Binalong Bay and the Bay of Fires: Chasing a Lucky Morning in Tasmania

Binalong Bay, on Tasmania's east coast, is part of the stretch known as the Bay of Fires — and if you've ever wondered where that name comes from, one look at the rocks along this shoreline answers the question immediately. Great granite boulders sit scattered along the sand, coated in a brilliant orange-red lichen that looks, quite genuinely, like the stones themselves are on fire.

Why the Rocks Glow Orange

The colour isn't in the rock itself — it's a lichen called Caloplaca, a slow-growing organism that clings to the granite and builds up over decades, sometimes centuries. Against the white sand and turquoise water, that burnt-orange colour becomes almost surreal, especially when it's lit by low, warm light. Early European explorers are said to have named the area after fires they saw along the coast, though the lichen-covered rocks make for just as fitting an explanation for the name today.

A Lucky Morning

The morning I photographed this scene, a thin layer of mist was sitting just above the water — soft, low, and drifting slowly across the bay. It's not something you can plan for or guarantee; it depends on a very specific combination of overnight temperature, moisture, and calm air. By the time the sun climbed higher and the day warmed up, that mist had completely burned off, and the scene had gone from something almost otherworldly back to a beautiful, but far more ordinary, sunny beach.

That's the thing about conditions like this — you either happen to be standing there with a camera ready when it appears, or you miss it entirely. I count that morning as one of the luckier ones.

The Best Time to Visit

For photography, Binalong Bay rewards patience with timing far more than most locations. Golden hour — the window just after sunrise — is when the orange lichen truly comes alive, as the low warm sunlight matches and intensifies the colour of the rocks themselves. It's a rare case where the light and the subject's own colour work together rather than fighting each other.

Blue hour, the quieter period just before sunrise or after sunset, offers something completely different — a cooler, more muted palette where the sky and water take on deep blues and purples, and the orange rocks provide a striking point of warm contrast against all that cool colour. If you can manage it, visiting for both blue hour and golden hour in the same morning, as the light transitions from one to the other, gives you two very different moods from the same spot within the space of half an hour.

Midday, by contrast, is the least forgiving time here — harsh overhead light flattens the colour of the rocks and washes out the contrast that makes this place so distinctive in photographs.

The Canvas

That misty golden-hour morning at Binalong Bay became one of my favourite pieces in the whole collection. You can see it as a fine art canvas print here — the Bay of Fires captured exactly as I found it that lucky morning, before the mist burned away.

Tasmanian Landscapes on Your Wall

If you'd rather have a whole year of scenes like this, my landscape calendars bring Australian coastlines, forests and wild places to your wall month by month — including the Tasmania Wall Calendar and the Australian Coastal Wall Calendar, each personalised to order.