The name Bay of Fires has nothing to do with the rock color. The French explorer Nicolas Baudin named it for the fires he saw burning along the coast in 1802 — Aboriginal Tasmanians had been managing this land with fire for at least 35,000 years before Baudin arrived to name things. The orange of the rocks comes from a lichen called Caloplaca, which colonizes granite and turns it the color of an ember. The historical irony layers itself without any help from me.
Standing on any of the headlands between Binalong Bay and Eddystone Point, with the orange boulders tumbling into white sand and the water running through shades of turquoise to deep blue offshore, you’re looking at one of the most improbably beautiful coastlines on the planet. And there’s almost no one on it.
Binalong Bay
The small settlement of Binalong Bay sits at the southern end of the bay and is the closest thing to a service town — a general store, a handful of holiday shacks, a boat ramp. From here, a dirt road runs north along the coast, and the beaches start almost immediately. The first one is accessible by car. The ones further north require walking.
I camped at Policemans Point with a small tent and an inadequate sleeping bag for two nights. The first night, the wind came off the water hard enough to rattle the tent poles. The second night was completely still and the stars were the fullest I’d seen since the Atacama — the kind of sky you don’t get near any city, where the Milky Way is an actual feature rather than a suggestion. I lay outside the tent looking up until my neck hurt.
Walking to Nothing
The walk north from Binalong Bay eventually reaches beaches accessible only on foot. The track passes through coastal heath — banksias, tea tree, prickly scrub at knee height — and emerges onto headlands where you look down at bays that have no one in them. Not fewer people. No people. The beach below, the orange rocks, the turquoise water, none of it observed by anyone but you.
I kept stopping on these headlands and sitting down. There’s a version of natural beauty that makes you want to move toward it and a version that makes you want to be still. This coast does the second thing. You find a flat piece of granite and sit and watch the waves come in and the light shift and the color of the water change as a cloud passes, and time runs differently than it does when you’re moving.
The Boulders Up Close
The scale of the granite boulders doesn’t read in photographs. Some of them are the size of a small building, tumbled and stacked in ways that suggest enormous violence at some point in the deep past, though now they sit absolutely still, sun-warmed, covered in their brilliant orange coat. The lichen has a texture — almost velvety in the places where it’s thickest, then rougher, coarser, where it thins to nothing and the grey granite shows through.
I put my hand on one of the boulders in afternoon light and the stone was warm from the sun, deeply warm, and the orange color under my palm was extraordinary. The kind of color that you keep testing against your memory afterward to make sure you’re remembering it correctly.
The Logistics of Remote
There are no shops north of Binalong Bay. No facilities. You carry what you need. The fishing is said to be excellent — I don’t fish, but I watched a man pull flathead out of the surf with the casual efficiency of someone doing something he’d been doing for fifty years. He didn’t look up.
When to go: November through April for warm enough days to swim and the longest daylight hours. January sees the most visitors, which here still means the beaches are nearly empty by any other standard. The walking lodge-based trek (Bay of Fires Lodge Walk) runs October through May and is worth the considerable expense if you want guides and a bed at night.