Bruny Island (lunawuni to the Nuenonne people) is southern Tasmania's wild, gourmet getaway: it's actually two islands, North and South, joined by a narrow and spectacular sandy isthmus, The Neck, topped by dunes where penguins nest. In a single day you can combine artisan cheese, oysters, whisky and chocolate with wind-lashed cliffs, historic lighthouses and marine wildlife watching.
North Bruny is gentler and more agricultural, with gourmet producers along the road; South Bruny is wilder, with South Bruny National Park, the 1836 Cape Bruny lighthouse and some of Tasmania's most dramatic coastline. Between the two, The Neck has a lookout reached by a staircase that takes in the whole island and, at dusk in season, lets you watch the penguins return to their burrows.
It's a destination that brings together nature, history and flavour. Wildlife cruises skirt cliffs and sea caves among seals, dolphins and birds; the food trail is one of the best in Australia; and the history, that of the Nuenonne people and of Truganini, one of their best-known figures, gives it a depth that goes far beyond the postcard. You get there on a comfortable ferry from near Hobart.
The island is Country of the Nuenonne people, part of the south-eastern Tasmanian Aboriginal people; Mangana, Truganini's father, was their leader when the Europeans arrived. Abel Tasman sighted it in 1642, Furneaux anchored in Adventure Bay in 1773 (and named it after his ship), and in 1792 the Frenchman Bruni D'Entrecasteaux confirmed it was an island and gave it his name. More on the Bruny Island history page.
Read the full history ↓The island south of the mainland, once Van Diemen's Land: home to one of the most feared penal colonies of the empire and the scene of the tragic Black War against the Palawa people. Today it is a haven of wild nature, with more than a third of its area protected as a World Heritage Site.
Read the history of Tasmania →They depart from Port Arthur, 51 km away. If you book from this link we earn a commission and you pay no more.
No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Before it carried the name of a French navigator, the island was lunawuni, home of the Nuenonne people, one of the Aboriginal bands of south-east Tasmania. The Nuenonne had lived on the island and along the shores of the channel for thousands of years, as hunter-gatherers whose way of life was suited to sea, forest and mountain. Aboriginal Tasmanians were one of the most isolated human populations on the planet. They were cut off from mainland Australia around 10,000 years ago when Bass Strait formed, and they had their own culture, technologies and languages.
The island offered plenty: shellfish, seals, seabirds and their eggs, as well as land plants and animals. The Nuenonne moved around lunawuni following the seasons and the resources, and kept up ties of trade and kinship with the neighbouring bands on the nearby mainland. As in the rest of Tasmania, fire was a key tool for managing the landscape, keeping open spaces clear and helping the hunt.
When the first Europeans arrived, the leader of the Nuenonne was Mangana. His daughter, born around 1812, would become one of the best-known and most tragic figures in Aboriginal Australian history: Truganini. Her name is now inscribed at the lookout on the isthmus of The Neck. It's a reminder that the island's beauty for tourists rests on a deep and painful human history.
Few places in Australia drew so many great navigators as this island. The first European to sight it was the Dutchman Abel Tasman, in November 1642, though he never worked out that it was an island. More than a century later, in March 1773, the Briton Tobias Furneaux had become separated from Cook's expedition, and he became the first European to land. He anchored in a bay that he named Adventure Bay, after his ship, the Adventure.
James Cook himself stopped at Adventure Bay in 1777, on his third and final voyage. In 1788 and 1792 Captain William Bligh arrived, the same Bligh of the famous mutiny on the Bounty. At Adventure Bay he planted Australia's first apple trees, a hint of the fruit-growing that Tasmania would later be known for. Adventure Bay became a regular stop for expeditions exploring these southern waters.
The island got its lasting name in 1792 from the French explorer Bruni D'Entrecasteaux, who confirmed that lunawuni was indeed an island, separated from the rest of Tasmania by a channel. Both the island and the channel (D'Entrecasteaux Channel) bear his name, and over time 'Bruni' was anglicised to 'Bruny'. Behind those European names, the Nuenonne name and history were left unspoken for a long time.
Truganini's story sums up the tragedy of the Aboriginal Tasmanians. She was born on Bruny around 1812, the daughter of the Nuenonne leader Mangana, and as a child and teenager she lived through the brutal arrival of colonisation. Before she turned twenty, sailors had murdered her mother, seal hunters had abducted her sisters and a soldier had shot dead her uncle. In barely a generation, the Nuenonne world collapsed under violence, the abduction of women by sealers and diseases brought by the settlers.
In the 1820s and 1830s, the conflict between settlers and Aboriginal people across Tasmania grew into what became known as the 'Black War'. Truganini ended up tied to the campaigns of George Augustus Robinson, who set out to 'gather' the surviving Aboriginal people and move them to settlements on islands in Bass Strait. One of these was Wybalenna, on Flinders Island, where large numbers died from disease and from being torn from their land. Truganini outlived nearly all of her people and died in Hobart in 1876.
For a long time she was falsely presented as 'the last Aboriginal Tasmanian', and with her spread the myth that the Tasmanian people had become 'extinct'. That claim is a historical lie. Descendants of the Aboriginal communities survived and kept their identity. Many of them descend from the women the sealers took to the islands of the Strait. Today they form the palawa community, which asserts its continuity and its connection to places like lunawuni. The lookout at The Neck is named after Truganini precisely so that this history is not forgotten.
What happened to her remains shows how long respect took to arrive. She had expressly asked to be cast into the sea in the D'Entrecasteaux Channel. Instead, after her death in 1876 her skeleton was exhumed and displayed for decades in the Hobart museum. Only in 1976, a hundred years later, were her remains finally cremated and scattered on the waters of the channel near her home island, as she had wished. That late act became a symbol of the long road towards recognising the dignity and continuity of the Aboriginal Tasmanian people.
Today Bruny Island is one of the best-loved destinations in southern Tasmania, famous for its mix of wild nature and artisan food. North Bruny is gentler and more agricultural, and it's home to the famous gourmet trail of cheese, oysters, whisky, chocolate and leatherwood honey. South Bruny is wilder. It holds South Bruny National Park, the historic Cape Bruny lighthouse from 1836, and beaches and cliffs battered by the ocean. Between the two, The Neck has its sandy isthmus, its penguins and its lookout full of memory.
The island's economy revolves around tourism, food production and conservation. Wildlife cruises run along the south coast past seals, dolphins, birds and whales, and they have become one of the best-known coastal wildlife experiences in Australia. At the same time, the island is fragile. It is home to species such as Bruny's rare white wallaby, so tourism here has to be careful.
As across Tasmania, recognition of Aboriginal history is growing on Bruny too. Bringing back the old names, remembering Truganini and the Nuenonne, and the work of the palawa community are all part of a more honest reading of the past. This island of cheese and lighthouses was lunawuni, home to a people thousands of years old whose tragedy and survival are still present. For the traveller, knowing that turns a food tour into an encounter with the deepest layers of Australian history.
