See the rebirth of Kangaroo Island up close on a new walk
The resilience of South Australia’s KI is on abundant display on this gentle, four-day walk.
Of all the things I shouldn’t be shocked to run into on Kangaroo Island, a roo would have to be right up there. But there’s something symbolic about the western grey we encounter on the windswept cliffs above the Southern Ocean, sipping impassively from a puddle of rainwater that’s collected on the porcelain-white limestone. Misty showers and sea fog have been drifting in all morning, smothering the headlands and limiting visibility, so the animal appears before us almost as an apparition, materialising from the murk. He finishes his drink, turns his head towards us for a moment, then slowly bounds away, evaporating into the mist.
If this coastline feels forgotten and eerie, that’s because it is. Aboriginal people abandoned Australia’s third-largest island when it separated from the mainland 10,000 years ago, but they gave it a name: Karta Pintingga, or Island of the Dead. In 1899, a ship called the Loch Sloy was wrecked on the rocks offshore from where my hiking group is standing, with just four of the 34 men on board making it to shore alive. One of the survivors spent two weeks wandering through the wilderness, surviving on pig face, penguin and brackish water, until he stumbled upon a homestead, his tongue black and swollen. We’re retracing his route.
I’ve joined eight other hikers on the Australian Walking Company’s Kangaroo Island Signature Walk, a four-day guided hike along two thirds of the 66km Kangaroo Island Wilderness Trail, open for business again after being destroyed in the black summer bushfires of 2019-20, which burned almost half the island, and virtually all 33,000ha of Flinders Chase National Park.
I was one of the first to hike the trail when it opened in 2016, carrying an 18kg pack and pitching my tent at plush, purpose-built campsites. I have wonderful memories of the rugged coastal beauty, of cooking meals in solar-powered kitchens while scarlet robins danced about in the trees, and drifting off to sleep to the sound of the pounding surf. I nearly cried when I heard it was gone, then nearly cried again when I learned how hard people had worked to rebuild it.
The trail’s reopening in December last year – along with the rebuild of Southern Ocean Lodge, which the trail skirts – marked both a physical and psychological milestone in the island’s recovery. I’m excited to see how the bush has regenerated, but I’m also feeling a bit smug, because this time I’ll be walking in a lot more comfort, carrying only a daypack and sleeping in a real bed. Oh, and someone else will be doing the cooking. It feels like cheating, but I figure I’ve paid my dues.
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