KIWT - Day 5: Kelly Hill Section (7.5km)

Flinders Chase National Park occupies the far western end of Kangaroo Island, where a long stretch of the island gives way to limestone cliffs, wave-cut platforms, sheltered river country and a wild southern coastline. First set aside in 1919 for the protection of native plants and animals, it remains one of South Australia's oldest and most important conservation areas. The park sits within a larger protected landscape on the island's west, adjoining the Ravine des Casoars Wilderness Protection Area and helping conserve one of the biggest continuous tracts of remnant vegetation on Kangaroo Island.

What makes this part of the island feel different from the farming country further east is the scale of intact bush and the strong meeting of land and sea. Granite outcrops rise above the coast at places such as Remarkable Rocks, while Cape du Couedic and nearby headlands are shaped by relentless Southern Ocean weather. Inland, the country changes again around Rocky River, where creeks and riparian vegetation support a very different environment from the exposed coast. That contrast between battered headlands and more sheltered inland pockets is a big part of the park's character.

Wildlife is central to the identity of the area, but not always in the simple way visitors expect. Long-nosed fur seals breed along this coast, and the park also played an unusual role in South Australian conservation history when platypus and koalas were introduced here in the 1920s. Kangaroo Island still holds the state's only wild platypus population. Native species such as Kangaroo Island kangaroos, tammar wallabies and short-beaked echidnas are part of the wider picture of an island landscape that evolved with a high degree of isolation.

The park also carries the more recent mark of fire. During the 2019-20 Kangaroo Island bushfires, about 96 per cent of Flinders Chase was burnt, making recovery part of the present-day story of the region. Regenerating mallee, heath and woodland now sit alongside older unburnt pockets and dramatic coastal geology, so the west end of Kangaroo Island is a place where deep time, conservation history and visible renewal all meet.