Qualla: Bunda Cliffs

Bunda Cliffs: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The plain gives no warning. For hundreds of kilometres the Nullarbor runs flat and treeless, a tabletop of saltbush and limestone so featureless that drivers on the Eyre Highway can watch the same horizon for hours. Then, without a hill or a slope to announce it, the land simply stops. The ground falls away in a sheer wall of pale rock, sixty to a hundred and twenty metres straight down to the Southern Ocean, where swells that have crossed half the planet detonate against the stone. These are the Bunda Cliffs, the edge of Australia where a continent meets the sea not with a beach but with a cliff, and where the next land south is Antarctica.

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Bunda Cliffs: The Edge of the World

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Bunda Cliffs stretch for 210 kilometres along the northern shore of the Great Australian Bight, from the Head of the Bight in the east toward Eucla near the Western Australian border. For a continuous 160 kilometres the cliff line never breaks, which gives the Bunda its grand...

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Bunda Cliffs: A Wall Built of Time

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The cliffs are made of fossiliferous limestone laid down during the Cenozoic era, the rock of the Eucla Basin, built grain by grain from the shells and skeletons of sea creatures over millions of years. They are the eastern face of the Great Southern Scarp, an 820-kilometre forma...

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Bunda Cliffs: The Whales of the Bight

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

From May to October, the waters below the eastern cliffs become a nursery. Southern right whales, hunted nearly to extinction in the whaling years, return to the sheltered shallows at the Head of the Bight to calve and to court. From the clifftop viewing platforms there, the spec...

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Bunda Cliffs: Sacred and Protected

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

This is not empty country, whatever the emptiness suggests. The cliffs and the plain behind them are the traditional lands of the Mirning people, the coastal Aboriginal nation whose name means to listen, learn and observe, and much of the coast now falls within layered protection...

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