Kimba is a rural service town on the Eyre Highway at the top of Eyre Peninsula in the Australian state of South Australia. At the 2016 census, Kimba had a population of 629 and it has an annual rainfall of . There is an tall statue of a galah beside the highway, marking halfway between the east and west coasts of Australia. The Gawler Ranges are north of the highway near the town. Kimba is located in the federal division of Grey, the state electoral district of Giles and the local government area of the District Council of Kimba. The word "kimba" is derived from the local Aboriginal word for "bushfire", and the District Council of Kimba's emblem reflects this in the form of a burning bush. The town was built on Barngarla lands. Early history The first European in the area was explorer Edward John Eyre, who passed through the area on his passage from Streaky Bay to the head of Spencer Gulf in late 1839. The area was first settled in the 1870s by lease-holding pastoralists who moved north up the Eyre Peninsula during the 1870s and 1880s. They lightly stocked the land and relied on the limited water supplies and intermittent open grass lands to raise their stock. It was more intensively settled for wheat farming from 1908, when overseas demand for wheat increased in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The large tracts of mallee scrub began to be cleared to facilitate this, and soon regular mail services were established from the port at Cowell. Bags of wheat had to be loaded onto bullock drays which carried the produce to Cowell 76 km south. In 1913, Kimba was connected by narrow gauge railway to Port Lincoln. This development encouraged a number of new wheat farmers to move into the area. Two years later the township of Kimba was officially proclaimed and service industries began to move into the district. Education within the town is provided by the Kimba Area School where around 170 students from reception to year 12 attend. National Radioactive Waste Management Facility Two properties in the Kimba district were nominated in 2017 for a proposed National Radioactive Waste Management Facility, to store low-level and intermediate-level nuclear waste. One is owned by Brett and Michelle Rayner, and the other is owned by Andrew and Dale Baldock. A third proposed site was located at