Look at a map of the south coast of Australia and you will find a small Dutch name marooned among English and French ones: Nuyts. In January 1627, more than a century and a half before any British charts of this coast existed, a Dutch ship called the Golden Seahorse sailed past these granite islands, and the man it carried left his name on the water. The archipelago he never set foot upon still bears it - roughly thirty islands and reefs scattered across the Great Australian Bight south of Ceduna, wild and almost untouched.
The voyage was almost an accident of geography. In 1626 the 't Gulden Zeepaert - the Golden Seahorse - left the Netherlands bound for the Dutch East Indies, captained by Francois Thijssen and carrying Pieter Nuyts, a senior councillor of the Dutch East India Company. Somewhere south of Western Australia they ran east along an unknown coast, charting more than 1,500 kilometres of it from near Cape Leeuwin all the way to these islands. Thijssen named the stretch the Land of Pieter Nuyts after his distinguished passenger. No log of the journey survives; what we know comes from old maps and a few lines in a Batavia register. When Matthew Flinders mapped the coast in 1802, he honoured the earlier Dutch visit and fixed Nuyts' name to the archipelago for good.
There is a literary footnote to these remote islands worth telling. When Jonathan Swift wrote Gulliver's Travels in 1726, he placed the land of the tiny Lilliputians somewhere off the then barely-known southern coast of New Holland - and scholars have long argued that the desolate, half-charted Nuyts coast was among the blank spaces he drew on. It is a strange thought to hold while looking at the real place: these wave-battered rocks, breeding ground for seabirds and sea lions, briefly doubling in the European imagination as a kingdom six inches tall.
What truly sets the archipelago apart is invisible from the surface. The warm, subtropical Leeuwin Current sweeps eastward across the Bight and collides here with the colder Flinders Current welling up from the south. Where they mix, the sea becomes a biodiversity hotspot, carrying species more typical of Western Australia than this coast - plate corals, and bright fish like the western footballer. The islands themselves tell their own slow story: soft calcarenite stone resting on hard granite, the calcarenite chewed away by the surf wherever it dips near sea level. Until the last ice age ended, around 9,800 years ago, none of these were islands at all - they were hills on a coastal plain now drowned beneath the Bight.
Today the islands are among the most important wildlife refuges in southern Australia. They shelter an estimated 93 percent of the Australian sea lions living in the Great Australian Bight, across eight breeding colonies hauled out on lonely beaches. BirdLife International recognises the chain as a globally important bird area: it holds well over one percent of the world's short-tailed shearwaters, with as many as 890,000 breeding pairs, alongside little penguins, white-faced storm-petrels, ospreys and white-bellied sea eagles. Southern right whales pass along the coast from May to October. Almost every island now lies within a wilderness protection area or conservation park - a deliberate quiet, kept for the creatures that got here first.
The Nuyts Archipelago centres on roughly 32.33 degrees south, 133.63 degrees east, in the Great Australian Bight south of Ceduna off the western Eyre Peninsula. From altitude the chain reads as a scatter of pale granite islands ringed by reef and surf, with the Isles of St Francis lying furthest offshore to the southwest. The waters fall within the 4,000-square-kilometre Nuyts Archipelago Marine Park. Nearest airport is Ceduna (ICAO YCDU) to the north. The islands make a clean coastal waypoint; expect strong Southern Ocean winds and rapidly changing visibility over open water.