Just to the west is the small settlement of Coles Bay, a sleepy town with sunburnt holidaymakers and well-tanned tour operators who work from their garages. Simon Stubbs runs Freycinet Adventures, an easy-going group of enthusiasts who have been guiding here for a decade. He gave us some boats, some local knowledge and tips on the use of a device he called a ‘Skweet Jeek’. After much enquiry in the Coles Bay store we discovered he was describing a squid jig, a menacing plastic rod with an array of spines that catch on clothing, bags and fingers - in fact anything but squid.

But after some experimentation involving improvised anchors we succeed in pulling in a couple of fish and bashing them into submission on the flexible kayak deck – clearly an inadequate bait board. It occurs to me just how easy it is. And I wonder why, in the last 4,000 years of inhabitation, the Aborigines never ate fish, preferring to scour the banks for shellfish or hunt inland for wallabies.

Let’s go back to the arrival of the first people on continental Australia some 40,000 years ago. Aborigines are believed to have crossed overland from what is now Indonesia, filtered through the then lush outback and finally spread as far south as Tasmania. About 10,000 years ago the world experienced several catastrophic flooding events, which saw sea levels rise up to 100 metres, cutting off Tasmania from the mainland with an enormous - though relatively shallow - passage of water now known as Bass Strait.

"Without the pressing necessity of innovation, Tasmanian aboriginal civilisation remained unchanged, and perhaps even lost technologies previously developed."

So began the longest isolation of any society in history. The Tasmanian Aborigines never managed to cross the strait, never bred with their mainland brethren, never engaged in war with anyone but neighbouring bands, never used boomerangs axes or dingos to hunt and only traded within their own confined culture. And because they were nomadic and food was relatively plentiful, even stone tools were abandoned. Without the pressing necessity of innovation, Tasmanian aboriginal civilisation remained unchanged, and perhaps even lost technologies previously developed. The small population lacked genetic diversity because they typically married within their language group, usually totalling less than 700 individuals. So by the time Abel Tasman arrived in 1642, the population was in decline. The diseases that were introduced from the ships destroyed frail immune systems and over the next few decades, thousands of aborigines died of respiratory conditions.

But Tasman never clapped eyes on an Aborigine, preferring to chart coast from a distance. And it must have been a great distance, for the feature he named Vanderlins Island actually turned out to be a peninsula. This was aptly noted 160 years later by the Frenchman Baudin who named it Freycinet after a couple of lieutenants he favored, and every other peak, bay and premonitory after mates back home he hoped to impress.

Unfortunately, Baudin had a run-in with the local aboriginal band, beginning a lengthy legacy of misunderstanding. By the time settlers arrived, the Tasmanian Aborigine was regarded with great disdain. There was a careless massacre at Risdon Cove, with the subsequent indigenous retribution and it was all on. In fact the story is one of the saddest tales of maltreatment and misunderstanding by a colonial power of any native people anywhere. In a grand finale the remaining population were rounded up and sent to almost certain expiry on an offshore island. Decades later there were less than 40 left, who returned to a settlement on the mainland and died to the man. In fact the only Tasmanian Aborigines alive today are the progeny of cabin-weary sealers who used to work Bass Strait and evidently stopped on the islands for a bit of R & R. Their descendents still live there, buoyed up with government subsidies, traditional hunting rights and the benefits of a greatly enlarged gene pool ever so kindly donated by the willing sealers.

The air is cool and dry. Milky calm water laps against the granite outcrops cloaked in wiry she-oaks. The kayaks cut through the sea like it is liquid Teflon, fine displacement waves peeling gently off the rudders. We paddle without talking, just the swish-swish sound of powerful strokes, the cackle of birds in the trees and the barely discernable gurgle of the little vortices left in our wake. It was right here that Silas Cole burnt the aboriginal middens, or shell piles, to make lime for mortar. And I sense a certain prescriptive irony in the fact that the first act of the first settler was to torch the only significant trace of previous society, the accumulated detritus of 40,000 years of occupation, and sell the ashes for concrete to build their own houses.

Here was also the first whaling operation on the east coast 180 years ago. Whalers spotted Southern Rights and put out into the bay in small sailing boats to harpoon them in pursuits that often lasted for hours. After striking a killing blow with a square-tipped harpoon they would tow the 96-tonne whales to shore and slaughter them on the beach. Unsurprisingly, fatalities were common. The whalebone made ladies corsets and lamp oil was boiled from the blubber. The plunder was so intense that within 16 years the station had shut down. Tasmania had simply run out of whales.

We coast around Fleurieu Point and into a long Tasman swell rolling up the belly of Promise Bay. It’s easy paddling with a little help from the current pushing us toward the hazy tip of the peninsula. But first a short jaunt to stretch the kayak-cramped legs is in order and we catch a steep break onto Hazards Beach.

Birds squawk in the bush in a fashion louder and more grating than those in New Zealand. They just seem to have more to say. One can walk clear across the peninsula at this point in little more than ten minutes. On the other side is Wineglass Bay, a deep sweeping beach of considerable length. In fact it is considered among the top ten beaches in the world, which would account for the Germans "ooo-ing" and "ahh-ing" and ticking it off their list. Fanning the imagination, it appears more or less the shape of a wine glass. But go back to the 1820’s and look again: a hundred or so Southern Right whales dragged up at stations at both ends of the beach and thousands of litres of blood filling the bay. The likeness may have been unavoidable.