Qualla: Point Cloates

Point Cloates: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

For more than a century, the best navigators in the world argued about whether this place was real. Eighteenth-century charts marked a Cloates Island somewhere off the west coast of Australia, but no two charts agreed on where, and some plotted it more than 1,600 kilometres from solid ground. In 1809 the influential hydrographer James Horsburgh wrote the verdict that stuck: "Cloates Island very probably has no real existence." Horsburgh was half right. There was no island - but there was a headland, and it had simply been mismapped into legend.

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Point Cloates: The Phantom on the Chart

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The confusion began with a name and a guess. The point may take its name from a sailor called Nash, thought to be English, commanding a Flemish ship - the House of Austria, bound from Ostend to China - who recorded a long stretch of coast and estimated it at "32 leagues." Cartogr...

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Point Cloates: A Coast That Took Ships

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The cartographic muddle was not harmless. Uncertainty about this stretch of water may have helped doom the Portuguese navy dispatch vessel Correio da Azia, bound for Macau in 1816, which ran aground on Ningaloo Reef, was abandoned, and sank. In 1887 the steamer SS Perth - formerl...

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Point Cloates: The Whaling Years

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1912 the Western Australian government granted a Norwegian company a licence to hunt whales, and the bay just south of the point - Norwegian Bay - became the site of the first modern shore whaling station in the state. The operation was industrial in a way the old hand-thrown ...

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Point Cloates: Light on Cloates Hill

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Above the wrecks and the try-pots stands the reason ships finally learned to trust this coast. A lighthouse was built in 1910 from local limestone on Cloates Hill, the modest rise that lifts 41 metres above the sea. It was one of five lights raised with Commonwealth funding in th...

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