Bunda Cliffs
Interesting facts
- In Mirning tradition, Jeedara, a great white whale who came from the Milky Way, is the ancestral creator of their country and of all whales.
- The pale band at the foot of the cliffs is Wilson Bluff Limestone, up to about 300 metres thick, of which only the top is exposed.
- The upper layers, the Nullarbor Limestone, began forming roughly 25 million years ago when the sea again flooded this edge of the continent.
- Some layers in the cliff face are built almost entirely from the tiny shells of foraminifera, single-celled marine organisms.
- The Bunda Cliffs are part of the Great Southern Scarp, which runs for about 820 kilometres along the southern edge of the Nullarbor.
- In 1841 the explorer Edward John Eyre crossed this coast on foot; his companion John Baxter was killed on the way, and the Baxter Cliffs further west recall him.
- The name Bunda was formally gazetted by South Australia only in October 2014, when a marine sanctuary zone below the cliffs was named.
Why it is worth it
For roughly two hundred kilometres the Nullarbor Plain simply stops. The flat, treeless limestone country that runs across the south of the continent ends in a sheer wall above the Great Australian Bight, and the Bunda Cliffs are the most unbroken stretch of that wall: about 160 kilometres of continuous cliff line between the Head of the Bight in South Australia and a point just beyond the Western Australian border, 60 to 120 metres high and with no beach, cove or harbour to interrupt it. The name comes from an Aboriginal word for the cliffs, and the land above them belongs to the traditional country of the Mirning people.
The beauty of the place is geological and very plain to read. The cliff face is a cross-section through the Eucla Basin, a thick pile of fossil-bearing limestone laid down on an ancient sea floor during the Cenozoic, now standing in pale horizontal bands above the dark water. The high-energy swell of the Southern Ocean hammers the base of the scarp without pause; blocks break away regularly, so the cliffs are slowly retreating inland and the edge is never quite where it was a generation ago. The Bunda Cliffs are the eastern part of a much longer feature, the Great Southern Scarp, which continues west towards Madura and reappears as the Baxter Cliffs.
What makes a visit memorable is scale rather than detail. From the lookouts the cliffs recede in both directions in a single line of headlands until they fade into haze, and there is nothing built anywhere in view. In winter the Head of the Bight at the eastern end becomes a nursery for southern right whales: they arrive from about June and leave in October, and at the peak of the season in July and August the mothers and calves can be watched from the clifftop directly below. The land around the Head of the Bight lies in the Yalata Indigenous Protected Area, the western section is protected within the Nullarbor Wilderness Protection Area and Eucla National Park, and the waters below form part of the Far West Coast Marine Park.
Getting there
The cliffs lie beside the Eyre Highway, the main road across the Nullarbor. The practical base is Ceduna, about three hours' drive to the east; Ceduna Airport (CED) is the nearest airport. The Nullarbor Roadhouse, some 295 km west of Ceduna, is the nearest place to stay. Signposted lookouts along the highway west of the roadhouse and east of Eucla give safe views of the cliff line, and the Head of the Bight whale-watching centre is a short, signposted detour of about 12 km from the highway. The cliff edge is unstable and collapses without warning, so keep to the lookouts rather than walking or driving along the rim.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Bunda Cliffs, also known as the Nullarbor Cliffs, are a coastal scarp on the southern coast of Australia, extending from the western coast of South Australia to the south-eastern corner of Western Australia.
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