Flinders was not alone in these waters in 1802. As his British expedition charted the southern coast sailing east, the French captain Nicolas Baudin was mapping the same shore from the opposite direction, and the two men met by chance further down the peninsula - rival empires comparing notes on the edge of the known world. The names they left behind still share the map. The first Europeans to explore the land itself arrived in 1839: John Hill and Samuel Stephens, working for the Secondary Towns Association, sailed in on the brig Rapid that August. A fortnight later the overland explorer Edward John Eyre walked in from Port Lincoln and set up a supply base a few kilometres from the modern town. The spot, Eyre's Waterhole, still sits just off the Flinders Highway, now listed on the state heritage register.

The arrival of settlers brought conflict that the gentle name of the bay does nothing to soften. As pastoralists pushed into the country from the 1850s, violence flared along this coast between Aboriginal people - the Wirangu, Nauo and Kokatha among them - and the newcomers who were taking their land and water. The most notorious episode happened on the cliffs of Waterloo Bay near Elliston, to the south, in May 1849. The death toll is bitterly contested: the thin colonial records note a handful killed, while local oral tradition and accounts circulating since the 1880s speak of as many as two hundred Aboriginal people driven over the cliffs. For generations this stretch of coast was held as forbidden ground in Aboriginal memory. In 2017, after long campaigning by Wirangu people, the Elliston council placed a memorial on those cliffs that names the killing plainly - a small, hard-won act of acknowledgement.

Once the land was taken, the town settled into the rhythms that still define it. It was officially proclaimed in 1872 under the rather grand name of Flinders, though almost nobody used it; locals called the place Streaky Bay, and in 1940 the authorities finally bowed to common usage and made the popular name the official one. Wheat growing took hold in the 1880s, and the harbour did the rest. By 1906, ships had carried 31,000 bags of wheat and 470 bales of wool out of the bay, a telegraph office had opened, and the mail came in regularly from Port Lincoln. Grain and sheep remain the backbone of the district to this day, worked with dryland farming techniques suited to the dry, unpredictable climate caught between the Outback and the sea.

Streaky Bay's setting is a study in contrasts. The bay itself is sheltered and calm, edged with quiet beaches, while just beyond it the coast throws itself open to the swells of the Southern Ocean - sea cliffs, surf, and tide-filled rock basins like Smooth Pool and The Granites. Inland the country is pastoral and dry, broken by reserves such as Calpatanna Waterhole, a surviving pocket of the original salt-lake landscape where wildlife still gathers. The town sits at the southern end of the bay on a sheltered inlet that early surveyors named Blanche Port, after Lady Blanche MacDonnell, wife of a colonial governor. And scattered across a nearby farm stand the district's geological showpiece, Murphy's Haystacks - pink granite boulders older than complex life on Earth.