Ceduna

 city, seaport

Ceduna (/səˈdjuːnə/ sə-DEW-nə) is a town in South Australia located on the shores of Murat Bay on the west coast of Eyre Peninsula. It lies west of the junction of the Flinders and Eyre Highways around 786 km northwest of the capital Adelaide. The port town/suburb of Thevenard lies 3 km to the west on Cape Thevenard. It is in the District Council of Ceduna, the federal Division of Grey, and the state electoral district of Flinders.

Ceduna - Aboriginal History

The traditional owners of the country around Ceduna were the Aboriginal people of the Wirangu, Kokatha and Mirning languages. Before white settlement, aborigines called this place ' chedoona', meaning resting place, which is apt for those who have just traversed the Nullarbor Desert. By 1920 the Kokatha people had become the most prominent group of Aboriginal people in the Ceduna area.

Ceduna - History

Early Dutch maritime Captain Francois Thyssen and Pieter Nuyts charted the area around Ceduna in 1627 aboard the vessel Gulden Seppart 'Golden Seahorse. Exploring the uncharted Indian Ocean while en route for the Dutch East Indies, Thyssen named the coastline Nuyts Land and he also recorded St. Peter and St. Francis Islands. In 1718, a young employee of the Dutch East Indies Company published a proposal to colonize Nuyts Land where huge persons lived; 'not only in stature, but in intelligence and knowledge, living in fortified towns with machines of war more terrifying than our bombs and cannons....'. The British and the Dutch were extreme rivals in colonising the world. When British satirist Jonathon Swift, wrote the famously satirical book Gullivers Travels, Swift turned to tale of shipwreck north west of Van Diemens Land into a tale of very tiny people, the Lilliputians who captured Gulliver. During the 1850's Murat Bay was home to a whaling station where the captured whales were brought ashore and processed. Murat Bay was declared as a town called Ceduna in 1901, although locals never called it by its proper name until the railway reached Ceduna in 1915.

Ceduna - Today

Today the main industries of Ceduna are farming, fishing, mining and oyster farming. Ceduna received international attention in 2002 when a total solar eclipse was viewable from there.

www.ceduna.net/site/page.cfm is the town's website.