Qualla: Mauds Landing

Mauds Landing: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A line of black, salt-eaten timber stumps still juts from the sand a few kilometres north of Coral Bay, marching out toward the water and stopping at nothing. They are the bones of a jetty that once reached 450 metres into the Indian Ocean, and they are almost all that remains of the port that wasn't — twice over. Mauds Landing was meant to be a shipping town, then a marina resort, and it became neither. Instead it became something quieter and, in the end, far more important: a stretch of empty beach that an entire state fought to keep empty.

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Mauds Landing: The Port That Almost Was

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The place takes its name from a schooner, the Maud, and the town-site reserve was set aside in 1896. The plans were ambitious for such a remote shore: that 450-metre jetty, capped with a T-head, plus a tramway, a well, and a woolshed, all built to ship wool, sheep, and cattle out...

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Mauds Landing: Two Hundred Million Dollars on the Sand

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 2000, the empty beach drew a far grander vision. Coral Coast Marina Developments proposed a 200-million-dollar resort and marina at Mauds Landing — hotels, canals, and berths cut into the shore directly behind one of the longest fringing coral reefs on Earth. To its promoters ...

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Mauds Landing: The Reef That Was Won

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

What followed became the largest environmental campaign in Western Australia's history. The novelist Tim Winton lent it his voice and donated his 25,000-dollar Premier's Award prize money to the cause. In December 2002 roughly 15,000 people marched through Fremantle — a crowd the...

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Mauds Landing: Left to the Turtles

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Today Mauds Landing is given back, quietly, to its oldest residents. The beach curves roughly 8.5 kilometres from the point of the bay, gently north-east, ending near Oyster Bridge where a band of beachrock reef meets the sand. Between December and March, endangered green and log...

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