Deal Island is a dot in Bass Strait best known as Tasmania’s most remote National Park and for having a lighthouse that sits higher above sea level than any other in the southern hemisphere. But it has other stories to tell.
This speck of land between Tasmania and the mainland has seen more than its share of tragedy. Dotted around the island are graves, and their stories include a shooting death, a world war and family tragedy.
photographer CRAIG SEARLE
My wife Debbie and I are back on Deal Island for our second shift as Parks and Wildlife Service caretakers. After a nervous landing on what is a challenging and short airstrip, I stepped out of the plane to start our three-month stay and felt a sense of coming home, of belonging, of feeling completely comfortable with the thought of spending winter in isolation on this remote outpost. I think I must have been a lighthouse keeper in a previous life.
As we wave goodbye to the plane, I ponder that we are going to be alone, in the depths of winter, on a remote island where the dead outnumber the living nine to two.
Garden Cove, at the northern end of the island, is a spectacularly beautiful place. A freshwater stream trickles into the bay, crossing a pristine beach that is framed by steep headlands covered in sheoak. This was the site of the island vegetable garden when lighthouse keepers were in occupation, and in the early days of the British occupation of Van Diemen’s Land, it was home to a sealer’s camp – men who roamed the Bass Strait islands hunting seals for their skins.
Sealers were accused of abducting many indigenous women, and George Augustus Robinson came to Deal Island in April, 1831, to try to relocate the women on the island. Among them was Murreringhe, who had been taken from her home on Bruny Island in 1826 by an African-American named James Baker. There were a number of sealers, convicts and a Maori woman on Deal Island at the time of Robinson’s visit. What transpired time we know from Robinson’s journal entries. While it is difficult to be clear about exact times and dates, what is clear is that one of the sealers, Bob Gambell, shot and killed Murreringhe, probably shortly before Robinson’s arrival.
Robinson did not witness the shooting, but recorded in his journal what he was told by an American sealer named John Taylor, “The American sealer went to the northern side of the island to look for the New Zealand woman that he had left whilst he went to port. Returned disappointed, not able to find her. Said the sealers had taken her away with them, and all his skins. Said they tried all they could to injure him. Said there was two convicts amongst them. Said that Gamble shot the woman from inside the house, he was firing at a stump and the woman jumped up from behind the stump and run into the house when she was shot and took the man she was living with by the collar and then dropped down dead. Saw the grave where she was buried.”
No evidence of the sealer’s camp or Murreringhe’s grave remains.
During my first visit to Deal Island in 2021, I heard about another grave at Garden Cove. A passenger on the ship Flying Squirrel, J Stewart, died on board and was brought ashore and buried in the sand dunes. The original wooden cross, with metal lettering, sits in the island museum, bearing the initials JS and the date September 30, 1849.
If one leaves Garden Cove and walks south, past the airstrip and the lighthouse keeper’s houses, there is a clearing next to a walking track, shaded by sheoaks and surrounded by poa grass. Here is the grave of 11-year-old Fanny Baker. The daughter of the Reverend Samuel and Mrs Harriet Baker, Fanny died aboard the emigrant ship Lima in early October, 1849. The family was on its way to New South Wales to start a new life. Fanny died of dropsy, a medical condition that has disappeared from the lexicon these days. Most likely she died as the result of an infection that ultimately affected her kidneys and heart. It may have been as a result of scarlet fever which was also known as scarlatina dropsy, and was one of the leading causes of death in children in those times. As the ship was near Deal Island at the time, she was brought ashore and buried.
Not far from Fanny’s grave, overlooking East Cove and the jetty that was his connection to the outside world, is the grave of John Hague. He was head lightkeeper when he died on September 23, 1924. His wife Ada, fortuitously the daughter of an undertaker, showed the assistant keepers how to build a coffin using an old table top and what little timber they had on the island. After the assistants dug a grave, Ada conducted the burial service for her husband. Such was the lot of a lighthouse keeper’s wife. And having coped with all that, the lighthouse authorities, in an act of callous indifference, waited three weeks before sending a ship to the island to collect her and then charged Ada cartage for herself and her two daughters from the wharf to their residence in Hobart.
At the southern end of Deal Island, perched 305 metres above sea level, sits the lighthouse. In the early days of this light station, the assistant keepers had their quarters near to the tower. These buildings were stone, convict-built structures, and the remains are visible today. Nestled amongst the ruins, only metres from the lighthouse, is a tiny grave marked with a white cross. This poignant marker is the grave of Recamia Jackson who died on February 25, 1881, aged just 16 days. Her father, Robert Jackson, was the head keeper at the time and his wife Mary probably the only woman on the island. If life on these remote islands was hard for the lightkeepers, it was even harder for their wives. One can only imagine what it must have been like for Mary to have to give birth in such a place, and then to cope with the death of that baby days later.
The Jacksons were transferred to the Table Cape lighthouse in 1888 where Robert was the first head keeper of the new light. Tragedy struck again and their 14-month old son Bertie is buried near the Table Cape lighthouse.
. . .
In 1943 the world was at war but on Deal Island, life for the lightkeepers and their families had not changed. Until the morning of September 23, that is, when the war came to Deal Island with shocking suddenness. On that fateful morning head keeper Henry Ford noticed an air force plane flying near the lighthouse. Shortly after the plane flew out of sight behind the tower, Ford’s assistant called to say he had heard an explosion.
The two men immediately started searching the steep and densely vegetated slopes below the lighthouse. The discovery of wreckage and two bodies confirmed their worst fears. Ford notified the authorities and the next day a mine sweeper anchored near the island and a contingent of air force personnel were guided to the crash site where they located two further bodies.
The four airmen killed were Sergeant Norman Graham, 22; Flight Sergeant Joseph Docherty, 30; Pilot Officer Kenneth Cowling, 19; and Leading Aircraftman and gunner Peter Hendrickson, 21. They were flying an Airspeed Oxford aircraft on an anti-submarine exercise. Because of the terrain, a decision was made to bury the four men near the crash site.
Some eight months later, on June 8, 1944, the bodies were exhumed and re-buried at Springvale War Cemetery, Victoria. On Anzac Day in 2021, I hiked to the site, where the wreckage of the plane is still visible and where a cross marks the original graves, and held my own dawn service to honour the airmen.
Deal Island is now quiet and peaceful and as I move about carrying out my caretaking duties, it is hard to imagine it any other way. But these nine deaths are a reminder of different times. They chart the history of Deal Island from the initial small camp at Garden Cove and the early days of the British colony, through the 144 years of the lighthouse era and finally a world at war.
So much tragedy for such a small, remote island.
Craig Searle is an eighth-generation Tasmanian who proudly hails from convict stock. A teacher for 31 years, he retired in 2011, having spent the last part of his career as an outdoor education specialist. He has a passion for wilderness, remote places and lighthouses and has spent two winters on Maatsuyker Island. He lives in Scottsdale with Debbie, his wife and partner in a lifetime of adventures.
