Saint Peter’s Island: via Ceduna on the West Coast in the Eyre Peninsula region of South Australia

Flying over the Far West Coast you get a sense of just what the early navigators were up against. The cliffs would fill any sensible sailor's heart with dread and so it was for the first Europeans who sailed along our shores.

Now, the vast expanse of Murat Bay, which wraps itself around the remote coastal town of Ceduna, is a haven for boaties and fishermen. But it wasn't always so and to get a better grasp on the fascinating stories that abound in these waters I jumped on board one of Perry Will's Ceduna Fishing Charters. But first things first - gathering the bait, which in this case was Razor Fish - said to be the best bait for King George Whiting. And it’s not surprising the bait is plentiful - Perry reckons the water quality in the bay is some of the best:

“The water tested was that clean that the scientist from the CSIRO didn't believe that there was water this clean in the world.”

And that explains why some fishermen are out early in search of whiting while the true experts, the Australian Sea Lions, at nearby Bird Rock spend their time digesting the week's catch.

There are no prizes for guessing why its called Bird Rock either. On granite boulders and a small sandbar Cormorants, Terns and the occasional Pacific Gull take a break in a bay named by the French Navigator Nicholas Baudin two hundred years ago. Today we cruise the waters a lot quicker than Baudin's men did in their long boats while searching for water. Soon we pull up at an island, discovered by the Dutch nearly two centuries earlier, which would eventually become the setting for one of the great shipwreck tales of all time.

“Saint Peters Island was discovered by the Dutch explorer, Pieter Nuyts in 1627. He went onto record a number of other islands in the area, which are now known as Nuyts Archipelago. And this particular island played a key role in a classic of English literature.”

The great satirist Jonathon Swift read the journals of Nuyts' voyage. The frightening descriptions of the Nullabor Cliffs and the sheer remoteness of Nuyt's antipodean voyage stirred Swift's imagination. Nearly a century after its discovery he would write about this island and other dramatic features of the fearsome Far West Coast of South Australia in his novel "Gulliver's Travels". A mythical land where the little people, or Lilliputians and the Giants lived.

By the 1820s some equally fearsome characters had hit these shores - a motley crew of Americans, British and French in search of other giants, the Southern Right Whales.

“This is the platform where they dragged the whales ashore - the flensing platform. They've dug a channel out there and they've brought the whales up onto here. They've cut them up into pot sized pieces and they take them up to the back of the beach and they had big - what they call tripots - with a fire under them and they've melted the blubber down into whale oil.”

Wander around this lonely island just 16 kilometres off the coast of Ceduna and you stumble across some of the oldest European structures in the State.

“This stone hut probably would have had at least three sides. It would have had mallee boughs over the top or maybe tarps dragged over the top so they had somewhere to shelter. They used to drop them off here in March and they'd come and pick them up again in October. Basically the trips were originating out of Hobart and they'd come along the coast and drop off groups of sealers with their lights and their whale boats and they had to survive here for that period of time.”

Nearby are thickets of vitamin-C-rich quandong trees planted by the whalers as a precaution against scurvy. And in a small opening there’s another fascinating reminder of those early whaling days.

“This is a cave that the whalers dug to store the whale oil. They had to keep the whale oil at a constant temperature so it didn't go rancid.”

What we know about these roughhouse days is largely due to the recollections of an aboriginal woman who was kidnapped by a local pirate.

“Blackbeard's vessel was wrecked in Avoid Bay near Port Lincoln and the only survivor from it was Charlotte. She swam ashore and managed to avoid the local Aborigines and got into Port Lincoln and from Port Lincoln she got back to Hobart.”

For us it's time to head home, but not before we make the most of that razor fish bait and catch a nice feed of local King George Whiting. A fitting farewell from Murat Bay, Ceduna.

Perry Will runs regular charters. You can contact him on 0428 643 519.

And if this charter has whet the appetite for a bit more of Jonathon Swift's classic you can obtain a copy of Gulliver's Travels from Video Ezy outlets.