Eucla is the easternmost locality in
Western AustraliaWestern Australia is a state of Australia, occupying the entire western third of the Australian continent. Australia's largest state and the second largest subnational entity in the world, it has 2.2 million inhabitants , 85% of whom live in the south-west corner of the state.The state's capital...
, located in the Goldfields-Esperance region of
Western AustraliaWestern Australia is a state of Australia, occupying the entire western third of the Australian continent. Australia's largest state and the second largest subnational entity in the world, it has 2.2 million inhabitants , 85% of whom live in the south-west corner of the state.The state's capital...
along the
Eyre Highway-Location:Named after Edward John Eyre the Eyre Highway is a highway linking Western Australia and South Australia. It forms part of Highway 1 and the Australian National Highway network linking Perth and Adelaide...
, approximately west of the
South AustraliaSouth Australia is a state of Australia in the southern central part of the country. It covers some of the most arid parts of the continent; with a total land area of , it is the fourth largest of Australia's six states and two territories....
n border.
It is the only location on the Eyre Highway that has a direct view of the
Great Australian BightThe Great Australian Bight is a large bight, or open bay located off the central and western portions of the southern coastline of mainland Australia.-Limits:...
due to its position immediately next to the
Eucla Pass - where the highway moves out and above the
basin known as
Roe Plains that occurs between the Madura and Eucla passes.
The name Eucla is believed to originate from an
AboriginalIndigenous Australians are the original inhabitants of the Australian continent and nearby islands, and these peoples' descendants. Indigenous Australians are distinguished as either Aboriginal people or Torres Strait Islanders, who currently together make up about 2.6% of Australia's...
word "Yinculyer" which one source gives as referring to the rising of the planet
VenusVenus is the second-closest planet to the Sun, orbiting it every 224.7 Earth days. The planet is named after Venus, the Roman goddess of love and beauty. After the Moon, it is the brightest natural object in the night sky, reaching an apparent magnitude of −4.6...
.
Eucla is the easternmost locality in
Western AustraliaWestern Australia is a state of Australia, occupying the entire western third of the Australian continent. Australia's largest state and the second largest subnational entity in the world, it has 2.2 million inhabitants , 85% of whom live in the south-west corner of the state.The state's capital...
, located in the Goldfields-Esperance region of
Western AustraliaWestern Australia is a state of Australia, occupying the entire western third of the Australian continent. Australia's largest state and the second largest subnational entity in the world, it has 2.2 million inhabitants , 85% of whom live in the south-west corner of the state.The state's capital...
along the
Eyre Highway-Location:Named after Edward John Eyre the Eyre Highway is a highway linking Western Australia and South Australia. It forms part of Highway 1 and the Australian National Highway network linking Perth and Adelaide...
, approximately west of the
South AustraliaSouth Australia is a state of Australia in the southern central part of the country. It covers some of the most arid parts of the continent; with a total land area of , it is the fourth largest of Australia's six states and two territories....
n border.
It is the only location on the Eyre Highway that has a direct view of the
Great Australian BightThe Great Australian Bight is a large bight, or open bay located off the central and western portions of the southern coastline of mainland Australia.-Limits:...
due to its position immediately next to the
Eucla Pass - where the highway moves out and above the
basin known as
Roe Plains that occurs between the Madura and Eucla passes.
History
The name Eucla is believed to originate from an
AboriginalIndigenous Australians are the original inhabitants of the Australian continent and nearby islands, and these peoples' descendants. Indigenous Australians are distinguished as either Aboriginal people or Torres Strait Islanders, who currently together make up about 2.6% of Australia's...
word "Yinculyer" which one source gives as referring to the rising of the planet
VenusVenus is the second-closest planet to the Sun, orbiting it every 224.7 Earth days. The planet is named after Venus, the Roman goddess of love and beauty. After the Moon, it is the brightest natural object in the night sky, reaching an apparent magnitude of −4.6...
. It was first used by Europeans for the area at some point before 1867.
In 1841,
Edward John EyreEdward John Eyre was an English land explorer of the Australian continent, colonial administrator, and a controversial Governor of Jamaica....
became the first explorer to visit the area. In 1867, the president of the Marine Board of South Australia discovered a port at Eucla, and in 1870,
John ForrestSir John Forrest GCMG was an Australian explorer, the first Premier of Western Australia and a cabinet minister in Australia's first federal parliament....
camped at the location for nearly two weeks. In 1873, land was taken up at Moopina Station near the present townsite, and work commenced on a
telegraphThe electrical telegraph is a telegraph that uses electric signals. The electromagnetic telegraph is a device for human-to-human transmission of coded text messages over wire...
line from
AlbanyAlbany is located in the Great Southern region of Western Australia, situated around a port on the southern coast.Its metropolitan area has a population of 25,196 as of the 2006 census, making it the sixth largest city in the state....
to
AdelaideAdelaide is the capital and most populous city of the Australian state of South Australia, and is the fifth-largest city in Australia, with a population of more than 1.1 million. It is a coastal city situated on the eastern shores of Gulf St. Vincent, on the Adelaide Plains, north of the Fleurieu...
. Land was set aside at Eucla for the establishment of a manual repeater station, and when the telegraph line opened in 1877, Eucla was one of the most important telegraph stations on the line. The station was important as a conversion point because South Australia and Victoria used
American Morse codeAmerican Morse Code — also known as Railroad Morse—is the latter-day name for the original version of the Morse Code developed in the mid-1840s, by Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail for their electric telegraph...
(locally known as the Victorian alphabet) while Western Australia used the
international Morse codeMorse code is a type of character encoding that transmits telegraphic information using rhythm. Morse code uses a standardized sequence of short and long elements to represent the letters, numerals, punctuation and special characters of a given message...
that is familiar today. A jetty and tram line were constructed for offloading supplies brought in by sea. The town was proclaimed a township and gazetted in 1885, and reached its peak in the 1920s, prior to the construction of a new telegraph line further north alongside the
Trans-Australian RailwayThe Trans-Australian Railway crosses the Nullarbor Plain of Australia from Port Augusta in South Australia to Kalgoorlie in Western Australia...
in 1929.
In the 1890s a
rabbitRabbits are small mammals in the family Leporidae of the order Lagomorpha, found in several parts of the world. There are seven different genera in the family classified as rabbits, including the European rabbit , Cottontail rabbit , and the Amami rabbit...
plagueSee also: 2009 flu pandemic A pandemic is an epidemic of infectious disease that is spreading through human populations across a large region; for instance a continent, or even worldwide. A widespread endemic disease that is stable in terms of how many people are getting sick from it is not a...
passed through the area and ate much of the Delisser Sandhills'
duneIn physical geography, a dune is a hill of sand built by aeolian processes. Dunes are subject to different forms and sizes based on their interaction with the wind. Most kinds of dune are longer on the windward side where the sand is pushed up the dune, and a shorter "slip face" in the lee of the...
vegetation, thus destabilising the dune system and causing large sand drifts to encroach on the townsite. The original town was abandoned, and a new townsite established about 5 km to the east and higher up on the escarpment. The ruins of the telegraph station still stand amongst the dunes, and are a local tourist attraction.
Many of the pioneer farmers and telegraph operators were buried at Eucla, but as the sand dunes encroached onto their graves, some of the headstones and plaques were removed and can now be seen at the museum at Eucla.
In 1971, world-wide media publicity came to the town after reports and photographs emerged of a half-naked blonde girl who had gone wild and lived and ran with the kangaroos, who came to be known as the "
Nullarbor NymphThe Nullarbor Nymph, referring to supposed sightings of a half naked woman living amongst kangaroos on the Nullarbor Plain, was a hoax perpetrated in Australia between 1971 and 1972....
". The story subsequently turned out to be a hoax cooked up by the residents of the tiny settlement.
Present day
Eucla has a population of about 50 people, and is the largest stopping point between
NorsemanNorseman is a town located in the Goldfields-Esperance region of Western Australia along the Coolgardie-Esperance Highway, east of Perth and above sea level. It is also the starting point of the Eyre Highway, and the last major town in Western Australia before the South Australian border to the...
and
CedunaCeduna is a small town in the West Coast region of South Australia. It is situated in the northwest corner of Eyre Peninsula, west of the junction of the Flinders and Eyre Highways around 786 km northwest of the capital Adelaide...
for travellers and trucks along the
Eyre Highway-Location:Named after Edward John Eyre the Eyre Highway is a highway linking Western Australia and South Australia. It forms part of Highway 1 and the Australian National Highway network linking Perth and Adelaide...
. It has a hotel and restaurant, a golf club (7 km to the north), a museum dedicated to the Old Telegraph Station, and a meteorological station. These together with fishing are the locality's major activities. There is a Travellers Cross that (despite its name) commemorates deceased local people.
Time zone
Eucla and the surrounding area, notably
MundrabillaMundrabilla is a small roadhouse community located on the Eyre Highway in Western Australia, on the Nullarbor Plain, west of Eucla and about north of the Great Australian Bight.-History:...
and
MaduraMadura is a small roadhouse community located on the Eyre Highway in Western Australia, on the Nullarbor Plain. It is from Perth.-History:Madura was settled in 1876 as a place to breed quality cavalry horses for the British Indian Army for use in the Northwest Frontier region of India . The horses...
, use the Central Western Time Zone of
UTC+8:45UTC+8:45 is used as a time in Australia . It is used by some roadhouses along the Eyre Highway in Western Australia and South Australia...
(in summer, UT+9:45). Although it has no official sanction, it is universally observed in this area, stopping just to the east of
CaigunaCaiguna is a small roadhouse community located on the Eyre Highway in Western Australia. It is the second stop east of Norseman on the long journey east across the Nullarbor Plain. Between Balladonia and Caiguna is a stretch of the highway which is one of the longest straight stretches of road in...
.
Transport
Eucla is a major stop-off point along the
Eyre Highway-Location:Named after Edward John Eyre the Eyre Highway is a highway linking Western Australia and South Australia. It forms part of Highway 1 and the Australian National Highway network linking Perth and Adelaide...
.
In October 2005, Greyhound Australia announced the closure of their Nullarbor service due to rising fuel prices and declining passenger numbers.
Climate
Eucla's climate is dry and usually mild, though very hot days can occur accompanied by hot northerly winds from the
Great Victoria DesertThe Great Victoria Desert is a barren, arid, and sparsely populated desert ecoregion in southern Australia. It falls inside the states of South Australia and Western Australia and consists of many small sandhills, grasslands and salt lakes. It is over 700 kilometres wide and covers an area of...
. Average maximum temperatures vary from 25-26 °C from December to March, to 18 °C in July. The average annual rainfall of 267 mm is evenly spread through the year, with monthly totals ranging from 14 mm in January to 31 mm in May. The highest temperature was 47.9 °C (118.2 °F) on 3 January 1979.
Further reading
- Saunders, B. A. (2005) Spirit of the desert: the story of Eucla, WA, after the east-west telegraph era Kalgoorlie, W.A.: B.A. Saunders for the Eyre Highway Community Association. ISBN 0646445839
External links