The Pages tell the story of Ngurundjeri and his wives; two islands a haven for sea lions in South Australian strait
Australian sea lions on one of The Pages islands between Fleurieu Peninsula on the South Australian mainland and Kangaroo Island. The inset map follows the Aboriginal dreamtime story of Ngurunderi who pursued his two wives down the River Murray and turned them into the stony islands (Metalong) as they waded across to Ngurungaui (Kangaroo Island).
The Pages Conservation Park covers two small islands and a reef in Backstairs Passage, a strait separating Kangaroo Island and the Fleurieu Peninsula of the South Australian mainland. The island group, with breeding colonies of Australian sea lions and silver gulls, was declared a conservation park in 1972.
The islands were known to the Aboriginal Kaurna people as Metalong. In Aboriginal lore, the islands were two women who had been unfaithful to the great totemic being Ngurunderi and fled from him. Ngurunderi made many features of the landscape during his dreamtime journey down the Murray Valley pursuing the wives. On the shores of Encounter Bay, he caused Granite Island and other islets to emerge from the sea and then went westward to Blowhole Creek (Tjirbuk) on the tip of Fleurieu Peninsula where he could see the wives trying to wade across to Kangaroo Island, the land of ancestral spirits. He called on the sea to rise and overwhelm the two wives who were transformed into two small rocky outcrops. The story equated to a geological time of 7,000 years ago.
The Pages were geologically part of the Kanmantoo Group of sediments deposited during the latter Cambrian Period. The sediments metamorphised and the rock of The Pages comprised phyllites of the Brukunga Formation. The Pages’ two main islands, about two kilometres apart were similar in size: North Page about 400 metres long, 200 metres wide and 24 metres high; South Page about 450 metres long, 170 metres wide and 20 metres high. A reef southwest of South Page included two adjacent wave-washed islets, rising one metre or so above sea level, with a combined length of 380 metres.
They were named The Pages by explorer Matthew Flinders on HMS Investigator on April 7, 1802, from their fancied resemblance to pages guarding their strategic position at the eastern entrance to the strait. An 1884 account of the island's fauna described little penguins as being "very plentiful" on the South Page island, and mentioned the nesting site of a large eagle at an "almost inaccessible" location. The little penguin colony, with about 200 to 400 birds in 1992, dropped to a "few" in 2009.
The Pages were recognised as an important area for seabirds and Australia sea lions as early as May 1900 when they were declared part of a bird protection district under the Birds Protection Act 1900. They were proclaimed a closed area again in 1955 in regard to sea lions and birds and as a fauna reserve as a fauna reserves in 1964-65. They went from the control of the South Australian government’s fisheries and fauna conservation depertment to the National Parks and Wildlife Service in 1972.
The Pages remained inaccessible except by helicopter. Small pockets of soil on the islands’ tops supported patches of vegetation, including variable groundsel, round-leaved pigface, ruby saltbush and an Atriplex saltbush.
