D’Estrees Bay Self-guided Drive - Stop 2 - Wrights Ruin - SA

Take a walk around the ruins of this two-roomed house. John and Emma Wright lived
here with their five children around 1876. They farmed the D'Estrees Bay area, planting
malting barley and wheat, and hunting wallaby, kangaroo and possum for their
skins and meat. Try to imagine the well-defined, cultivated paddocks, gardens, yards,
sheds and huts that maps from 1883 show of this area. If visiting in winter, you will see
apatch of yellow and white jonquils flowering, a reminder of the life and times of our
pioneering forebears.
John and Emma Wright lived in luxury compared to the first European family living
at D’Estrees Bay.
John Bates is recorded as the first D’Estrees Bay agriculturalist (1872–1874). It is
said that he and his family were rendered homeless after a disagreement with
a drunken sailor who burnt down their Hog Bay (Penneshaw) home. They walked
to D’Estrees Bay and set up home in an abandoned whaler’s cave.
‘Bates built up the front of the cave and put a chimney in it. In summer water
had to be carried two miles. Bates sometimes walked to Kingscote, about 28 miles,
and returned next day, carrying a 50 pound bag of flour and other stores.’
(This Southern Land, Jean Nunn, 1989)
As you drive from the entrance to Cape Gantheaume Conservation Park you will
notice a narrow strip of cleared land that peters out just before Wheatons Beach.
Due to poor soil and dense bush this is the only area that was ever farmed here, even though cropping was later supplemented with sheep for wool and meat.
Before the 1996 bushfire Kangaroo Island Kangaroos and Tammar Wallabies
could be seen grazing here. Today you may see the smaller Tammar Wallaby,
however the Kangaroo Island Kangaroo has been slow to re-populate the area.