Gabo Island has always fascinated me. It sits only a short distance off the coast from Mallacoota, close enough to feel familiar, but far enough away to have developed a history and character of its own. The more I looked into the island, the more I realised there was not one story there, but many.
Over the past few weeks I have ended up writing three songs about Gabo. I did not set out to make a trilogy, it just happened that way. Each song picked up a different part of the island, and together they started to tell a bigger story about the animals, the people and the stone itself.
Everything Swims to Gabo came first. The idea was simple, almost everything seems to find a way across that strip of water between the mainland and the island. Cattle were once swum across, kangaroos and deer have made the crossing, shearwaters return from huge migrations, little penguins come ashore after fishing, fur seals lie out on the rocks, and whales and dolphins pass by offshore.
That song became a slow Australian indie folk blues track. I wanted it loose and unhurried, with upright bass, brushed drums, piano, slide guitar and a few horns, almost like something you might hear late at night in a small coastal pub. The drone footage suited it perfectly because from the air you can really see just how narrow that channel is and how exposed the island feels sitting out in the Southern Ocean.
The second song, The Road Home, came from a different part of the story. Gabo has been grazed by cattle for many years, and the old tracks through the grass became part of the landscape. Those same paths are now used by wildlife as well, so the idea of a road home started to take shape.
The Road Home has a more Celtic Australian folk sound, with DADGAD guitar, bouzouki, low whistle, fiddle and bodhran. It rolls along in 6/8 rather than pushing hard, which seemed to suit the island better than a big dramatic arrangement. It is really a song about the tracks left behind and the way one generation of animals, people and work can leave something useful for the next.
The third song, The Stone Remembers, took me into the history of the lighthouse. The great pink granite tower was built from stone quarried on Gabo itself, and once I started reading about how it was built, the human story became much more interesting than I expected. Men had to quarry, cut, dress and move enormous blocks of granite in a remote place where everything was harder than it would have been on the mainland.
There had already been an unsuccessful attempt to build a lighthouse on Gabo in the 1840s. After the wreck of the Monumental City near Tullaberga Island in 1853, a temporary wooden light was put up, but the permanent granite lighthouse came later. Work on the tower began in the early 1860s, and the new light was first lit in 1862.
Some of the lower granite blocks weighed several tonnes. The builder, Robert Huckson, lost a considerable amount of money on the contract and eventually went bankrupt, while the men doing the work were dealing with poor provisions, hard conditions and an island that gave them no easy options. Most of their names are no longer part of the story people know, but the tower they built is still there.
That became the line at the centre of The Stone Remembers. People disappear, records get lost, names fade from ledgers, but the stone remains. Every block in that lighthouse was shaped and placed by somebody, and more than 160 years later their work is still standing above the sea.
Musically, The Stone Remembers sits closer to The Road Home than the earlier blues song. It starts quietly with acoustic guitar and low whistle, then builds with fiddle, bouzouki, bass and bodhran as the tower rises through the story. I wanted it to feel like a real Australian folk song rather than a sea shanty or a polished studio production.
The three songs ended up fitting together better than I expected. Everything Swims to Gabo is about getting to the island, The Road Home is about the paths across it, and The Stone Remembers is about what people left behind. They are three different stories, but they all come back to the same little island sitting just off the coast from Mallacoota.
I have paired the songs with drone footage of Gabo because the place itself is the fourth character in all of them. From the air you can see the pink granite, the green interior, the lighthouse, the channel and the open sea around it, and the history starts to make a bit more sense. Gabo is small, but there is a lot packed into it.
I now have more than 50 original songs on Spotify, Apple Music and other streaming platforms, many of them inspired by Mallacoota, East Gippsland, Australian history and places I know well. These three are probably among my favourites because they came directly from learning more about a place I thought I already knew. The more I looked at Gabo, the more stories it gave me.
