An Island Off an Island

Why did we choose to call our blog ‘An island off an island’ ? Australian readers may want to go and make a cup of tea right now and avoid the geography lesson, but for our friends overseas who have written to say they’ve been looking at maps to work it out here goes!

Bruny Island ( the first “island”in the title) is just off the east coast of the southern most Australian state of Tasmania ( the second island referred to). Bruny is just below the gorgeous and historic state capital, Hobart. We take no credit in coming up with the name – its part of a Bruny tourism strategy and I suspect has been around for a while .If we’d been aiming for correctness we could have added a third “off an island” as mainland Australia is an island continent so it would have read “an island, off an island, off an island”.

At times I have added “at the bottom of the world” to my narrative ( not original, I heard Ernie Dingo use it in a documentary on SBS and added it to my arsenal). This isn’t technically true as there are places in South America that are much further south – and then there’s Antarctica!

Bruny is actually two land massses (North and South Bruny), joined by an isthmus known as The Neck which is very Instagramable! From top to bottom Bruny is about 100km long. We are at the very top of North Bruny at Dennes Point (pronounced Dens).From the house we look north across the mouth of the Derwent River to Mt Wellington and Hobart. To the west we look across the D’Entrecasteaux Channel to Snug and Tinderbox and our southerly view takes in the farm land leading down to Nebraska Beach.

A huge thanks to our lovely friend Kira Brown from Sauce Design for designing the site and creating the map. If you look closely you’ll find a certain dog swimming in the sea off the coast. Special prize to the first person to spot and report on it.

Love from Bruny