The island's split personality is written into its land. North Bruny is mostly flat farmland, open and pastoral. South Bruny is mountainous and forested, its hills cloaked in eucalyptus and patches of temperate rainforest, its coast guarded by the dramatic cliffs of South Bruny National Park. Between them runs the Neck, the slender sand bridge where the two halves meet and where wildlife crowds into the narrow corridor. The whole island stretches about 100 kilometres end to end, but to travel it you cross from one world to another: tidy paddocks giving way to deep bush, the easy and the wild stitched together at a single fragile seam.

Bruny is the homeland of the Nuenonne people, who lived here for thousands of years, and the birthplace of Truganini, perhaps the most famous Aboriginal Tasmanian in history. Her father, Mangana, was a Nuenonne leader, chief when the British explorer Tobias Furneaux anchored here in 1773 and again when James Cook visited in 1777. Truganini's life was marked by almost unimaginable loss: before she was twenty, her mother had been killed by sailors, her sisters abducted by sealers, and her uncle shot by a soldier. Within a single human lifetime, the colonisation of Tasmania devastated the island's Aboriginal peoples through violence, dispossession, and introduced disease. Truganini lived through all of it. To walk Bruny is to walk her country, and to remember a people who endured a catastrophe the world too often forgets.

The sheltered curve of Adventure Bay on South Bruny has drawn ships for centuries. It takes its name from HMS Adventure, the vessel Tobias Furneaux sailed when he anchored here in 1773 while separated from Cook's expedition, naming the bay for his ship. Cook himself came ashore on his third and final voyage in 1777. And in 1788, the bay received its most notorious caller: Captain William Bligh of the Bounty, who stopped here to take on wood and water, and who planted what are remembered as Australia's first apple trees. It is a quiet irony that Tasmania, which would become famous for its apples, may have grown its first on this remote bay, courtesy of the captain whose crew would soon cast him adrift.

Bruny's isolation has made it a sanctuary, and an oddity. The island is renowned for its white wallabies, ghostly pale Bennett's wallabies carrying a rare genetic variant that have flourished here in the absence of the predators that would have picked them off on the mainland. At dusk along the national park tracks near Adventure Bay, they are your best chance of a sighting, pale shapes moving through the gloaming. There are no Tasmanian devils here and no wombats, but the island teems with possums, short-beaked echidnas, and Tasmanian pademelons. At the Neck, the colony of fairy penguins, the smallest penguins in the world, returns from the ocean each evening, a nightly procession up the sand that has been drawing quiet crowds to the lookout for generations.

For all its wildness, Bruny has become one of Tasmania's great food islands. Visitors spend their days grazing a produce trail of cheeses, oysters, honey, fudge, and wine, much of it made within sight of where it is sold. The island's establishments, most of them small and owner-run, work together to showcase what Bruny grows and catches. Down at Lunawanna you will find the country's southernmost vineyard, and somewhere on the island sits the southernmost licensed pub in all of Australia, a fitting boast for a place perched near the bottom of the inhabited world. It is an island you taste as much as see: oysters pulled cold from the channel, cheese on a wooden board, a glass of wine grown about as far south as wine can grow.