Kangaroo Island has the cliffs too. Cliffs to put a stab of fear in your heart just by looking at them; cliffs that rear 200 metres from the surf in some places. Ramparts of shining stone haughtily indifferent to the tantrums of the Southern Ocean which has hurled so many shipwrecks in tribute at their jagged feet. These terrifying cliffs have helped define the character of Kangaroo Island. They make it a natural fortress. They discourage the fainthearted, are merciless to the foolhardy and encourage a siege mentality in those who live there.
Beyond those fortress walls I also found it to be a place of surprising romance, great spectacle ... and drama. Drama most Australians would never imagine could come from these chill, grey southern waters. Drama to rival all the swashbuckling sea stories to sail out of the Caribbean with the buccaneers of another era. Because it was not always just a natural island fortress. Kangaroo Island was also a pirate fortress.
VIEWED FROM ABOVE, KANGAROO Island resembles a giant turtle swimming eastward across the mouth of Gulf St Vincent. It is Australia's third largest island after Tasmania and Melville. With most of its beaches along the north shore and its great cliffs along the south it looks rather like a half-submerged wedge, and visitors are invariably surprised by its size -156 km long, 57 km wide at its widest, barely 1 km at its narrowest where the turtle's head joins its body, and 4409 sq. km of land mass.
Officially it was discovered by Matthew Flinders in March 1802, during a mapping expedition aboard the Investigator. He named it Kangaroo Island because of the many kangaroos he saw and it was subsequently colonised in 1836 by the South Australian Company, a private venture formed to encourage investment in the new province.
Unofficially, the island was discovered at least a decade before Flinders by freebooting British, French and American whalers. Shanghaied from the waterfront taverns and bordellos of Europe and the Americas, the crews of these ships were little more than cutthroats. Shipboard discipline often meant flogging, food was awful, conditions appalling, the work was hard and dangerous and there was no pay - only a share of the ship's catch, if it made any. It's hardly surprising that men jumped ship on an island with a good water supply and teeming with game.
Kangaroo Island was big enough to accommodate dozens of these runaways and it did. They were joined by escaped convicts from New South Wales and Tasmania, some of whom brought abducted Aboriginal women, called "lubras", with them. These renegades traded seal and kangaroo skins with passing ships for rum, tobacco, firearms, tools and other necessities.
One, a black American nicknamed "Abyssinian Jack", used his lubras as slaves to scrape salt from the island's two principal salt lagoons which he traded to visiting skippers who used it to preserve animal hides. Another, George "Fireball" Bates (so-called because of his flaming red hair and whiskers), deserted from the Royal Navy and led murderous raids on mainland villages for the handsome women of the coastal Narinyerri tribe. Legend says one of these women escaped by swimming 14 km back to the mainland with her baby clinging to her neck.
Around the waterfront in Hobart and Sydney the islanders were known as Straitsmen, from Investigator Strait which separates the north shore of the island from the boot of Yorke Peninsula. They were also less flatteringly called "sea rats", and clad in wallaby skin moccasins and smelly kangaroo hides they looked the part.
The worst of these sea rats was John "Black Jack" Williams, an Englishman reputed to have murdered an entire ship's crew stranded near Port Lincoln. It was Black Jack who first used the island's cliffs as a means of enforcing discipline. One of his men, a Portuguese mulatto known only as Antonio, had talked too much about Black Jack's affairs to a visiting ship's crew. Days later Antonio was lowered over a high cliff to skin some seals spotted basking on the rocks below. After sending the skins aloft Antonio began his long haul back, only to be told as he neared the top that he had wagged his tongue once too often. Black Jack cut the rope.
Major Lockyer's report in 1827 warned that the Kangaroo Island pirates had become so numerous, well armed and bold that it would soon be dangerous for even a heavily armed vessel to venture past its shores.
Britain had already earmarked the island for colonisation to discourage any grand designs by the French or Americans along Australia's vast, unprotected southern coast with its vital sea lanes from Cape Hope to Sydney. Spurred by Lockyer's warnings the British dispatched a company of soldiers and at the end of 1827 the worst of the Straits' pirates were taken back to Port Jackson in chains.
