well known to American and French whaling ships; Eyre documents seeing whalers in the area. A government ship landed at the bay to bring him supplies. Whaling ships visited the port in the 1800s, and whales were brought onto the beach for processing. Settlement and naming In the 1860s, the first pastoral leases were established by William Swan and Robert Barr Smith, forming Yalata station (they called it Yatala run), a farming property whose boundaries extended from the Head of the Bight (Nullarbor Plain) in the west to Point Brown near Streaky Bay in the east. The station's first buildings were on the beach at Port Eyre. The sheep station's homestead, now a ruin, was built in 1880 on a high hill around inland from Fowlers Bay. The huge sheep station ran up to 120,000 sheep at times. An unofficial post office was opened in 1865, and the first three postmasters were also policemen. The town was first surveyed in 1867, and resurveyed in March 1890 and proclaimed as the "Town of Yalata" on 10 July 1890. The Nomenclature Committee recommended its renaming to "Tarombo", the name used by local Aboriginal people for a nearby well, to avoid confusion, but its name was changed to Fowler's Bay on 19 September 1940 to agree with the bay and to prevent dual naming. (Yalata now refers to a nearby township.) Telegraph line and expansion From 1875 to 1877, three sections of the East-West Telegraph Line were built: from Port Augusta to Port Lincoln; from there to Fowlers Bay, and from Fowlers Bay to near the WA border at Eucla. The third section was undertaken by the Posts and Telegraph Department itself and supervised by R. R. Knuckey. A supply base was built at Fowlers Bay to provide equipment and provisions along the line, and the line between Adelaide and Perth became operational on 8 December 1877, spanning . Sometime in the late 19th century a kangaroo hunter named Tom Kent, son of Benjamin Archer Kent, after whom the Adelaide suburb of Kent Town is named, created a cluster of cottages which was informally named "Kent Town". The families of fellow hunters lived there, but there were only ruins left by 1892, and all of the houses were later covered by sand (see below). In 1910–1911 additional allotments were added, bringing the number from 42 to 62 and in 1990, a further ten