Qualla: St Francis Island https://qualla.com/st-francis-island en-us © 2026 Bendyline Mon, 20 Jul 2026 10:21:26 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/q/f/n/z/st-francis-island-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: St Francis Island https://qualla.com/st-francis-island St Francis Island: Introduction https://qualla.com/st-francis-island/ Photo credit Melchisédech Thévenot, Public domain. In January 1627, a Dutch ship called the Gulden Zeepaert – the Golden Seahorse – was blown far off any sensible course. Bound from the Netherlands for Batavia in the Indies, captain François Thijssen instead found himself tracing more than a thousand miles of unknown coastline along the bottom of an entire continent. Aboard was Pieter Nuyts, a senior official of the Dutch East India Company, and it is his name that the archipelago carries today. Among the scatter of islands they charted off what is now the South Australian coast were two they named for saints. One became St Francis – a low, salt-pruned island that was among the very first pieces of South Australia ever marked on a European map.

Read more: St Francis Island on Qualla

Image: Melchisédech Thévenot | Public domain

]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/q/f/n/z/st-francis-island-wp/qfnz-st-francis-island-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full St Francis Island: The Accidental Chart https://qualla.com/st-francis-island/ Photo credit Melchisédech Thévenot, Public domain. The Gulden Zeepaert was not exploring so much as lost, in the productive way that produced so much of the early map of Australia. Thijssen and Nuyts had no interest in this barren southern shore and no reason to linger; their business lay thousands of miles north, in the trade of...

Read more: St Francis Island on Qualla

Image: Melchisédech Thévenot | Public domain

]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/q/f/n/z/st-francis-island-wp/qfnz-st-francis-island-the-accidental-chart.mp3 0:06 2 full St Francis Island: The Island of Birds https://qualla.com/st-francis-island/ Photo credit Melchisédech Thévenot, Public domain. Stand on St Francis at dusk in summer and the sky fills. This is one of the great seabird islands of the southern coast, home to something like a quarter of a million pairs of short-tailed shearwaters – the muttonbird, that astonishing ocean wanderer that migrates each year to th...

Read more: St Francis Island on Qualla

Image: Melchisédech Thévenot | Public domain

]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/q/f/n/z/st-francis-island-wp/qfnz-st-francis-island-the-island-of-birds.mp3 0:06 3 full St Francis Island: From Sheep Run to Sanctuary https://qualla.com/st-francis-island/ Photo credit Melchisédech Thévenot, Public domain. Like many of these islands, St Francis was once put to work. A century or so ago it served as a base for sheep grazing, the hardy stock left to fend for themselves on a heath of saltbush and low shrub far from the mainland; at times the island is thought to have had a hand in the...

Read more: St Francis Island on Qualla

Image: Melchisédech Thévenot | Public domain

]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/q/f/n/z/st-francis-island-wp/qfnz-st-francis-island-from-sheep-run-to-sanctuary.mp3 0:06 4 full St Francis Island: An Archipelago of Refuges https://qualla.com/st-francis-island/ Photo credit Melchisédech Thévenot, Public domain. St Francis does not stand alone. It anchors a whole scattered fleet of islands – the Nuyts Archipelago – strewn across the sea off Ceduna, each a fragment of higher ground left behind when the oceans rose at the end of the last ice age and drowned the plains between them. St Pete...

Read more: St Francis Island on Qualla

Image: Melchisédech Thévenot | Public domain

]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/q/f/n/z/st-francis-island-wp/qfnz-st-francis-island-an-archipelago-of-refuges.mp3 0:06 5 full