Qualla: Bass Strait

Bass Strait: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit anyaka, CC BY-SA 2.0. On the evening of 21 October 1978, a twenty-year-old pilot named Frederick Valentich radioed Melbourne flight control from his Cessna 182 to report that something was hovering over his aircraft. "It is not an aircraft," he said. Then a metallic scraping sound, then silence. Neither Valentich nor his plane were ever found. He had been flying over Bass Strait, the wide, shallow channel that separates Tasmania from the Australian mainland, and his disappearance joined a long ledger of vessels and people the strait has taken without explanation. The water here is not deep, but it is treacherous beyond its depth, a place where powerful currents, hidden reefs, and the howling winds of the Roaring Forties converge.

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Image: anyaka | CC BY-SA 2.0

Bass Strait: A Drowned Plain

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gibbo51, CC BY-SA 3.0. For most of human history in Australia, Bass Strait was not water at all. During the last glacial period, sea levels were so low that a broad land bridge called the Bassian Plain joined Tasmania to the mainland, and Aboriginal people walked across it to reach the island roughly 4...

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Image: Gibbo51 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Bass Strait: The Reluctant Discovery

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Peter Ellis, CC BY-SA 3.0. Europeans were slow to believe the strait existed. Abel Tasman brushed past it in 1642 and turned away when the Roaring Forties hit his ships. James Cook sailed toward it in 1770, fought the wind for two hours, gave up, and noted in his journal that he was "doubtful whether they ...

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Image: Peter Ellis | CC BY-SA 3.0

Bass Strait: A Coast of Wrecks

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Wayne McLean (jgritz) Taken with Nikon D100., CC BY-SA 2.5. The bargain has a cost, and the strait has collected it in hulls. Shipwrecks along the Tasmanian and Victorian shores number in the hundreds. Some vessels, a few of them large, simply vanished, leaving no wreckage and no survivors, which over the years fed talk of curses and supe...

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Image: Wayne McLean (jgritz) Taken with Nikon D100. | CC BY-SA 2.5

Bass Strait: Power Beneath the Waves

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jörn Brauns, Public domain. What lies under the strait has reshaped a nation's economy. In the 1960s, geologists found enormous oil and gas fields in the Gippsland Basin off the eastern entrance, beneath fields with names like Snapper, Marlin, and Barracouta. The hydrocarbons travel by pipeline to refinerie...

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Image: Jörn Brauns | Public domain

Bass Strait: Crossing It the Hard Way

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Michael fromholtz, CC BY-SA 4.0. For some, the strait's danger is precisely the point. Sailors race across it in the Melbourne to Hobart and brave its weather in the Sydney to Hobart. Others have crossed by far stranger means. Windsurfers, kitesurfers, and dinghy sailors have all made the open-water passage, som...

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Image: Michael fromholtz | CC BY-SA 4.0