Robe: How Did a Port Become the Start of a Long Walk?

Robe sits on Guichen Bay in South Australia’s Limestone Coast, on the traditional lands of the Bunganditj (Boandik) people. The colonial government surveyed the town in 1846 and developed it as an administrative centre and port. During the 1850s, wool from the western Victorian hinterland arrived by bullock wagon for shipment, shaping the warehouses, customs facilities and streets facing the sea.

The port’s most memorable history, however, grew from an exclusionary law. The Victorian colonial government imposed a £10 poll tax on Chinese immigrants landing at its ports. Shipowners responded by disembarking passengers at Robe instead. The local council records that more than 15,000 Chinese people landed there in the late 1850s, then walked over 400 kilometres to the Victorian goldfields. In 1857, the Dutch merchant ship Koning Willem II was wrecked in a storm shortly after putting about 400 Chinese passengers ashore; its wreck site was only confirmed in recent years.

Robe is therefore more than a picturesque preserved port. It shows how regional routes are made by industries, laws and people’s responses. A racially targeted tax turned a small South Australian harbour into an entry point for movement between colonies and wrote an otherwise easily overlooked trek into the town’s memory. Today, the Chinese memorial gateway and the maritime remains recall that ports connect not only cargo, but also journeys redirected by unequal institutions.

https://www.robe.sa.gov.au/explore/history

https://www.environment.sa.gov.au/goodliving/posts/2025/05/dutch-ship-uncovered

https://www.slv.vic.gov.au/node/4824810