Qualla: Sir Edward Pellew Group of Islands

Sir Edward Pellew Group of Islands: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NASA, Public domain. When Matthew Flinders sailed past these islands in 1802 and named them for a fellow naval officer, Sir Edward Pellew, he noticed he was not the first outsider here. His journals describe signs of other visitors and he guessed, wrongly, that they had been Chinese. He was closer than he knew that something larger had been happening on this coast for a very long time. The Sir Edward Pellew Group, scattered across the south-west corner of the Gulf of Carpentaria, wears the names of strangers — a British admiral, and earlier a Dutch ship. But to the people who have sung these waters into being for thousands of years, the islands have always had their own names, and their own law.

Image: NASA | Public domain

Sir Edward Pellew Group of Islands: The Shape of the Group

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NASA, Public domain. Five main islands make up the group — Vanderlin, North, West, Centre and South West — strung across roughly 2,100 square kilometres of sea and land off the Northern Territory coast. Vanderlin is the giant of them, thirty-two kilometres long and thirteen wide. They lie at the mout...

Image: NASA | Public domain

Sir Edward Pellew Group of Islands: Saltwater Country, Sung

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NASA, Public domain. Most of the islands are Yanyuwa country, part of Wurralibi Aboriginal Land, and some are still lived on, full- or part-time. The Yanyuwa call themselves li-Anthawirriyarra, people of the sea, and their knowledge of this place is carried in kujika — songlines that thread island to...

Image: NASA | Public domain

Sir Edward Pellew Group of Islands: Ships in the Night of History

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NASA, Public domain. The European record here is a string of near-misses and misreadings. In 1644 the Dutch navigator Abel Tasman saw the group, took it for part of the mainland, and called it Cape Vanderlin after one of his ships — a name that stuck to the largest island. Long before and long after ...

Image: NASA | Public domain

Sir Edward Pellew Group of Islands: Birds, Camps and the Long Return

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NASA, Public domain. North Island holds the small Barranyi (North Island) National Park, where free campsites sit near Paradise Bay with drinking water and barbecues. Just north-east, three tiny islands — Pearce, Urquhart and Hervey — form an Important Bird Area, identified by BirdLife International ...

Image: NASA | Public domain