exotic and native plants it would give most botanic gardens a run for their money. Add the fact that this is the heart of a fudge-making enterprise, and you have Hiba (which is Arabic for gift).
Michael Carnes -- who owns it with partner Bob Lavis -- briefly abandons his fudge laboratory to show us around their seaside backyard. Beyond an avenue of young birches spreads Adventure Bay and Cape Queen Elizabeth, an exclamation mark of land with the dot provided by a jagged canine of rock called the Hounds Tooth. As we gorge ourselves on fudge back in the chateau, I reassure myself with the knowledge that if the sugar overload wreaks havoc on my teeth, Lavis is a dentist.
That night, still high on fudge, Cochran and I set out for a bit of wildlife spotting. She goes lightly on the accelerator; there's so much wildlife about it would be way too easy to add to the mountains of roadkill for which Tasmania has something of a reputation as a champion. We find wallabies, eastern quolls (both the pale and the striking dark editions are on show here), tawny frogmouths, rabbits and possums, including a golden possum.
Then there are the fairy penguins, who have a rookery on the Neck. We creep about with torches wrapped in red cellophane, watching them huddling together or disappearing into their burrows, trilling and yowling to each other. (They clam up when stressed.)
I still hear them in my dreams through the night, but they give way to bovine bellowing in the morning. Cochran's cattle are excited about the prospect of breakfast. I'm excited about the sunlight spilling over the mountaintops and transforming the landscape. It overwhelms my normally powerful instinct to stay under the doona.
After a visit to Cloudy Bay and its inviting beach, and Cape Bruny with its lighthouse and magnificently mauled and ragged coastline, our last stop is the Penguin Cafe at Adventure Bay where owners Martin and Mary fill us up with cottage pie and apple crumble. As Mary brings out the coffee, she makes an announcement. ``The day before yesterday we whale-watched from bed,'' she says.
Whale watching from bed? I feel I've been present at the birth of a whole new arm of the tourism industry.

James Jeffrey was a guest of Wilderness Australia and Inala Sanctuary.

James Jeffrey
The Weekend Australian, Edition 1 - Preprints, SAT 05 JUN 2004, Page 03