The replica is the town's most photographed resident, and the story behind it is the real draw. The shark was caught about 22 kilometres offshore, tiring slowly through a five-hour-and-fifteen-minute struggle before it could be brought in. Scientists later estimated the animal at sixteen to eighteen years old and used it to gather data on a species we still understand poorly. These waters are genuine great white country - cold, deep, rich with seals and sea lions - which is exactly why the apex predator grows so large here. Standing under the cast, looking up into that gaping mouth, you get a visceral sense of scale that no aquarium glass can match. It is free to visit, open whenever the servo is, and worth the stop even if your tank is full.

Streaky Bay sits in some of Australia's best oyster water, and the freshest way to eat them is barely out of the sea. Drive the back roads toward the oyster sheds and you can buy them by the dozen, shucked or unopened, often for a fraction of what a city restaurant charges. For something more memorable, head to nearby Smoky Bay, where farmers run an over-water oyster experience: a barge carries you out to a floating deck above the leases, you learn to shuck your own, and you taste them right there over the water with a glass of wine and the coast spread out around you. Add the local King George whiting and snapper pulled from the bay, and the case for Streaky Bay as a seafood town more or less makes itself.

The scenery here is best taken slowly, and the Cape Bauer Loop is how to do it - a 39-kilometre scenic drive northwest of town that traces the cliffs and beaches along the edge of the Great Australian Bight. The standout stop is the Whistling Rocks and Blowholes, where a 360-metre boardwalk threads through the dunes to platforms on the cliff edge. Time it for high tide: the swell drives air and seawater up through holes in the rock, blasting spray skyward with a deep, eerie whistle you hear before you see it. Further along, lookouts at Cape Bauer open onto dramatic cliffs and the lonely outline of Olive Island offshore, while Hallys Beach offers surf fishing and a boardwalk down to the sand.

Back in town, the pace drops to a stroll. The Streaky Bay Jetty is one of South Australia's few north-facing jetties, a fine spot to drop a line, watch the boats, or simply take in the light over the sheltered water that Matthew Flinders named for its strange streaks back in 1802. The foreshore caravan park puts the bay almost at your tent flap. Practical notes for the unprepared: the only way in is by road on the Flinders Highway, so fuel up before remote stretches - petrol here runs noticeably dearer than in Adelaide. Telstra carries the mobile signal; rival networks largely don't. The nearest commercial flights are out of Ceduna, about ninety minutes north. None of this is a hardship. The remoteness is the point - and the reward.