Map - Lady Musgrave Island (Lady Musgrave Island)

Lady Musgrave Island (Lady Musgrave Island)
Lady Musgrave Island is a 14 ha coral cay on Australia's Great Barrier Reef, with a 1192 ha surrounding reef. The island is the second southernmost island in the Great Barrier Reef chain of islands (with the first (southernmost) being Lady Elliot Island). The Island is named after Lady Lucinda Musgrave, the wife of Sir Anthony Musgrave, a colonial governor of Queensland.

Lady Musgrave Island, and the immediate surrounds, is a national park and can be reached by excursion boat from Bundaberg (located approximately 4 hours north of Brisbane) and from the Town of 1770, Queensland (located approximately 5 hours north of Brisbane). The island is part of the Capricornia Cays Important Bird Area.

Lady Musgrave Island is referred to as Wallaginji by local Australian Aboriginal tribes. The name Wallaginji means 'beautiful reef'.

This island is the only shingle cay situated on the leeward reef flat. The island also has beach rock that is exposed along the north eastern and eastern beaches and an outcrop of lithified coral conglomerate, similar to that forming the core of the cay, occurs near the south eastern corner.

Vegetation consists of Pisonia grandis, Tournefortia argentea, Casuarina equisetifolia, and Pandanus tectorius. The vegetation is less dense than that of the larger sand cays of the Capricorn Group.

A small pond of brackish water is located towards the southern end of the cay. The island is located on the southern end of a large lagoon. From a boating perspective, a good thing about Lady Musgrave reef is that one can enter the lagoon via a deep water channel. There has been some debate about whether the channel into the lagoon is a naturally occurring phenomenon, or was cut into the lagoon by Japanese or Taiwanese fishermen, or, as legend has it, it was widened by guano miners many years ago; it is recorded by 1938 and in 1966 surveys.

More convincingly however, the channel is mentioned in William Collin's Life & Adventures of an Essexman: a Queensland pioneer and in a Brisbane newspaper reporting in December 1875 Collin's salvage of the Norseman. It may have been widened by Captain Collin after he had re-floated the Norseman from Lady Musgrave Island reef and repaired damage to its hull; apparently Collin's crew had the vessel 'on the hard' on the sand cay to make these repairs. He may have widened the narrow, naturally-occurring 'gap' in the reef to get the repaired vessel out of the lagoon, under tow and without further mishap.

 
Map - Lady Musgrave Island (Lady Musgrave Island)
Country - Australia
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Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands. With an area of 7617930 km2, Australia is the largest country by area in Oceania and the world's sixth-largest country. Australia is the oldest, flattest, and driest inhabited continent, with the least fertile soils. It is a megadiverse country, and its size gives it a wide variety of landscapes and climates, with deserts in the centre, tropical rainforests in the north-east, and mountain ranges in the south-east.

The ancestors of Aboriginal Australians began arriving from south east Asia approximately 65,000 years ago, during the last ice age. Arriving by sea, they settled the continent and had formed approximately 250 distinct language groups by the time of European settlement, maintaining some of the longest known continuing artistic and religious traditions in the world. Australia's written history commenced with the European maritime exploration of Australia. The Dutch navigator Willem Janszoon was the first known European to reach Australia, in 1606. In 1770, the British explorer James Cook mapped and claimed the east coast of Australia for Great Britain, and the First Fleet of British ships arrived at Sydney in 1788 to establish the penal colony of New South Wales. The European population grew in subsequent decades, and by the end of the 1850s gold rush, most of the continent had been explored by European settlers and an additional five self-governing British colonies established. Democratic parliaments were gradually established through the 19th century, culminating with a vote for the federation of the six colonies and foundation of the Commonwealth of Australia on 1 January 1901. Australia has since maintained a stable liberal democratic political system and wealthy market economy.
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