Book Review: The Forgotten Islands

Title:              The Forgotten Islands

Author:           Michael Veitch

Written:          2011

Publisher:      Penguin Viking

I bought this book on special at the Post Office when I went in to post a letter I had written. It intrigued me about somewhere I knew I hadn’t been to - Tasmania – and it reminded me that, in New Zealand, I have never been to Stewart Island. I wondered if the areas were similar (perhaps another blog later!).

Michael Veitch wrote this years ago, and I could have / should have read it back then, but when I bought it, it was the first time I had seen it. The sub-title on the front says “One man’s voyage into a truly gothic Australia.” Veitch started the book with a tale he was told at age 12, of a young lighthouse assistant vanished off that island. There was no proven truth to how he disappeared, but Veitch decided he wanted to check out the tale.

In Bass Straits area, known as the Bass Strait Triangle, there are over 1,000 ships, schooners, barques and other boats which sank in the “roaring forties” winds which engages the weather and encourages storms. Veitch wrote about some of the most known disasters, and quotes some of the tales from older mariner’s books and the words from some of the plaques which acknowledge the shipwrecks and deaths.

Over his time in his trip around the Bass Strait islands, he took five separate journeys, each of which he has set up with a map of that area: (1) Three Hummock Island; (2) around the Glennie Group but didn’t make it to Deal Island; (3) to Flinders Island; (4) to King Island; and, finally, (5) to Deal Island. Each trip made very interesting reading, and even for someone like me who doesn’t know Tasmania, lots of details. If you are a tourist, then this book would be excellent for you!

The middle of Veitch’s book has some colour photos which are labelled as to where they were taken: Eleanor’s Beach at Three Hummock Island; the broken boat he was on when they didn’t make it to Deal Island; the Strzelecki Range on Flinders Island; the reef at King Island which was responsible for 400 deaths in previous shipwrecks; and his visit to the Deal Island lighthouse and walk on the beach where he thought the tale he had been told at age 12 had ended.

Veitch’s book ends after his fifth trip actually got him to Deal Island. He visited the Museum of Tasmania to talk to a woman there about his tale of the ‘giant squid’. She told him what she knew about giant squids, and he made up his own mind about the tale. It had seemed to intrigue him ever since he was 12, but not making a definitive decision until after his island visits may have been where he was thinking. Veitch has six books that he’s written, and you can check him out on his own website.