French Island - Victoria - Islands of Australia

French Island is a large, mostly undeveloped island in the Western Port in Victoria, Australia, about 18 kilometers by 12 kilometers, or twice the size of the neighboring inhabited Phillip Island. The northern seventy percent of the island is a National Park, and there are only about 60 permanent residents, most serving the park or the tourist trade in one way or another.

Salt marshes border the coasts, while flat, flowering heath land and mangroves dominate the interior. Six hundred plants (including 100 species of orchid) and more than two hundred bird species flourish there, along with koalas, Sambur deer, water rats, and the rare long-nosed potoroo, a species of rat-kangaroo. The koalas flourish so well in this protected habitat that many have to be transferred to other nature reserves on the mainland in order to keep the population from outstripping French Island’s resources.

The island has no electricity or medical service, and only one small shop and post office in the tiny hamlet of Tankerton. No tourist vehicles are allowed -- visitors must arrive by passenger ferry. However, the opportunity to experience unspoiled nature by camping, hiking, and biking is unparalleled.

Some small-scale farming and sheep and cattle grazing still takes place in the southern part of the island.

Explorer George Bass, who discovered nearby Phillip Island in 1798, mistook French Island for a part of the mainland. It was more fully explored and named “Ile de Francoise” by a French expedition in 1802. It was intermittently inhabited by sealers, barilla producers, and salt works over the next several decades, but there was little permanent settlement until a successful chicory farm was established there in the 1890s; at one time the island had more than thirty chicory kilns.

The relatively gentle McLeod Prison and farm was founded there in 1915, little more than a tent farm to house prisoners in serving the last portion of their sentences. Permanent buildings were constructed in 1946, which were converted to a children’s adventure camp in 1975 when the prison was closed.

The island was almost opened up to industry in the 1960s, when a proposal to build factories, a toxic waste plant and a nuclear reactor was considered by the Victorian government. However, advice from environmentalists led to its preservation as first a State Park and in 1997 a National Park. In the 2000s, the waters to the north of the island were also declared a Marine National Park.

French Island (Australia)

 

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