King Island
— — the green a place keeps when the wind never lets up.
Not only on a wall.
“An island the Roaring Forties hit first. Cape Wickham Lighthouse on the north tip, Currie's small harbour on the west, dairy paddocks lit a colour green that only happens when the rain comes off the sea. The cheese here is famous for a reason — the grass is what the wind brings in. Nobody hurries on King Island. — from the studio
King Island, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
King Island sits in the western entrance of Bass Strait, about 90 kilometres north of Tasmania's mainland and roughly the same distance south of Victoria. It is part of Tasmania, with a population near 1,600, most of them in Currie on the west coast. The island is about 64 kilometres long, shaped by the prevailing westerlies that arrive uninterrupted from the southern Indian Ocean. Cape Wickham Lighthouse, built in 1861 at the northern tip, is among the tallest in the Southern Hemisphere at 48 metres.
The wind here is the weather. The Roaring Forties cross thousands of kilometres of open ocean before they meet the island's western cliffs, and the air arrives clean and salt-heavy enough that the pastures stay green through most of the year. That same wind is why King Island Dairy, founded in 1902, became one of Australia's best-known cheesemakers — the grass grows on rain the westerlies push in from the sea. On still days the silence after the wind is its own weather.
The island is reached by a 35-minute Sharp Airlines flight from Melbourne's Essendon or Burnie in Tasmania, or by occasional vehicle barge. There is no public transport on the island, so most visitors hire a car at the small Currie airport. Cape Wickham Golf Links and Ocean Dunes have put King Island on the international golf map in the last decade, both ranked among Australia's top courses. The island has roughly 145 kilometres of coastline, much of it accessible by gravel road.