Kangaroo Island
Kangaroo Island, known colloquially as KI, is Australia's third-largest island, after Tasmania and Melville Island. It lies in the state of South Australia, southwest of Adelaide. Its closest point to the mainland is Snapper Point in Backstairs Passage, which is from the Fleurieu Peninsula.
The native population that once occupied the island disappeared from the archaeological record sometime after the land became an island following the rising sea levels associated with the Last Glacial Period around 10,000 years ago. It was subsequently settled intermittently by sealers and whalers in the early 19th century, and from 1836 on a permanent basis during the British colonisation of South Australia.
Since then the island's economy has been principally agricultural, with a southern rock lobster fishery and with tourism growing in importance. The largest town, and the administrative centre, is Kingscote. The island has several nature reserves to protect the remnants of its natural vegetation and native animals, with the largest and best-known being Flinders Chase National Park at the western end. It is particularly known for the abundance of sea lions at Seal Bay, and for its population of little penguins. The island is subject to bushfires in the summer, and had two particularly devastating fires in 2007 and 2019.
Description
Kangaroo Island, colloquially known as "KI", is long west/east and between from its narrowest to widest north/south points. Its area covers. Its coastline is long, and its highest point of is in Flinders Chase National Park, west of the junction of the Playford and West End Highways. The second highest point is Mount MacDonnell at above sea level.It is separated from Yorke Peninsula to the northwest by Investigator Strait and from Fleurieu Peninsula to the northeast by Backstairs Passage. A group of islets, the Pages, lie off the eastern end of the island.
History
Aboriginal use and occupation
Kangaroo Island separated from mainland Australia around 10,000 years ago, due to rising sea level after the last glacial period. Known as Pintingga by the mainland Aboriginal peoples, the existence of stone tools and shell middens shows that Aboriginal people once lived on Kangaroo Island. The people disappeared from the archaeological record sometime after the land became an island; it is thought that they occupied it as long ago as 16,000 years before the present and may have only disappeared from the island as recently as 2000 years ago. There is however evidence of the Kartan people on the mainland, for instance at Hallett Cove. A mainland Aboriginal dreaming story tells of the Backstairs Passage flooding:Long ago, Ngurunderi's two wives ran away from him, and he was forced to follow them. He pursued them and as he did so he crossed Lake Albert and went along the beach to Cape Jervis. When he arrived there he saw his wives wading half-way across the shallow channel which divided Naroongowie from the mainland. He was determined to punish his wives, and angrily ordered the water to rise up and drown them. With a terrific rush the waters roared and the women were carried back towards the mainland. Although they tried frantically to swim against the tidal wave they were powerless to do so and were drowned.
European settlement
On 23 March 1802, British explorer Matthew Flinders, commanding, named the land "Kanguroo Island", due to the endemic subspecies of the western grey kangaroo, Macropus fuliginosus fuliginosus, after landing near Kangaroo Head on the north coast of the Dudley Peninsula. He was closely followed by the French explorer Commander Nicolas Baudin, who was the first European to circumnavigate the Island and who mapped much of the island.Although the French and the British were at war at the time, the men met peacefully. They both used the fresh water seeping at what is now known as Hog Bay near Frenchman's Rock and the site of present-day Penneshaw. Baudin named the Island Île Borda, in honour of Jean-Charles de Borda, although the French chart published by Louis de Freycinet after Baudin's death referred to the Island as Île Decres.
A community of sealers and escaped convicts existed on Kangaroo Island from 1802 to the time of South Australia's colonisation in 1836. A sealing gang led by Joseph Murrrell are reported landing at Harvey's Return in 1806–07, and they established a camp on the beach. The sealers were rough men and several kidnapped Aboriginal women from Tasmania and mainland South Australia. The women were kept prisoner as wives and virtual slaves. At least two contemporary accounts report reputed crossings of Backstairs Passage from Kangaroo Island to the mainland by kidnapped women seeking to escape from their captors. "A fine specimen of her race" was pointed out to J. W. Bull as having swum the passage in 1835, and a woman and her baby were found dead on the beach after a presumed crossing in 1871. In 1803, sealers from the American brig built the schooner, the first ship built in South Australia, at what is now American River.
In 1812, Richard Siddins reached Kangaroo Island on the, which was engaged in salt harvesting on the island. When she was wrecked later that year, 30 tons of the mineral was recovered from her cargo. In 1819, a whaler named Henry Wallen established a farm near "Three Wells River" and with the assistance of a later arrival, "Fireball" Bates, and a friend William Day, exerted his dominance over the island's rag-tag population, who deferentially referred to him as "King Wally".
Most ships of the "First Fleet of South Australia" that brought settlers for the new colony first stopped at Nepean Bay. The first was commanded by Captain Robert Clark Morgan on 27 or 28 July 1836;, under Robert Ross, arrived a day or two later. The arrival of the, under John Finlay Duff, in November that year, was notable for the deaths of E. W. Osborne and Dr. John Slater, who perished on an exploratory trek from Cape Borda to Kingscote. Samuel Stephens, the colonial manager, was so impressed with Wallen's farm that he annexed it for the South Australian Company. A number of shore-based bay whaling stations operated on the coast in the 1840s. These were located at Doyle's Bay, D'Estrees Bay and Hog Bay.
Shipwrecks and lighthouses
Numerous ships have been wrecked on the Kangaroo Island coastline. The earliest was the cutter William, which was wrecked while trying to enter Hog Bay on 23 August 1847. The largest vessel lost was Portland Maru, which sank at Cape Torrens on 20 March 1935. The greatest loss of life occurred with the wreck of Loch Sloy on 24 April 1899 at Maupertuis Bay, when 31 people were drowned, and one initial survivor subsequently perished. Twenty-seven people drowned at West Bay in September 1905, when Loch Vennachar was wrecked.The first lighthouse built was erected at Cape Willoughby in 1852; this was also the first lighthouse to be erected in South Australia. This was followed by the Cape Borda Lightstation in 1858, the Cape du Couedic Lighthouse in 1906 and Cape St Albans Lighthouse in 1908. All lighthouses continue to be operational.
Geography and geology
Kangaroo Island has a rugged coastline, and is mostly covered in dense scrubland. A network of limestone caves hidden beneath the surface, especially along the southern and western coasts of the island, are estimated to have formed between one and two million years ago. They were formed from shell fragments from the exposed seabed around this time, after the dunes hardened over time, and rainwater dissolved the soft limestone to create the caverns. Before the [|2020 bushfires], 120 caves had been discovered. Speleologists who have been exploring the land devegetated by the fires had found a further 150 caves by December 2025. They have also found previously undocumented species living in the caves. Most of these caves are not open to the public, but Kelly's Hill Caves have been a tourist attraction since the early 20th century.Fossils
The northern coast of Kangaroo Island contains important fossil-bearing deposits, dating from the late Lower Cambrian, such as the Emu Bay Shale. A variety of primordial marine arthropods left their remains in this Burgess shale type preservation, but the larger grain size of the Emu Bay rock means that the quality of preservation is lower.A few genera of non-biomineralized arthropods, among them Squamacula, Kangacaris, and the megacheiran Tanglangia, are known only from the Emu Bay Shale and Chengjiang. The site is also the source of magnificent specimens of trilobites such as Redlichia takooensis, Emuella polymera, Balcoracania dailyi, Megapharanaspis nedini, Holyoakia simpsoni, and Estaingia bilobata. Balcoracania and Emuella are the only known genera of the distinctive Redlichiina family Emuellidae, known for possessing the greatest number of thoracic segments known for Trilobita as a whole, and so far entirely restricted to Australia and Antarctica.
The depositional environment of the majority of Burgess-Shale-type assemblages is outer shelf, deeper water. The Emu Bay Shale in contrast, appears to represent deposition in restricted basins on the inner shelf, indicating that soft tissue preservation occurred in a range of environmental settings during the Cambrian. Some Emu Bay fossils display extensive mineralization of soft tissues, most often of blocky apatite or fibrous calcium carbonate, including the oldest phosphatized muscle tissue – along with records from Sirius Passet in Greenland, the first thus far reported from the Cambrian. Mid-gut glands are preserved three-dimensionally in calcium phosphate in the arthropods Isoxys and Oestokerkus, as in related species from the Burgess Shale. Pleistocene fossilised footprints indicate extinct Australian megafauna, such as diprotodons, short faced kangaroos, and thylacines were once distributed on the island.