Fowlers Bay South Australia
Town of Fowlers Bay
Fowlers Bay
Coordinates	31°59′25″S132°26′09″E / 31.990142°S 132.435748°E /-31.990142; 132.435748[1]
Population	51 (SAL2016)[2]
Established	10 July 1890 (town) 8 February 2001 (locality)[3][4]
Postcode(s)	5690[5]
Elevation	3 m (10 ft)[6]
Time zone	ACST (UTC+9:30)
• Summer (DST)	ACST (UTC+10:30)
Location	658 km (409 mi) NW ofAdelaide 500 km (311 mi) W ofPort Augusta 118 km (73 mi) W ofCeduna
LGA(s)	Pastoral Unincorporated Area[1]
Region	Eyre Western[7]
County	Hopetoun[1]
State electorate(s)	Flinders[8]
Federal division(s)	Grey[9]
Mean max temp[6] Mean min temp[6] Annual rainfall[6] 21.5 °C 71 °F 12.3 °C 54 °F 300.2 mm 11.8 in
Localities around Fowlers Bay: Yalata Yalata Yalata Mitchidy Moola Coorabie Fowlers Bay Mitchidy Moola Bookabie Great Australian Bight Great Australian Bight Great Australian Bight
Footnotes	Locations[1][5] Adjoining localities[1]

Fowlers Bay, formerly known asYalata, is a bay, town and locality in the Australian state ofSouth Australia located about 658 kilometres (409 mi) north-west of the state capital,Adelaide. The town is located onPort Eyre, at the western end of the larger Fowlers Bay. It was named Yalata afterYalata station, established in the 1860s and stretching from theNullarbor Plain across to nearStreaky Bay on theEyre Peninsula, whosehomestead was located on the hill nearby. The nameYalata now belongs to a smallAboriginal community further west, which was also situated on station land.

Situated on theNullarbor Plain, Fowlers Bay was once an active port and a gateway to the western reaches of the continent, but fell into decline in the 1960s and 1970s. However a revitalised tourist industry started bringing more tourists to the town from the 1980s onwards. Thesouthern right whales that frequent theGreat Australian Bight were a target ofwhalers in the past, but now bring sightseers. Large sand dunes are prominent on the southern side of the town, and have been migrating to cover parts of the town over the past century.

The town site of Fowlers Bay lies on the traditional lands of theWirangu people.^[10] TheMirning,Kokatha, andMaralinga Tjarutja people, some of whom lived at theYalata Mission during the 1950s after being displaced, also have spiritualconnections to the country. The Mirning people havedreaming stories connected with the whales, in which the people call the whales from the edges of thebight.^[11]

The wordyalata is said to be from anAboriginal language, meaning "oyster place"^[12][13] (or "shellfish"^[14]).^[a]

The coastline around Fowlers Bay was first mapped in 1627 byFrançois Thijssen, a Dutch sea captain, on his ship't Gulden Zeepard (Golden Seahorse).^[15] The bay was named on 28 January 1802 byMatthew Flinders after his first lieutenant,Robert Fowler,^[16] as he was reconfirming the Dutch mapping of the coast and naming features along the way, in theInvestigator. He found a couple of islands charted by Thijssen and named the groupNuyts Archipelago.^[17]

Edward John Eyre set up base camp here from November 1840 during his epic journeys across theNullarbor Plain, receiving supplies at Eyre's Landing.^[17] By this time the area was well known to American and Frenchwhaling ships; Eyre documents seeing whalers in the area.^[18] A government ship landed at the bay to bring him supplies.^[12]

Whaling ships visited the port in the 1800s, and whales were brought onto the beach for processing.^[11]

In the 1860s, the firstpastoral leases were established by William Swan andRobert Barr Smith, forming Yalata station (they called it Yatala run^[12]), a farming property whose boundaries extended from theHead of the Bight (Nullarbor Plain) in the west to Point Brown nearStreaky Bay in the east.^[15] The station's first buildings were on the beach at Port Eyre.^[17] The 5,000 ha (12,000-acre)sheep station's homestead, now a ruin, was built in 1880 on a high hill around 10 km (6.2 mi) inland from Fowlers Bay. The huge sheep station ran up to 120,000 sheep at times.^[19]

An unofficialpost office was opened in 1865, and the first three postmasters were also policemen.^[17] The town was first surveyed in 1867,^[12] and resurveyed in March 1890 and proclaimed as the "Town of Yalata" on 10 July 1890.^[3][17] The Nomenclature Committee recommended its renaming to "Tarombo", the name used by local Aboriginal people for a nearby well, to avoid confusion,^[12] but its name was changed to Fowler's Bay on 19 September 1940 to agree with the bay and to prevent dual naming.^[1][20] (Yalata now refers to a nearby township.)

From 1875 to 1877, three sections of theEast-West Telegraph Line were built: fromPort Augusta toPort Lincoln; from there to Fowlers Bay, and from Fowlers Bay to near the WA border atEucla. The third section was undertaken by the Posts and Telegraph Department itself and supervised byR. R. Knuckey. A supply base was built at Fowlers Bay to provide equipment and provisions along the line, and the line betweenAdelaide andPerth became operational on 8 December 1877, spanning 1,986 mi (3,196 km).^[17]

Sometime in the late 19th century a kangaroo hunter named Tom Kent, son ofBenjamin Archer Kent, after whom the Adelaide suburb ofKent Town is named, created a cluster of cottages which was informally named "Kent Town". The families of fellow hunters lived there, but there were only ruins left by 1892,^[17] and all of the houses were later covered by sand (see below).^[11]

In 1910–1911 additional allotments were added, bringing the number from 42 to 62 and in 1990, a further ten allotments were created from reclaimedsamphire swampland.^[17]

In 1927 thetelegraph line was closed, and in 1967 the post office was shut down,^[17] contributing to the decline of the town. Some houses were abandoned.^[11]

Boundaries for the locality of Fowlers Bay which include the town were created on 8 February 2001.^[4]

Thejetty (built in 1896 and extended in 1907, 1914 and 1948) was upgraded in 2002, with solar lighting added in 2003.^[17]

The town is located on Port Eyre, at the western end of the larger Fowlers Bay.^[21]

It is located within the federalDivision of Grey, the stateelectoral district of Flinders and thePastoral Unincorporated Area of South Australia.^[1][8][9] In the absence of a local government authority, the community in Fowlers Bay receives municipal services from a state government agency, theOutback Communities Authority.^[22]

At the2016 census, the localities of Fowlers Bay andCoorabie shared a population of 51.^[23]

Fowlers Bay does not receive reticulated power or water^[17] and there are few services; there aresolar panels on every roof, residents use rainwater and water piped from a source in the adjacent sand dune, and manage the town's rubbish themselves.^[11]

Visually the town is dominated by largesand dunes on its southern side, which have become higher in recent years. After a very quiet period in the 1960s and 70s, the town has become so popular that over 8,000 visitors stay at thecaravan park each year, and numbers are boosted by around the same number ofday-trippers who often come to watch thesouthern right whales in the bay over winter.^[11] The old police station and courthouse, dating from 1883, has been converted intoholiday apartments.^[17]

The ruins of the homestead of the Yalata station can be found several kilometres from the town.^[19]

There is a small cemetery on the outskirts of the town.^[24]

Fowlers Bay contains one place listed on theSouth Australian Heritage Register, theWhale Bone Area and the Point Fowler Structure.^[25]

There are also some other restored historic buildings, such as the courthouse, the Fowlers Bay Institute, and theharbour master's house.^[17]

The largesand dunes near Fowlers Bay have been moving closer to the town, and had already by the 1970s covered the Kent Town dwellings up to the lastchimney top. By the 21st century, both Kent Town and the High Street have been covered. The dunes have moved approximately 75 m (246 ft) towards the new main road into the town in the decade preceding 2021.^[11]

It is feared thatclimate change might be exacerbating their movement owing to the added stress on the vegetation caused by aridity. TheCSIRO has estimated that rainfall will decline by around 30 per cent in the region by 2100, which will impact the plant life significantly and affect their ability to hold the dunes.^[11]

For several years before and including 2021, residents of the town have been working tostabilise the dunes by planting new vegetation such asboobialla trees and other native plants, and thegovernment of South Australia approved funds to help pay for therevegetation of the ridge that causes the greatest risk to the town.^[11]

Fowlers Bay has acool semi-arid climate (KöppenBSk), with moderating influences from the Great Australian Bight. Summers are typically warm to very warm and almost rainless, although when hot northerly winds from the interior occur extreme heat may result. Winters are pleasant, although often windy, and damp though not wet. Three-fifths of the meagre annual rainfall of around 300 millimetres or 12 inches typically occurs between May and August, but only three months have ever exceeded 115 millimetres or 4.53 inches: June 1890 with 169.1 millimetres (6.66 in), August 1915 with 122.5 millimetres (4.82 in) and May 1956 with 130.8 millimetres (5.15 in).^[26] The wettest year has been 1890 with 505.8 millimetres (19.91 in) and the driest 1959 with 89.1 millimetres (3.51 in).^[26] The highest recorded temperature was 48.4 °C (119.1 °F) and the lowest −3.2 °C (26.2 °F).

• Fowlers Bay Conservation Park

• Fowlers Bay (Nullarbor Net)
• "The dunes that ate a town"(Video).Australian Broadcasting Corporation.Archived from the original on 12 December 2021 – via YouTube.

• Towns in South Australia
• Coastal towns in South Australia
• Bays of South Australia
• Places in the unincorporated areas of South Australia
• Great Australian Bight

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