Approaching French Island on the ferry at dawn, if you’re lucky you might be greeted by the sight of hundreds of ibis in flight. From far away, they look like starlings in murmuration, the flock constantly swelling and shifting like the sea far beneath them.
Just 70km from Melbourne in the middle of Western Port Bay, French Island is a remote haven hidden in plain sight. While nearby Phillip Island boasts popular holiday attractions, a motorcycle grand prix, a population of nearly 14,000 and a bridge to the mainland, French Island – twice its size – can only be accessed by an expensive, intermittent two-car barge from the small town of Corinella, or passenger ferry from Stony Point. It’s a refuge for native wildlife, and for a small human population – just 139 in the last census – who live entirely off-grid and prefer things to stay quiet.
“We feel we’ve got the best of both worlds,” says Lois Airs, a fourth-generation French Island local. “We’ve got the quiet country life, we’ve got the mainland to go to, it just takes all the organising to have your nights out and your days away.”
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On a Tuesday morning, the only other incoming ferry passengers are on their way to work. Among them are Matt Spark and Wayne Cox, who are locals, even if they don’t live there any more: part of the extended Thompson clan, an island family since 1893. Doug Church is not a local, but he lived there for 15 years. “You fall in love with the place, but you can fall out of love with it too,” Church says.
Histories of French Island do little more than note that it is the traditional land of the Boon Wurrung people. The scraps of available information about its Aboriginal heritage suggest it was a hunting and foraging ground, probably accessed seasonally by canoe. It was called French Island by colonists after the first Europeans known to have stopped there, on the Baudin expedition’s ship Naturaliste in 1802. The ship’s name has since been adopted by the Stony Point ferry.
Isolation cuts both ways
The island’s isolation has long been the source of its appeal and its biggest drawback, for tourists and locals alike.
Rusted, banged-up cars cluster around the ferry terminal, covered in dust from corrugated dirt roads. There is no public transport, and most visitors get around by bicycle, lugged over on the ferry or hired from the island’s only general store, 2km up the road. The store also functions as a post office, accommodation provider and community noticeboard. There is no pub, no police station, no town water, mains power or waste collection. The closest doctor is on the mainland.
“A lot of people don’t know about it,” says Dan Walker from the cab of his ute, halfway down a dirt track. He works for a contractor with Parks Victoria to manage weeds in the national park, which covers two-thirds of the island. “You say, ‘oh I’m working at French Island again’, and they ask, ‘What’s that?’”
Walker warns us to watch out for tiger snakes. Just over the ridge by a water hole, scores of royal spoonbills preen.
The first non-Aboriginal residents of the island were pastoralists running sheep and cattle, which (the stories say) they mustered to the mainland by swimming them through a shallow part of the bay at low tide. They cleared old growth trees for grazing land, burned mangroves to make barilla ash for soap and glass production, and grew chicory, a root vegetable used as a coffee substitute.
In 1915, the island became home to McLeod’s prison farm, a self-sustaining low-security jail. After it closed in 1976, the tumbledown cells and administrative buildings were used as a youth camp, then an eco-lodge. In 2018, the state government sold the heritage-listed site to a Chinese consortium that had plans to develop it into a large-scale resort.
French Island is an unincorporated territory: there is no local council (or rates levied) and planning permits are managed by the state government. But remaining effectively self-governed and objecting to large-scale development are core principles of the island’s elected representatives, the French Island Community Association. The community hated the resort proposal, and when the consortium hit difficulties, the project fell into stasis. The prison remains undeveloped and inaccessible, surrounded by barbed wire and warning signs.
When tourists come, it’s for the wildlife. French Island is part of the Western Port Biosphere, a Unesco-listed environmental reserve. Its whole shoreline and much of its waters are recognised under the Ramsar Convention for their importance for migratory waders and other seabirds. Orange-bellied parrots have been seen in the salt marshes. Cape Barren geese honk and masked lapwings swoop over the paddocks, while echidnas amble around in the bracken.
Koalas were introduced in the 1890s, and liked the island so much there are now far too many of them, sparking calls for interventions such as removal or sterilisation before they cause an ecological disaster and die of hunger.
“They’re starving, and you find them in weird trees, like fruit trees or melaleucas – trees that they never, ever would go up,” says the president of the French Island Landcare group, Sue Jenkins.
“They’ve killed a lot of trees. I’ve got a beautiful 70-year-old swamp gum up there on the road and it’s practically dead. Just in one season they’ve eaten all the leaves off and I don’t know if it’s going to recover from that.”
‘I love being in nature’
Jenkins bought her 100-acre (40-hectare) island farm in 2001, when she was working as a caterer in Melbourne. “I bought it as a weekender. What I wanted was a view,” she says. She only realised on settlement day just how much land she had bought. “I didn’t even realise what a hundred acres looked like! … I had to learn new skills for sure.”
She taught herself about land management, set up the house with solar power and rainwater tanks, planted native trees, and bought cattle to keep the grass down. Earlier this year she sold her terrace in Clifton Hill to move to the island full-time – “which I was slightly terrified about”, she says. “But I love it.
“I love being in nature. The birds, the soil, the pasture, the cows, the beautiful views. The way you can see the weather coming in, the big skies.”
The island also has the rare benefit of being fox-free. A long-term program to eradicate feral cats reduced numbers enough that researchers could release 50 endangered eastern-barred bandicoots there in 2019. They are now thriving, as are the island’s long-nosed potoroos.
The absence of foxes is what led Michael Garwood to set up here, to protect his kids – goat kids, that is.
“Years ago, about 2012, my wife said, ‘you know, we’re spending a lot of money on yoghurt and ricotta and feta, and so on’. And I could it make myself if I had a goat’,” Garwood says.
His wife didn’t want just any goat; she wanted Nigerian dwarf goats, a breed developed in the US known for its rich milk and manageable size. Australian quarantine restrictions prohibit importing live goats, so Garwood investigated embryo importation. “It is very difficult and very expensive,” he says.
A quarter of a million dollars later, the Garwoods became the first people to successfully import Norwegian dwarf goat genetic material into Australia. They have been breeding them ever since.
An age-old problem
Public interest in French Island has been growing, despite its isolation. Not all the locals appreciate that. But Airs thinks some new faces are necessary.
Chooks, ducks, geese and guinea fowl cluck and honk around Airs as she chats. Island ephemera, kitsch and handwritten notes are dotted around their yard. Her husband, Keith, tinkers underneath an old bus, a legacy of the island tours the pair used to run, complete with Devonshire teas in the old chicory kiln on their property.
Raised on the island, Airs moved to the mainland with her parents when she was 15, returning with Keith in her early 20s to look after her grandmother. She expected to stay for two years at most. Now 75, she’s still here.
“I like the mix of people that we have now, except I’d like to see younger families,” Airs says. The local primary school currently has no students, and the median age of residents is 52, which is 14 years older than the rest of the country. A community group has recently been formed to work out how to help island residents age in place.
“What I feel that I can contribute to French Island is to talk to people and encourage them to go on a committee to continue the island, to keep going the way it is,” Airs says. “Some things are hard to try and get younger people in. But if people put up their hand and do a little bit, things get done.”
“It’s not for everybody,” Jenkins acknowledges. “I think it would drive some people crazy to live in a place like this, but I love it.”
“People say, oh, don’t you feel lonely? I just don’t feel like that at all. I’ve got plenty of neighbours and friends over here too if I do ever feel like that. But I just don’t.”