Penneshaw- The charms of a Kangaroo Island gateway: Kangaroo Island, South Australia

The gleaming blue and white Sealion 2000 ferry injects a stream of three or four thousand tourists every week into the village of Penneshaw. As its seaview visitor centre reminds us, it is the "Gateway" to a region that has put South Australia firmly on the international tourist map. The centrepiece of the information shop's heritage display is the original Frenchman's Rock, carved exactly 200 years ago when Captain Nicholas Baudin literally put Kangaroo Island on the map.

The English navigator Matthew Flinders began the task the year before when he discovered the northern coast here and named it Kangaroo Island in gratitude for the delightful regale the great marsupials provided (they'd gone without fresh meat for 4 months). Then, just across Backstairs Passage, there was the famous encounter between the two explorers, when Flinders told Baudin about the freshwater springs on what is now Penneshaw's attractive and protected sandy beach, and so The Napoleonic expedition was back in the next summer.

They liked it so much they spent four weeks here in January 1803, during which time one of the sailors carved the now famous message in the jagged vertical shafts of volcanic rock. The small white domed shrine over the site dates from early in the twentieth century, and recent public artwork brings us back to the idea of Anse des Sources, Baudin's cove of springs. He picked up kangaroos here to transport home for science, but the real point of the mission was to give us the French coast of Kangaroo Island, with its southern side adorned with symbolic Napoleonic names like Cape Gantheaume, Vivonne Bay and Cape de Couedic.

Flinders and Baudin's charts brought to Kangaroo Island a ragtag mob of whalers and sealers who camped in protected bays, or even stayed for good. That era is symbolically recalled above the beach at Penneshaw with the recent installation of a long seat carved from the trunk of an ancient river red gum. Bev Willson is a strong promoter of the story being told.

"Yes, it's very important", she noted as we sat together on the bench. We call it the second wave when the sealers came and and some settled here. Some were convicts and they brought aboriginal women with them - some from Tasmania, and some captured from the mainland.

She senses that some of this history has been deliberately neglected, but asks that this not be a place for judgement.

That's the symbolism of this seat. We call it a Contemplation Seat, because all we can do is think about that period of history and think about what we do know and be aware of it.

When it comes to the township of Penneshaw, it is really a tale of two villages. On the headland overlooking the almost circular inlet, Christmas Cove, and what the residents call old Penneshaw, I met Ray Swanson, who has just written a new signposted trail for the town. "Why Old Penneshaw?" I asked. "Largely, it was a matter of where the first port was", he explained. "This was the only part of the coast where they could bring their vessels close in."

The ketches stayed offshore, and the dray horses waded in to meet the rowing boats loaded with supplies or wheat bags for export. The village rose in the 1860's near a former cottage built above the rocky coast. "Fireball" Bates jumped ship more than a dozen years before Governor Hindmarsh declared things official in South Australia, and he lived here for many years. Ray pointed to another connection with the unofficial "second wave".

"That's Mary Seymour's cottage, the daughter of Nathaniel Thomas and his aboriginal wife, Betty. Mary moved here from Antechamber Bay and farmed behind her home here."

The new trail details the nineteenth century farmeršs hamlet above Christmas Cove. Remote, but very picturesque, it includes an old schoolhouse turned National Trust museum and a simple painted-iron church perched above the coastline. One substantial survivor on the main road to the rest of K.I is now serving as a B and B. Beautifully restored, Surbiton House, was built by a multi-talented pioneer, Harry Bates.

"He had a little post office and ran it as a boarding house on the rise above the port", Ray Swanson observed. "It was also a general store, and more importantly for the sailors, he had a wine saloon in the front room."

Today's tourist invasion starts wherethe new Penneshaw did. Shifting the focus of the port action, a new jetty was completed in 1902, projectng into the bay at the other end of the beach from Frenchman's Rock. Up the hill from the jetty, the new town rapidly rose. The Penneshaw Hotel is a typical rambling country pub, celebrating its centenary. Across the road that takes ferry passengers to the rest of the island, Grimshaw's general store (now enhanced by a verandah cafe) is going stronger than ever , and along North Terrace facing the sea, the old Sorrento guest house is all but hidden within the upgrade and extensions to the two storey Sorrento Resort. New Penneshaw is a heritage town with all the mod cons, including some interesting cafes.

In the evening, mind you, you share the streets, and up to a kilometre inland with a nocturnal army of Little Penguins returning to their burrows from a long day at sea. Nightly tours to learn more about them are an essential part of the Penneshaw experience. They are nature's ambassadors for the town , joined now by the hundreds of Tammar Wallabies that come out into the new Baudin Conservation Park, a coastal walk out of town.

While it is the gateway to Kangaroo Island's headline destinations, Penneshaw has its own colourful story to tell.

Details:

Gateway Information Centre
Penneshaw, South Australia,
ph. 1800 811
Web: www.tourkangarooisland.com.au

Kangaroo Island Sealink Travel
440 King William St., Adelaide, SA, 5000
Bookings ph. 13 13 01
Email: kiexpert@sealink.com.au
Web: www.sealink.com.au