Qualla: Marchinbar Island

Marchinbar Island: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Picture a single ribbon of land nearly sixty kilometres long but rarely more than eight kilometres wide, its entire eastern flank rising in high cliffs straight out of the Arafura Sea. That is Marchinbar, the largest of the Wessel Islands and the place where, in 1944, nine coins came out of the sand near a creek south of Jensen Bay. Five of them were stamped with Arabic script from the medieval Kilwa Sultanate of East Africa. On this remote, almost empty island, that small handful of metal opened one of Australia's most stubborn historical puzzles.

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Marchinbar Island: A Knife-Edge of Land

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Marchinbar is all length and no width, a 210-square-kilometre splinter pointing northeast toward the open sea. Its northern tip is called Low Point. Sixteen kilometres to the south-southwest, the cliffs at Sphinx Head climb to sixty-seven metres, and two flat-topped hills behind ...

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Marchinbar Island: The Jensen Bay Coins

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The coins surfaced at Djinjan creek, just south of Jensen Bay. Four were later identified as Dutch duits, dated between 1690 and the 1780s, the kind of small change that washed around the colonial trade. The other five were the shock. Their Arabic inscriptions name a ruling sulta...

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Marchinbar Island: Last Refuge of the Golden Bandicoot

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Marchinbar holds another distinction, quieter but no less remarkable. Until recently it was the last place on Earth that still sheltered a wild population of the golden bandicoot, a small, russet-furred marsupial that once foraged across northern, central and western Australia, a...

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Marchinbar Island: Reading the Coast

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Stand on Marchinbar and the scale of its isolation settles over you. The high east coast takes the full weight of the Arafura swell, while the gentler bays on the lee side are where people have always come ashore. The same beaches that gave up the coins still gather whatever the ...

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