Qualla: Nuyts Archipelago

Nuyts Archipelago: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Look at a map of the south coast of Australia and you will find a small Dutch name marooned among English and French ones: Nuyts. In January 1627, more than a century and a half before any British charts of this coast existed, a Dutch ship called the Golden Seahorse sailed past these granite islands, and the man it carried left his name on the water. The archipelago he never set foot upon still bears it - roughly thirty islands and reefs scattered across the Great Australian Bight south of Ceduna, wild and almost untouched.

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Nuyts Archipelago: The Golden Seahorse

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The voyage was almost an accident of geography. In 1626 the 't Gulden Zeepaert - the Golden Seahorse - left the Netherlands bound for the Dutch East Indies, captained by Francois Thijssen and carrying Pieter Nuyts, a senior councillor of the Dutch East India Company. Somewhere so...

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Nuyts Archipelago: An Echo in Fiction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

There is a literary footnote to these remote islands worth telling. When Jonathan Swift wrote Gulliver's Travels in 1726, he placed the land of the tiny Lilliputians somewhere off the then barely-known southern coast of New Holland - and scholars have long argued that the desolat...

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Nuyts Archipelago: Where Two Currents Meet

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

What truly sets the archipelago apart is invisible from the surface. The warm, subtropical Leeuwin Current sweeps eastward across the Bight and collides here with the colder Flinders Current welling up from the south. Where they mix, the sea becomes a biodiversity hotspot, carryi...

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Nuyts Archipelago: A Refuge of Wings and Fur

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Today the islands are among the most important wildlife refuges in southern Australia. They shelter an estimated 93 percent of the Australian sea lions living in the Great Australian Bight, across eight breeding colonies hauled out on lonely beaches. BirdLife International recogn...

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