Kingston SE is where the Limestone Coast meets the Coorong - a fishing town with calm bay beaches, a famous crustacean and wild country in every direction.
The town where the coast turns
Drive the Princes Highway south from Adelaide and Kingston SE is where the landscape changes character: the long lagoon country of the Coorong gives way to the limestone coast proper, and the road swings along the great sheltered curve of Lacepede Bay. Most travellers know the town for a single photograph - the gloriously oversized Larry the Lobster, seventeen metres of fibreglass crustacean built in 1979 to celebrate the fishing fleet that still works out of the bay.
Larry deserves his photo, but Kingston rewards a longer stop.
Around the bay
The town beach along the Kingston foreshore is calm, shallow and family-friendly, with a jetty for an evening walk. A few minutes around the bay, Wyomi Beach offers two kilometres of white sand and some of the gentlest swimming on the entire Limestone Coast. In town, the sandstone Cape Jaffa Lighthouse is a genuine oddity: a lighthouse that spent its working life on an offshore reef before being dismantled and re-erected in a suburban street as a museum.
Wild edges
Kingston's hinterland holds its quietest treasures. Six kilometres south, the wetlands of Butcher Gap Conservation Park fill with swans and teal, and in winter occasionally shelter the critically endangered orange-bellied parrot. Twenty minutes north, the surf breaks over The Granites, the only rocks in 180 kilometres of ocean beach and the district's best sunset stage. Inland, stringybark woodland at Mount Scott hides malleefowl and wallabies.
Make a day of it
Kingston works perfectly as a slow day on a longer coastal run: swim the bay in the morning, lunch on local seafood, walk a wetland in the afternoon, and end with the sun going down behind The Granites. For more places to lay a towel along this shore, see our pick of the best beaches on the Limestone Coast.
