Qualla: Point Labatt

Point Labatt: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Diceman~commonswiki, Public domain. Fifty metres below the viewing platform, scattered across a crescent of beach you can never reach, lie the sea lions. From the clifftop they look almost like driftwood – tan-and-cream bodies sprawled on the sand, the occasional one heaving itself up the beach with surprising effort, or barking a complaint that drifts faintly upward on the wind. This is Point Labatt, a headland on the western coast of the Eyre Peninsula, about forty kilometres south of Streaky Bay, and it holds a distinction shared by nowhere else on the continent: it is the only permanent breeding colony of Australian sea lions on the entire Australian mainland. Every other colony of this species clings to an offshore island, scattered across the southern sea. Here alone, they come ashore on the continent itself.

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Image: Diceman~commonswiki | Public domain

Point Labatt: The Rarest of Seals

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Diceman~commonswiki, Public domain. The Australian sea lion is found in no other country on Earth, and there are perhaps fewer than twelve thousand of them left – among the rarest seals in the world, and listed as endangered. What makes them so vulnerable is hidden in their biology. Unlike almost every other seal, ...

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Image: Diceman~commonswiki | Public domain

Point Labatt: A View From the Edge

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Diceman~commonswiki, Public domain. You watch from above, and that distance is the whole arrangement. The colony sits at the foot of an unbroken wall of cliff that begins here at around sixty metres and climbs to a hundred and thirty-five metres at Cape Radstock to the southeast – the rock a pale calcarenite laid o...

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Image: Diceman~commonswiki | Public domain

Point Labatt: Life on the Beach

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, photographer not specified or unknown, Public domain. Watch long enough and the scatter of bodies resolves into a society. Bulls – dark, massive, scarred from fighting – patrol stretches of sand and surf, while paler females rest in clusters with their pups. A mother will leave her pup ashore and head out to sea to feed, sometimes f...

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Image: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, photographer not specified or unknown | Public domain

Point Labatt: The Gift of the Freemans

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Diceman~commonswiki, Public domain. The land that makes all this possible was given away. For years the country above the colony was grazed farmland, until in 1972 Ron, Myra and Ellen Freeman donated it specifically so the sea lions could be protected. That single act of generosity became the seed of three overlapp...

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Image: Diceman~commonswiki | Public domain