Almost too soon - just 45-minutes out from Melbourne - our plane banks over land again, but this time we are over fields trimmed hedge-like by darker bushes, and sheep and cattle dotting the richest grass I've ever seen. Greener than Ireland, I think, and finally realise then, how King Island manages to produce such rich meat and dairy products.

Yet I flinch at the sight of the black, murderously sharp rocks below me. This cruel coastline has claimed over 60 ships and more than 800 lives in the island's short history. From them King Island has earned the doubtful honour of being the site of more known shipwrecks than any other part of Australia, as well as that of Australia's worst maritime disaster, the loss of the Cataraqui and 399 on board, in 1845.

Ironically, even these tragic events are thought to have contributed to the high standard of island produce. Some say that the mattresses on board many of the shipwrecked vessels burst, and the millet stuffing washed ashore, taking root and becoming the basis of the island's rich pastures.

This tiny dot in Bass Strait, just 64 km long and 24 km wide on the map appears to swing Tasmania like a pendant from Australia's south-eastern tip. Yet it has perhaps one of the richest and most diverse food selections in the world: many varieties of fish, seafood that includes abalone, scallops, prawns, crayfish, huge king-sized oysters and rock lobsters, breads, pies (do check out the seafood pies at the local bakery), biscuits and cakes, a dozen or more types of cheese, cream so rich you almost need a knife for it, milk, as well as butter and yoghurt; honey produced by bees drunk from feasting on white clover, and some of the world's best beef, free-range pork, game birds, wild wallaby and small goods. Even some local wine.

Some products feature further afield - King Island Beef exports its chilled beef mainly to Japan, and the extensive and continually expanding range of King Island Dairy cream and cheeses turn up in prestige shops all over Australia, plus Singapore, Malaysia, Japan and even London. Of course, fledgling industries such as honey and wine are more localised.

King Island may not be as remote as some places – 80 km from north-western Tasmania and slightly more from Victoria – but its rugged coastline made it initially quite inaccessible, an outpost that needed to manage alone for many months at a time, often in hostile conditions.

The island was named in 1801 after King, an early governor of the infant NSW colony, yet interestingly so much of the produce is also king-sized. The bulls are enormous. Even the crabs, crayfish and oysters, although delicate in flavour are huge, too big for many Asian markets, we are told, where small is often more desirable and sometimes wrongly thought to be more flavoursome and high-class. Yet you rarely get more elegant flavour than from this seafood born deep in the wild oceans around King Island.

Just outside the island's main town of Currie (population around 800) is one of the island's bigger industries, and one of the worlds strangest. Although not pretty – or even tasty - it is certainly food-related, yet you won't see the raw product on any gourmet display counter, and it is not open to the public. You may come across trucks in the town, packed with slithering black seaweed, or at the shore see men wrestling the huge strands from the ocean.

At the processing plant the leathery kelp hangs in hundreds of sombre black rows, drying so that it can be processed into granules then shipped to Scotland for further processing before it reappears as alginates used to stabilise ice cream, thicken cosmetics, or to manufacture jellies or milk desserts. So rich is King Island in this valuable commodity that it is able to supply around twenty per cent of the world's needs for bull-kelp.

Originally the food grown on the island was purely for sustenance of the isolated settlers. Although south of Melbourne, the island prides itself on warmer winters and cooler summers, so gradually the local farmers realised that the soil, climate and vegetation here, was in perfect combination. Today, one business, King Island Cloud Juice, capitalises on yet another pure resource – rainwater – captured on Cape Grim, reputed to have the cleanest air in the world.

Much of the produce of King Island is exported – to mainland Australia, or overseas. From this speck in the ocean, dwarfed by the rest of Australia, and virtually unheard of by most of the world, the reputation of King Island's products is growing. Maybe one day that will be king-sized too.