History
Indigenous Australians occupied the area at least 6,500 years ago based on archaeological records.
The first Europeans to sight Wilsons Promontory are believed to be George Bass and Matthew Flinders in 1798.
Extensive sealing took place at Sealer's Cove during the 19th Century, such that seals are no longer found there.
Lobbying by the Field Naturalists Club of Victoria and the Royal Society of Victoria (including Arthur Henry Shakespeare Lucas) led to the Government of Victoria temporarily reserve the area as National Park in 1898, made permanent in 1908. The original settlement in the Park was on the Darby River site, where a chalet existed.
The Prom was used as commando training area during World War II.
During the Black Saturday Fires (February 2009) throughout Victoria, Wilsons Prom had been struck by lightning, which then led to the loss of up to 50% of the park through extensive fire damage.
Read more about this topic: Wilsons Promontory National Park
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“No matter how vital experience might be while you lived it, no sooner was it ended and dead than it became as lifeless as the piles of dry dust in a school history book.”
—Ellen Glasgow (1874–1945)
“The history of his present majesty, is a history of unremitting injuries and usurpations ... all of which have in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world, for the truth of which we pledge a faith yet unsullied by falsehood.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God’s property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)