When the English navigator Matthew Flinders first mapped a large island off the coast of southern Australia, he spotted some remarkable rocks high above a bay where there were many seals. The bay he named Seal Bay. As for the rocks, he called them Remarkable Rocks. The interior of the island was teeming with kangaroos. So when he came to naming the island – well, you’ve got it.
You can’t blame Flinders. He had an awful lot of space to fill on his new, empty maps. The original Aboriginal inhabitants of Kangaroo Island had left some 2,000 years before. Did they die from disease or cross to the mainland? No one is sure. They left stone flints and tools, but no names. So Flinders did what settlers tended to do: ate the kangaroos and gave lots of names to places. The capital, Kingscote, was the first settlement in the new province that took up a big chunk of south Australia. This became a state and they called it South Australia.
The tendency to be a bit literal continues to this day. A new lodge has just been constructed overlooking the Southern Ocean. Its name is Southern Ocean Lodge. And its opening is big news. For the last 150 years, Kangaroo Island (KI) has gone quietly about its quiet business: farming, fishing and, latterly, wildlife conservation. Not much happens. But in December 2007, lightning strikes caused widespread bushfires. It’s a large island – three times the size of Singapore – and a fifth of it was scorched. That the disaster wasn’t much worse – only one life was lost, a driver who missed a turning and was caught up in the rampaging fire – was greatly down to the Herculean efforts of rescuers and firefighters who flooded in from all over Australia and beyond, as well as its villages and remarkable ecology.
The opening of Southern Ocean Lodge this year was a statement of regeneration and new act of pioneering in South Australia. For generations of Adelaide schoolchildren, KI was a place where they went on picnics. It wasn’t somewhere you’d expect to find a supercool groovy retro-style eco-lodge. Yet here it is: a single-storey building sitting high above Hanson Bay. If Jeff Tracy of Thunderbirds decided to reinvent himself as a 21st-century eco-entrepreneur, battling climate change rather than the Hood, this is what his HQ would look like.
A line of low bungalows files up the thickly wooded ridge, ending in a semicircular lodge, which at first sight seems to be mainly cushions and windows. When you set foot in a luxury resort, that initial ooh and aah factor is vital. Here the oohs and aahs are off the scale. Ooh – look at the spray crashing on the beach below in the blinding light; aah, clock those swish banquettes – and ooh, OK, as all the drinks are free, a Clare Riesling will do the job.
So here is my journey’s beginning: at the southern tip of the continent with not much between here and Antarctica. My feet are propped up on a huge cushion outside my suite on a pristine white limestone terrace. A long and scary ant-like creature, three times longer and spikier than it should be, crawls fast towards the table, then disappears (I hate it when things like that suddenly disappear in Australia). The scrub is bright green and yellow in the afternoon sun – and then there is a huge thunderclap. A 15ft turquoise wave is crashing on to the shore and three dolphins emerge from its swell. They float through the waves like a family on a stroll along the beach. The waves build, engorge and swell, the deep green becomes cloudy as it gathers up tons of sand and slams it down in one long fluorescent demolition job. I think I’ll take up the literal naming habits of the European settlers and call this Nice Place.
Kingscote nearly became the capital of the new state until it lost out to a more practical alternative. On the mainland coast, there was a large expanse of marshy flatlands fringed by long beaches. To the east there were shady hills and fertile ground. This became Adelaide.
My next stop is a hotel where Adelaide started: the seaside suburb of Glenelg, where the first ship from England touched land in 1836. Glenelg was also where the South Australians earned their reputation for enlightenment and progressiveness in an often lawless new country of landgrabbers and convicts. South Australia was to be a place of free settlers following the principles set down by the English reformer Edward Gibbon Wakefield, who believed the colonies should provide a place of refuge for workers from the crowded and insanitary cities. At Glenelg, the new governor declared the native Aboriginals would have the same rights as the settlers.
In time, Adelaide became known for its respectable conservatism. But Jane Lomax-Smith, the minister for the City of Adelaide, and herself an English emigrant, thinks the state’s progressive, even radical history isn’t sufficiently well-known. ‘It was an experimental colony,’ she tells me. ‘The first place to introduce secret ballots. The first to give land rights to Aboriginal people and allow them to vote. The first place to give votes to women, in 1894, and to allow them property rights.’
