The story of this place
Bruny Island is actually two islands—North and South Bruny—joined by a narrow sandy isthmus called The Neck, where little penguins and short-tailed shearwaters nest in their thousands. The island's Aboriginal name is Lunawanna Allonah, from which the settlements take their names. Abel Tasman sighted the island in 1642 but didn't realise it was an island. That discovery fell to Tobias Furneaux in 1773, who anchored at Adventure Bay for four days.
Captain Cook returned in 1777, carving his initials into a tree (later destroyed in a 1905 bushfire, now marked by a plaque). The island was named after French explorer Bruni d'Entrecasteaux, who explored the channel in 1792. Whaling stations operated here in the 1820s-40s. Today, Bruny is a sanctuary for wildlife: it supports the world's largest population of endangered forty-spotted pardalotes, up to a third of the world's swift parrots, and 240,000 breeding pairs of short-tailed shearwaters. The Cape Bruny Lighthouse (1838) was Australia's fourth lighthouse and longest continuously staffed until automation in 1993.