Jun 02 2008
Rottnest Island
Rottnest Island is a special destination for interstate and international visitors. The whole island is a Nature Reserve of indigenous flora and fauna, including the curious Quokka, and no public vehicles are allowed.
Rottnest Island was named in 1696 by Navigator Willem de Vlamingh after the many large rats that he imagined he had found there. The island is still full of the marsupials he thought were rodents, the friendly little Quokkas, setonix brachyurus.
Their name, in one of the Aboriginal languages of southwest Australia, is gwaga.
Quokkas
Quokkas look like small wallabies, with brown or grey fur and little rounded ears. The hind legs are strongly developed allowing quokkas, as well as hopping, to climb trees up to 1.5 metres.
Quokkas can survive in an environment with hardly any freshwater, and can breed all year round, but there’s real concern about the future of this little marsupial. Once they were in much greater numbers in the south west, surviving the calamitous arrival of the dingo about 3,500 years ago only to be decimated when the European Red Fox was deliberately introduced in 1870.
Neither the dingo nor the fox reached Rottnest Island, where quokka populations remained healthy until the island was developed for recreational purposes. A lot of habitat was lost, and sometimes visitors will feed a quokka, either upsetting the night-feeding pattern or sadly, poisoning the little creature with processed food.
Please don’t feed the quokkas, or any wildlife at all.
Native Flora
Sea rocket, spinifex and aromatic wild rosemary grow along the coastline, along with samphires, halosarcia, the broadleaf grey salt bush, sedges and templetonia.
The blue Rottnest daisy, a member of the carrot family, is found under the Melaleuca and Acacia.
Things to do
When you get to Rottnest Island, there are no public vehicles allowed, so it’s either walk, pedal or take a guided tour.
There’s plenty of kayaking, snorkelling, scuba diving, surfing, swimming, diving, and cruising in self driven glass-bottom watercraft along the world’s finest beaches.
Trips and tours operate throughout the day and the most popular way to discover the Island is on a bike.
How to get there
Rottnest Island can be reached by a short ferry ride of approximately 25 minutes from Fremantle or about an hour from Perth.
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