Qualla: St Peter Island (South Australia)

St Peter Island (South Australia): Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Melchisédech Thévenot, Public domain. In January 1627, nearly two centuries before any British navigator reached this coast, a Dutch ship called 't Gulden Zeepaert - the Golden Seahorse - sailed past a long, low island off what is now Ceduna and gave it a name. St Peter Island is, by that act, one of the very first pieces of South Australia ever charted and named by Europeans. The largest island in the Nuyts Archipelago, it stretches some 13 kilometres across the entrance to a sheltered run of bays, a green-brown line of land sitting between the mainland and the open Southern Ocean.

Image: Melchisédech Thévenot | Public domain

St Peter Island (South Australia): The Golden Seahorse Sails By

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Melchisédech Thévenot, Public domain. The story begins with a long voyage far off course. The Gulden Zeepaert, captained by Francois Thijssen, was bound from the Netherlands toward Asia when it ran along roughly 1,800 kilometres of Australia's southern coast in 1626-27 - a stretch no European had mapped. Aboard was P...

Image: Melchisédech Thévenot | Public domain

St Peter Island (South Australia): Sealers, Whalers, and Bone in the Sand

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Melchisédech Thévenot, Public domain. For a time in the 1820s and 1830s, St Peter Island drew a harder kind of visitor. Seal hunters worked these waters, part of the brutal early-colonial trade that stripped the southern coast of its fur seals with little thought for the future. Archaeologists have since found whale ...

Image: Melchisédech Thévenot | Public domain

St Peter Island (South Australia): A Refuge for Seabirds

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Melchisédech Thévenot, Public domain. Now the island belongs mostly to the birds. St Peter Island forms part of the Nuyts Archipelago Conservation Park, with the surrounding waters protected as a marine park, and BirdLife International has recognised the wider archipelago as an Important Bird Area. The reason is its ...

Image: Melchisédech Thévenot | Public domain

St Peter Island (South Australia): The Biggest of the Group

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Melchisédech Thévenot, Public domain. St Peter Island anchors the Nuyts Archipelago, a loose scatter of islands and islets strung along the coast off Ceduna. It is both the largest and the most accessible of them - and, after Kangaroo Island, the second largest island in all of South Australia, a fact that surprises ...

Image: Melchisédech Thévenot | Public domain