The name of the place comes from the Aborigines and describes the beginning of the course of the planet Venus , called Yinculyer ; another name is chinialla .
The first European, Edward John Eyre , came to this area in 1841. In 1867, B. Douglas, President of the Marine Board of South Australia, discovered the only possibility for a port at Eucla on the 200-kilometer-long Great Australian Bay. In 1873 the telegraph station Moopina Station was built, which connected Albany with Adelaide . Eucla was an important station because the Morse code, the so-called Victoria Code of South Australia and Victoria was translated into the international code there. A pier was built to bring goods to Eucla by sea. In 1885 the place was declared a city and opened in 1929 by the Trans-Australia Railway. A rabbit plague in 1890 destabilized the sand dunes that buried the town, the telegraph station and the cemetery. The place was rebuilt five kilometers to the east. The telegraph station enclosed by the sand dune and the cemetery are now a tourist attraction.
Economy and Transport
View from the Eucla Pass to the coast
Eucla has a hotel, a restaurant, a caravan park and a golf club, a meteorological station and a museum in the old telegraph station. In addition to the income from tourism, the residents of Euclas live from fishing. The Eucla Pass near the village is - apart from the one in Madura - the only elevation on the Great Australian Bay that offers a view over the sea. The 33 km² large Eucla National Park southeast of Eucla between the highway and the coast protects an area characterized by sand dunes.
Eucla can no longer be reached with Greyhound Australia , as the company has not been visiting the place since 2005. There is also a runway for aircraft near Eucla.
UTC + 8:45 is unofficially used in Eucla and some other settlements on the Eyre Highway such as Caiguna , Madura , Mundrabilla and Border Village . The settlements are in the middle between the western ( UTC + 8 ) and central time zones ( UTC + 9: 30 ). Summer time is also observed in this area, but the total population is only around 200 people.
