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Her name is Caroline, she was a Toorak debutante

There's no-one else on King Island quite like Caroline Kininmonth - wild pepper picker, potter, restorer of boatsheds. There's probably no-one else on the mainland (Australia or Tasmania, you choose) quite like Caroline either.

"Flamboyant" is the word she uses to describe herself when talking (briefly) about a relationship with a previous "neat and tidy" business partner. Other suitable words would include ‘eclectic', ‘nurturing', ‘bohemian', and definitely ‘fulfilled'. Some islanders call her the "mad potter".

"I'm called the mad potter because I was the first to build on the beach," Caroline says, of the cliff-side Devil's Gap Retreat guest houses. Often beset by strong winds and violent storms, King Islanders traditionally set up home inland. "The winds here can be hugely wild because there's nothing between us and South America," she explains. "Modern materials enable us now to build on the coast."

The ‘mad potter' label is more pet-name than insult, for this year the islanders voted her Citizen of the Year. It's recognition for the unique role she plays on the island as both community mediator and "flamboyant" artist in residence. An astute and natural marketer, Caroline has urged and assisted a number of the more laid-back locals to more actively leverage local produce awareness under King Island brand.

Tallish, lean, fit and very (very) busy - Caroline doesn't spend much time at home. She's either picking pepper, cleaning up after recently departed guests at one of the two Devil's Gap Retreat guest houses, meeting up with friends at the island's ‘community space' in the bay area Boathouse, or painting and potting in a studio on Wharf Road.

"I even slept here for the first few years," she says pointing to the studio's upright futon couch occupying the area under the front window. "It's a great work spot isn't it?" she asks, using her eyes to point out an easel set up in a back room as well as the full light streaming in from the large front windows. "This is what cemented my staying on the island."

The studio, called ‘The Pottery', sits up high on the bay-side cusp of the Currie central business district. Outside, it is surrounded by a well-placed scrum of crayfish nets, buoys and various pieces of colourful pottery. Inside the small white weatherboard shack, the organised chaos continues - bundles of dried parsley from the ceiling (for the seeds), whimsical pottery in various shades blue and green sit on shelves lining most walls. 

This is also where Caroline processes and packs her pepper. The wild pepper and leaves are placed in a drier until the fleshy pepper skin has withered and wrinkled. They are then bottled, then labelled, then sold through her studio. 

"I inherited the pepper business," she says as she closes, but does not lock, The Pottery front door. "A local man was doing it and I took it on when he left the island. It's a tiny little industry, and that's the way I like it." The pepper business's pots and labels were also inherited. "I'm nearly through his bottles. I'm looking into what I'll do next. I made a few pots for the pepper - people used them afterwards as candle holders. But people like to be able to see inside."

Now aged in her 60s, Caroline came to King Island in 1989 in search for "some space and time". Claiming to be just "an old fashioned wife" when she first moved to the island, the "born and bred" Toorak (Melbourne) girl was looking for a place to pot and paint.

"Most people at some stage in their life will really question their lives. I really wanted to be an artist. And to be an artist you really need some space and time - and King Island gives me this. It's a very selfish thing, potting. I had a go at doing what I what I always wanted to do."

Left behind were 30 "wonderful" but drought-stricken years bringing up a family on an East Gippsland farm. "I married young, at 19, to a western district man," she says. "We grew sheep, beans, potatoes, pigs - whatever we could to survive. I even sold wildflowers. I go back-and-forth now. I still have lovely friends there."

She has good relationships with all three of her children, as well as with her husband Ian. Her son Stuart (34) is a marine biologist living on Magnetic Island. Youngest daughter Susie (32) lives in Sydney, as does older daughter Chrissy (40) who is a regular panel member on the Inventors (ABC television) due to her successful ‘Belly Belt'.

Although it clearly obvious that she misses her three children and five grandchildren, she has no plans to leave the island. "We've seen people leave to be closer to their families, and then the children will move," she responds when asked if it's hard to live so far away from her family. "It's a modern problem. It's best for everyone to live their own life."

Also on her journey of space, time and revival, Caroline took on the rebuilding and ongoing maintenance of a boathouse ideally nestled in a solitary alcove in the Currie Bay. Once a school, even storage house for explosives during WW2, the boathouse laid vacant and derelict for around 20 years.

"It was total madness because we didn't know who owned it," she says as she turns her weathered 4WD truck onto a narrow, unsealed road that leads out of to Devil's Gap. "We got Council approval, thinking they owned it, but didn't - the Marine Board did."

After a decade of negotiations and renovations, the boathouse opened in the mid-1990s. "Dick Smith opened it. He came here for lunch, and I said, ‘hey, we haven't officially opened it'." Islanders also use the free-for-all venue for self-catered lunches, dinners, BBQs - any kind of social gathering which needs a few plates, chairs and fabulous bay-side view.

Caroline rolls under an electric fence on the way to the now-dry Sea Elephant River to pick the wild pepper. Her outfit is unusually subdued today - a paint-splattered white long sleeved t-shirt hangs loose over black pants tucked into white socks and white shoed. She bends down to pick up a Currawong feather and tucks it into her bright-white hair which is pulled up into a loose knot.

These Currawong birds play an important role in the wild pepper process. "The trees don't propagate themselves - they grow from bird poo. It's got to go through a Currawong. They're the only birds that can eat the peppers."

Weaving in and out of wild pepper trees and native Manuka (ti tree), Caroline explains that the previous pepper picker showed her the crop's location before he left the island. A fairly long drive through two properties on a very bumpy and lumpy unsealed track takes her to an electric fence and down to the crop of perhaps 100-or-so pepper trees of varying age.

The pepper patch is as Caroline describes it - "another world". What seems like rows and rows of very straight tree trunks jut out from a very dry and mostly baron bush floor underneath a canopy of leaves. It's quiet, except for the occasional wattle bird song. It smells slightly damp. Every now and then the stench of a dead wallaby wafts by. "You have to hold your nose - something is awfully dead."

Summer is the season for wild pepper, called Mountain Pepper. Caroline picks once a week, for 3-4 hours at a time - "when the spirit moves me". She hikes (at breakneck speed) through the scrub in search of the black, ripe and ready pepper.

"The higher they go up, the blacker they are. Each tree ripens differently. Like fruit, the pepper has to ripen. They go green, red, and then black. This particular tree is red - in a fortnight the pepper will be black."

"The leaves are just as exciting as the peppers," Caroline says, reaching her gloved hand up high to a large bunch of peppers to be stuffed into a canvas bag. She walks up to a large tree brimming with shiny, black fruit. "This is what they should look like. This is a perfect bush - it's a young bush. If I don't take them now, the birds will have taken them all by next week."

Note: This feature ran in the first edition of Australian Regional Food magazine.

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