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 40,000 years ago. Then the ice melted. Around 8,000 years ago the rising sea swallowed the plain, and the Tasmanian Aboriginal population was cut off from the continent, isolated for thousands of years on the far side of the new strait. The shallowness that makes the crossing so violently rough today is a memory of that lost lowland: beneath the chop, the seabed is mostly a flooded plain, scattered with the granite high points that survive as the strait's many islands.

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 are one land or no." The question was settled by George Bass and Matthew Flinders, who sailed the small sloop Norfolk clean around Tasmania in 1798 and 1799, proving it was an island. The governor named the water after Bass on Flinders' recommendation. The discovery had a hard practical value: ships bound for Sydney from Europe could now cut through the strait and save some 700 nautical miles, trading a longer route for a shorter and more dangerous one.

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 supernatural forces of the kind attached to the Bermuda Triangle. The truth is less mysterious and no less deadly: a brutal meeting of wind and swell over a maze of half-submerged rocks and reefs. The first lighthouse went up on Deal Island in 1848, and others followed at Cape Otway and Cape Wickham, but the lights only ever reduced the danger. They never removed it.

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 refineries on the Victorian coast and have supplied a major share of Australia's energy for decades. The strait now carries electricity too: since 2006, the Basslink cable has run up to 500 megawatts of power along the seabed between Tasmania and the mainland. Above the water, the same relentless wind that drowns ships has drawn proposals for some of Australia's first offshore wind farms, a plan to turn the strait's oldest hazard into its newest resource.

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, some setting records that stand for years. Sea kayakers island-hop the eastern side, and roughly 300 have paddled across in modern times. Among them was Andrew McAuley, who crossed Bass Strait three times before dying in 2007 attempting the far larger Tasman Sea. The strait remains a proving ground, a stretch of water small enough to attempt and wild enough to mean it.