Two Aborigines on the jetty at Ceduna

Ceduna (including Denial Bay, Thevenard, Laura Bay and Smoky Bay)
Major town and port at the edge of the Great Australian Bight
In a very real sense Ceduna is the solitary major township on the eastern side of the Great Australian Bight. Some 1208 km to the west lies Norseman. Between these two towns are a couple of tiny settlements - Penong and Eucla - and a number of substantial roadhouses which provide all the necessary facilities - food, accommodation and fuel - for travellers journeying across the Nullarbor Plain. But, as far as the normal definition of a town is concerned, there is nothing between Ceduna and Norseman. In this sense Ceduna is very much the last easterly stop before entering the wastelands of the Nullarbor Plain and the vast flatlands which lie to the north of the Great Australian Bight.

Ceduna is located 1964 km from Perth, 470 km from Port Augusta and 781 km northwest of Adelaide on the Eyre Highway. It is a substantial and attractive town which, with the nearby port of Thevenard, is located on Murat Bay which in turn is part of the larger Denial Bay.

The road sign in the centre of Ceduna with the jetty and the bay in the background

The first Europeans to see the coastline near Ceduna were the Dutch sailors who accompanied Pieter Nuyts in his 1627 voyage across the Great Australian Bight. Nuyts reached the islands off the coast which are now known as Nuyts Archipelago before turning west to head for Batavia. It is claimed that Jonathan Swift, hearing of the discovery and learning of a Dutch plan to settle the area, used the islands of the Nuyts Archipelago as the models for the lands of Lilliput and Blefescu in Gullivers Travels.

After Nuyts came the coastal explorers of the early nineteenth century. In 1802 Matthew Flinders, circumnavigating Australia in the Investigator sailed down the coast of Eyre Peninsula naming prominent landmarks, bays and harbours as he went. That same year the French explorer Nicholas Baudin sailed up the coast and named Murat Bay after one of Napoleon's marshalls and Thevenard after a French admiral.

The first European settlement in the Ceduna area occurred in the 1840s on the shores of Denial Bay. The area had first been explored by Matthew Flinders who, with a rare sense of a good pun, had named the bay as a combination of the fact that it denied entry into a larger body of water as well as an oblique reference to the island of St Peter off the coast - St Peter having denied Christ three times. In his journal Flinders wrote: 'The bay to the northward, between the islands and the mainland I named Denial Bay, as well in allusion to St Peter as to the deceptive hope we had formed of penetrating by it some distance into the interior country.'

The area was first settled by William McKenzie in 1889. He fancied himself as something of a rural philosopher and is famous for the observation that 'You can't grow wheat with your hands in your pockets' to which it would be fair to add that with an average annual rainfall of 300 mm it is hard to grow wheat in the Ceduna area regardless of whether your hands are in your pockets on on a plough. Still McKenzie was, by any conventional definition, a remarkable man. He cleared the mallee scrub with an axe, built a general store, became the local harbour master, blacksmith, postman, saddler, butcher, haulage contractor and Justice of Peace and, as if this wasn't enough, at times, employed up to 30 people.

The settlement of Denial Bay was basically created to load and unload supplies. The distinguishing feature of the area was that the rocks ran out into the bay and ships could come quite close to the shore while loaded wagons could be driven out across the rocks at low tide. At first sight the landing at Denial Bay, known as McKenzie Landing, seems to make no sense. Remnants of the landing sit forlornly some 50 metres from the shore. However closer inspection still shows the grooves in the rocks where the bullock drays were driven out to the jetty. Today Denial Bay is a tiny settlement of no more than 50-60 houses about 12 km out of Ceduna on a good dirt road.

The other piece of history at Denial Bay is the famous dog fence which runs down to the water near McKenzie's Landing.

The town of Ceduna, probably named as a corruption of the local Aboriginal word 'chedoona' which supposedly means 'a place to sit down and rest', was surveyed in 1901. It grew quickly after the arrival of the railway line from Port Lincoln ensured the decline of Denial Bay as an important transportation point.

The focus of the settlement shifted to Thevenard which, sitting on the headland between Murat and Bosanquet Bays, is the main grain handling port for the rich northerly sector of the Eyre Peninsula. In good years Thevenard has shipped out over one third of the entire Eyre Peninsula wheat crop. Its huge silos have a capacity of 168 500 tonnes.

Thevenard also handles the local production of gypsum from nearby Lake MacDonnell (see Penong) and salt. Add to this the local fishing fleet which sails the coast fishing for snapper, garfish, whiting, prawns, squid and lobster (and the fish factories which process the catch) and it is easy to see why Ceduna-Thevenard has continued to grow while many of the other settlements at the northern end of the Eyre Peninsula have either remained static or declined.

A petition to have the town of Ceduna surveyed was signed in 1896. It was eventually surveyed in 1901 and for some years was known simply at Murat Bay. The name was changed in 1921 when the local Post Office removed the name of the bay and replaced it with the name of the railway siding. Today Ceduna is a pleasant and thriving community. The jetty, which runs out into Murat Bay from the bottom of the McKenzie Street is ideal for fishing and is a pleasant way to walk out into the Bay. It was built in 1903 by John Tait.

Things to see:  

Fishing around Ceduna
Ceduna has a reputation as a superb fishing location. Apart from jetty fishing there is also surf fishing, rock fishing and the waters of Murat Bay are safe for small vessels. The waters abound with fish and it is common to catch silver whiting, leatherjackets, snook, garfish, tommy ruffs, King George whiting, salmon, trevally, mullet, silver drummer, mulloway, sweep and a range of sharks including school shark, bronze whalers, hammerheads, gummy sharks and world record white pointers.

OTC Ceduna Station
37 km to the north of the town is the OTC (Overseas Telecommunications Commission) Ceduna station which handles all international telecommunications from Europe, Japan and the Middle East. It is open to the public with guided tours occurring at 10.00 a.m., 11.00 a.m., 2.00 p.m. and 3.00 p.m. Regardless of the visit the sight of the two huge discs (Ceduna 1 was built in 1969 and is 32.8 m high, weighs 300 tonnes and has a diameter of 29.6 m while Ceduna 2 was completed in 1980 and is 35.2 m high, weighs 260 tonnes and is 32 m in diameter) against the sky is a strange and inspiring experience. The whole operation is designed to send and receive microwave signals from satellites located above the Indian Ocean.

Kongwirra Repeater Station
Closer to town (11 km east and just off the Eyre Highway) is the Kongwirra Repeater Station which monitors communications throughout Australia as well as being a vital link for the nearby OTC satellite dishes. The Repeater Station is run on wind power - with a diesel engine taking over on windless days. It is open for inspection. Contact (08) 8678 2006

The Ceduna Museum (originally the school)

Ceduna Museum
The Ceduna Museum, which was the town's first school (it was built in 1912), is now a National Trust Building surrounded by extensive exhibits of local farming equipment and housing much of the equipment used during the 1950s when atomic testing was going on at Maralinga. The museum is a typical folk memorabilia collection with lots of old photographs, a room devoted to the medical history of the region, good displays of domestic utensils, and a specific policy to store and display the 'commonplace' rather than the exceptional. The museum grounds also include a number of other old school classrooms (including one which was used by Edith Lee in 1918 - she subsequently married and gave birth to Robert James Lee Hawke) as well as the first Ceduna gaol, the Denial Bay gaol, a blacksmiths shop, a large shed for horse drawn vehicles, and a large farm machinery shed.

The cliffs where the body of Mary Hattam was found

The murder of Mary Hattam
One of the saddest moments in Ceduna's history occurred on 20 December 1958 when Mary Hattam, the nine year old daughter of a Ceduna butcher, was raped and murdered on the beach between Ceduna and Thevenard. Of itself the case was brutal and ugly. However over the next year it became one of the most celebrated and controversial murder cases in Australian legal history. It became known as the Rupert Maxwell Stuart case after the Aborigine accused of the murder. In his book The Stuart Affair Sir Roderick Chamberlain, who was the counsel for the prosecution, sums up the public's fascination with the case: 'In every State of the Commonwealth, the newspapers covered each step of the case with breathless furore. In South Australia, the streets were plastered with newspaper posters in flaming red...As the press campaign continued, Rupert Stuart became little more than a pawn in the game. The attack was turned against the Liberal Government of the State and its Premier, Thomas Playford and South Australia was said to be a 'hanging State' dominated by bloodthirsty country-folk. Many reputations suffered in one way or another. A newspaper editor was placed on trial for seditious libel. A Royal Commission was established to enquire into allegations that new evidence had been found and that this would prove the conviction to be wrong. One of the appeals was carried as far as the Privy Council, and heard by the Law Lords of the United Kingdom. The case was discussed in many parts of the world, and the campaign eventually succeeded in having South Australians condemned by Asian countries as persecutors of coloured people.' In the end Rupert Maxwell Stuart was found guilty of the crime and convicted to death. His sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment. Today there are still people in Ceduna who will swear that Stuart was definitely innocent or guilty.

The town still has sad reminders of the crime. The gates to the Ceduna Cemetery have the initials MH on them. They were paid for by public subscription after the murder of Mary Hattam. Mary Hattam's grave is on the left just four rows in from the gates.

Only a few hundred metres from the cemetery, on the road out to Thevenard, are the 'cliffs' where Mary Hattam's body was found. They are really no more than an embankment between the road and the beach.

The dunes and the ocean at Laura Bay Conservation Park near Ceduna

Laura Bay Conservation Park
To the south of Ceduna and Thevenard lies the Laura Bay Conservation Park an area of 251 ha which was proclaimed a conservation park in 1973. It is a rare opportunity to see a section of natural coastline which offers an insight into what the area was like before the arrival of Europeans as well as having remnants of the water gathering and transportation techniques which were used in the area at the turn of the century.

Laura Bay itself protects a flooded forest. Mangroves grow in tidal mud and twice a day the tide floods their roots. To survive mangroves have upright root extensions that act like snorkels. Decaying leaves provide food for a host of small marine creatures that in turn become meals for fish and sea birds. The bay is surrounded by a number of interesting coastal flora communities and there are good stands of coastal mallee which once covered large areas of the northern Eyre Peninsula.

In 1911 a timber platform was constructed on the Laura Bay headland to load bagged grain onto ketches. The grain had been hauled in from nearby farms on horsedrawn drays. Although the platform has been removed it is still possible to find the sight from the cuttings in the limestone.

On the road out to the headland is a large stone water storage tank and gutters which was built in 1914 to collect runoff for local farmers in times of drought. The water storage tank is capable of holding nearly 1 million litres of water. The house nearby predates the Conservation Park. The residents persuaded the Government to allow them to stay on and since 1973 they have worked to maintain the area.

Smoky Bay, which boasts a permanent population of about 100 people, is located about 48 km southeast of Ceduna. It was named by Matthew Flinders who, observing a haze over the area which may have been result of fires lit by the local Aborigines, wrote 'The number of smokes arising from the shore of this wide, open place, induced me to give it the name Smoky Bay.'

	Motels
	Ceduna Community Motel OšLoughlin Tce Ceduna SA 5690 Telephone: (08) 8625 2008 Rating: **
	Pinegrove Motel 49 McKenzie St Ceduna SA 5690 Telephone: (08) 8625 2201 Rating: **
	East West Motel McKenzie St Ceduna SA 5690 Telephone: (08) 8625 2101 Rating: ***
	Highway One Motel Eyre Hwy Ceduna SA 5690 Telephone: (08) 8625 2208 Rating: ***
	Cottages & Cabins
	Decres Bay Beach Cabins Decres Bay Rd P.O. Box 464 Ceduna SA 5690 Telephone: (08) 8625 2044
	Caravan Parks
	A1 Cabins & Caravan Park 41 McKenzie St Ceduna SA 5690 Telephone: (08) 8625 2578 Facsimile: (08) 8625 2578 Rating: ***
	Ceduna Airport Caravan Park Highway One Ceduna SA 5690 Telephone: (08) 8625 2416 Facsimile: (08) 8625 2416 Rating: **
	Ceduna Shelly Beach Caravan Park Lot 178 Decres Bay Rd Ceduna SA 5690 Telephone: (08) 8625 2102 Facsimile: (08) 8625 2102 Rating: ***
	Ceduna Foreshore Caravan Park Poynton St Ceduna SA 5690 Telephone: (08) 8625 2290 Facsimile: (08) 8625 2290 Rating: ***1/2
	Ceduna Tourist Centre 29 McKenzie St Ceduna SA 5690 Telephone: (08) 8625 2150 Facsimile: (08) 8625 9018 Rating: ***1/2
	Restaurants
	Ceduna Airport Caravan Park & Fosters Licensed Restaurant Highway One Ceduna SA 5690 Telephone: (08) 8625 2416
	Ceduna Community Motel OšLoughlin Tce Ceduna SA 5690 Telephone: (08) 8625 2008
	East West Motel McKenzie St Ceduna SA 5690 Telephone: (08) 8625 2101
	Highway One Motel Eyre Hwy Ceduna SA 5690 Telephone: (08) 8625 2208
	Mozie's Truckstop & Diner McKenzie St Ceduna SA 5690 Telephone: (08) 8625 2038
	Nuyts Dining Room O'Loughlin Tce Ceduna SA 5690 Telephone: (08) 8625 2008