Qualla: Great Australian Bight Marine Park Whale Sanctuary

Great Australian Bight Marine Park Whale Sanctuary: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Holly Randell, CC BY-SA 4.0. A line on a map saved the whales. In 1995, the South Australian government drew a rectangle of ocean off the head of the Great Australian Bight – from 130°45.5' east to 131°30' east, reaching three nautical miles out from a coast of sheer white cliffs – and declared everything inside it a whale sanctuary. The boundaries look arbitrary, just numbers in a gazette, a parcel of grey-green water about 790 kilometres west-northwest of Adelaide and far from anywhere a city dweller would call close. But the rectangle traces something real. It encloses the patch of cold, sheltered water where hundreds of southern right whales return every winter to give birth, the single most important calving ground for the species anywhere in the world.

Image: Holly Randell | CC BY-SA 4.0

Great Australian Bight Marine Park Whale Sanctuary: The Right Whale to Protect

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tentotwo, CC BY-SA 3.0. Southern right whales earned their grim name from the whalers who nearly erased them. Slow swimmers that hugged the coast, rich in oil, and – conveniently for hunters – inclined to float once dead rather than sink, they were judged the "right" whale to kill. The logic was brutall...

Image: Tentotwo | CC BY-SA 3.0

Great Australian Bight Marine Park Whale Sanctuary: A Nursery Under the Cliffs

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tentotwo, CC BY-SA 3.0. What makes this stretch of coast extraordinary is how close the whales come. The Bunda Cliffs – part of the longest uninterrupted line of sea cliffs on the planet, running more than two hundred kilometres along the edge of the Nullarbor – drop straight into the water, so a mother...

Image: Tentotwo | CC BY-SA 3.0

Great Australian Bight Marine Park Whale Sanctuary: Fed by the Far South

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tentotwo, CC BY-SA 3.0. The whales that crowd this coast in winter spend the rest of their year somewhere unimaginably colder and wilder. Southern right whales are creatures of the deep Southern Ocean, fattening through the summer on dense swarms of krill and tiny copepods in the freezing waters that ri...

Image: Tentotwo | CC BY-SA 3.0

Great Australian Bight Marine Park Whale Sanctuary: Lines That Keep Shifting

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tentotwo, CC BY-SA 3.0. Protected areas are not permanent things; they are arguments written in legislation, and the arguments change. From late 2012 the sanctuary was folded inside the broader Far West Coast Marine Park. In October 2016 the original whale sanctuary, classified at the strictest conserva...

Image: Tentotwo | CC BY-SA 3.0