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Each dusk, with the Australian winter approaching, I watch the mutton-birds commence their transglobal flight back to the Arctic Circle. As I prepare to follow them north, to my summer burrow near Stonehenge in Wiltshire, I'm halted in my tracks.
Driving through the village of Buckland, I rub my eyes to see... Stonehenge. Built by local stonemason Ron Krulow, the huge sandstone replica seems bewilderingly out of place. But it also embodies a Tasmanian need to annihilate distance with sameness.
Because Tasmania is so far away, it has always done its best to be very near. In 1804, a Royal Marine private passed this way to hunt kangaroo. Hugh Germain packed two books into his knapsack, the Bible and The Arabian Nights, and with the insouciance of a seed-sower flung names at the hills and rivers, some
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Our man in Tasmania is flying north for summer from his island of odd monikers
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of which I can see through the windscreen: Jerusalem, Jericho, Abyssinia, Jordan, Bagdad [sic]. Germain's successors ignored native words and replaced them with domesticating ones, like Egg and Bacon Bay.
Over the past few months I have managed to cross the Rubicon, sail through Hell's Gates, and visit the hamlet Nowhere Else - named after the comment of a farmer who warned trespassers: "The track leads nowhere else."
Krulow's Stonehenge may be purchased on eBay for $180,000. He's now planning a reproduction of an ancient temple in Turkey. Meanwhile, glinting across the bay, almost the first house that the mutton-birds fly over after leaving their rookeries has just won a top architectural award. The house's name: Avalon. 
FIRST POSTED MAY 25, 2006
 Oz miners' great escape turns sour
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