Dirk Hartog Island

In the corner of a make-shift shack clinging precariously to a windswept beach on Australia’s far west coast, a hastily-written bit of graffiti neatly sums up the unknown author’s philosophy of the universe and the meaning of life in general.

"If you’re not living on the edge, you’re taking up too much space."

Stand on the doorstep and face west, and you literally couldn’t be more on the edge if you tried, for this is the Indian Ocean side of Dirk Hartog Island. Australia stops here. The next lump of land is Africa.

And here, if I am not mistaken, you will find the hottest and most stupendously varied land-based sportfishing action in all of Australia.

It’s taken nearly 400 years to re-discover, since a roving Dutchman made the first recorded European footprint on this spot, about a hundred years before Captain Cook was even born.

Most Australians might well be able to trace their ancestry back to Holland instead of the United Kingdom, if Dirk Hartog had simply been better equipped.

Had the 17th century Netherlander possessed some basic spin gear, the crudest of lures, and a rudimentary cliff gaff, young Dirk would have sent a message back to his masters in the Dutch East India Company thus:

"From the ship Eendraght, the Great South Land, to our Wise, Discrete, Benevolent Directors, Amsterdam. Sod the Spice Islands, we’re hopping into some humungous critters down here. Tell Willem, Cornelius and the boys to get a move on while they’re on the bite. Send supplies, and don’t forget the Gouda. See you in a year or two. Tight Lines. Dirk. October 25, 1616."

Alas, Dutch records don’t go into detail, but Hartog obviously had no idea of the quality of the water into which he was emptying the Eendraght’s marine potties. He took one look at the place, fetched a tin plate from the galley, had it hammered flat, scratched a few words, nailed it to a post and high-tailed it to Indonesia. Had the above message been received in Holland, Captain Cook wouldn’t have got a look-in. We might all be wearing clogs, growing tulips and living in windmills.

It’s perhaps not surprising that the fishing at Dirk Hartog Island is so good. The island is within spitting distance of the legendary Steep Point. For more than twenty years, hordes of avid land-based fishermen have jostled for elbow room at Steep Point and hooked into huge spanish and shark mackerel, tuna, cobia, trevally and a dozen other toothy predators.

Many must have gazed north across the short distance of South Passage and wondered about that untouched stretch of sheer cliff that disappeared over the horizon.

Until a couple of years ago, wondering was about as close as anybody got.

Over a beer one night at Perth’s Marmion Angling Club, newspaper photographer and fishing addict Ron D’Raine told how he’d just returned from a news story in the north west.

The chartered plane had flown low over the west coast of Dirk Hartog Island. Ron, who can smell a likely fishing spot through a thick fog at midnight, was excited.

Run as a pastoral lease for more than a century, DHI had been virtually quarantined from visitors for the last thirty years, its reclusive owner Sir Thomas Wardle preferring to keep things to himself.

But Sir Thomas was recently deceased, and his heirs had other ideas about how to make their inheritance pay — tourism. By May of 1997, our party of six was heading north from Perth to begin the exploratory phase of what the Wardle family believes is the first serious survey of DHI’s west coast as a land-based sportfishing destination.

By our fourth visit we knew we’d never find it better anywhere.

It’s a bloody long drive, though.

You head north from Perth, a nine-hour cruise on the blacktop to Overlander Roadhouse. That’s the easy bit. From there it is serious 4WD country, not to be attempted in anything equipped with less than robust suspension.

The track into Steep Point is only about 150km, but it’s a three-hour haul over corrugated limestone, saltpans and sand-dunes. (Double that if you’re towing a boat).

Kieran Wardle meets you at the beach with the island’s barge, and you ferry the vehicles across to the island one at a time. Another 45 minutes and you’re at Homestead Bay for a welcome beer, and your last real bed, real shower and real toilet for a week.

The homestead is a low collection of limestone block and corrugated-iron buildings on the shore of a shallow bay at the southern end of the island’s eastern side.

Built as shearers quarters a hundred years ago, it’s now being turned into a basic-but-comfortable lodging as Kieran, his girlfriend Tori and Kieran’s father Geoff re-focus the business from sheep to adventure-based tourism.

You don’t have to move far from the comfort of the bar to catch fish. Right in front of the homestead you’ll catch flathead and bream in the shallows, and if you tee it up in advance with Kieran he’ll take you in the barge to a spot two miles out for pink snapper and tuna.

An hour’s drive to the western side of the island will take you to Quoin Head and Charlie’s Harbour, both of which provide spectacular fishing platforms.

But it’s the far northern end of Dirk Hartog Island which draws us back each time.

The track north from the homestead takes you over (or around, if you can) a series of big sand dunes. The dunes have a life of their own, shifting with the wind. It’s weird. In a week your out-bound track can be blocked on your return by a mountain of smooth sand.

The dunes negotiated, you strike due north along the eastern side on a mostly-civilised station track, through scrub rarely high enough to block the view.

At Cape Inscription, where Dirk Hartog left that plate all those years ago, a lighthouse built in 1909 is the only sign that anything has changed in four centuries.

Five kilometres from here is the camp at Urchin Point. Last year we re-built the crude shelter and turned it into a comfortable but simple shack, installed rain water tanks and gutters, even a kitchen sink - rough and ready, but million dollar views that can’t be built out, and the nearest neighbours a hundred kilometres away, unless you count the tuna, crashing through a bait school right in front of you.

From here you can walk or take a short drive to rock-hopper’s heaven, a dozen fishable outcrops, holes and deep drop-offs that have barely seen a lure. We’ve even named a few ourselves — you’ll soon find them officially on station maps — simply because nobody else had bothered.

Just 200 metres south of the camp is Ron’s Rock, a perfect casting platform into gin-clear water. We regularly catch tailor here to a whopping 8 kilos, and they just love green Bombers, and poppers, the bigger the better. But you can catch that kind of tailor just about anywhere along this part of the coast, so I’m hardly giving away any secrets by telling you where to go.

Another hundred metres and you’re at Wazza’s Hole, further along still is Someone Else’s, then Fergie’s Folly, and The Block. If you keep walking, there are dozens of untried outcrops we just haven’t got to yet, and you can name them yourself if you like: Bad Hair In The Morning Rock, My Ugly Mother-In-Law Reef, Get Your Hands Off My Beer You Rotten Mongrel Platform, and so on.

Here’s a sample of the fish we’ve caught (and mostly released) in a single week: pink snapper to 8kg (heaps of them), spangled emperor, mackerel tuna, shark mackerel, spanish mackerel, tailor, golden trevally, giant trevally, shark, baldchin groper, sweetlip and spanish flag. And all with spin gear from 2kg to no more than 8kg.

There’s plenty of opportunities for gas ballooning on heavier gear too, but we found you just don’t need it — the big fish school virtually right at your feet.

Fishing Gear to Bring:

We’ve learned to travel light.

You can cart along your whole arsenal, and you’d find most of it unused. An Ugly Stik and a Penn 850 strung with 8kg monofilament will do for most of the rock fishing, plus a 6 kilo outfit for more sport, and a two or three kilo spin rod for the shallows. Everything else is luxury.

You’ll do a helluva lot of walking, so a big bum bag plus a backpack will be enough to carry everything you need from spot to spot — from cliff gaff to camera, sunscreen, fly repellent, and a few of those handy plastic trays for lures.

Whole pilchards will attract just about anything, but we use lures much more than bait. Strangely, the deep diving Rapala-style lures don’t seem to work as well here as they do offshore, but poppers, Bombers and other shallow-diving minnows like RMG Scorpions are dynamite.

But you need plenty of them, and you’re gear, from drag smoothness to knots, has to be in first class condition. There’s nothing quite like the electrifying thrill of tossing a popper into a surf-washed hole on the end of three kilo monofilament to have it wolfed immediately by a 10kg shark mackerel. A short-lived thrill, though. As Darryl Kerrigan is wont to say in The Castle, "yer dreamin’".

It’s at Turtle Bay, just around from the lighthouse, that the ultra-light spin gear and fly rods come out. Tumble down a very steep slope and you find yourself on a long, wide arc of white sand gently sloping out under turquoise-green water, home to dart, bream and tailor of ‘only’ 3 kilos.

Other stuff to take:

If all you’re going to do is base yourself at the homestead, you need nothing more than clothes and fishing gear.

If you’re planning on camping at Urchin Point, you need to take…everything!

That means plenty of fresh water, fuel (check with Kieran on availability), Engel fridge/freezers and a generator to run them, and the usual camping gear, including tents. Make sure they’re strong ones too, with big sand pegs. it gets windy up there. Oh, and beer.

Best time to go:

The island is open to visitors from March to October. Early in the season you run the risk of cyclones spoiling things, though, so keep an eye on the long range forecast. One year we went to early copped the fringes of two of them, which kept us holed up at the homestead for four days.

What it costs:

It’s $500 per vehicle, plus $10 per head per night if you’re camping. A bit of homestead comfort at the end of a week in the scrub never goes astray, and you’ll pay $150 a head, all meals included.