Streaky Bay limestone-coast cottage

This 95 square-metre cottage sits on a wide, quiet block in Streaky Bay, a working oyster and fishing town on the western side of South Australia's Eyre Peninsula. The house is honest South Australian coastal stock: timber frame, painted weatherboard and iron, a deep front verandah facing the afternoon sea breeze and a corrugated roof feeding a rainwater tank. Inside are three bedrooms, a single bathroom, a separate laundry and an open kitchen and living space with lino-over-jarrah floors that have been sanded back. There is a carport, a lock-up shed big enough for a boat and trailer, and lawn out the back for a barbecue and a couple of fruit trees.

Streaky Bay is one of the last places in Australia where a solid three-bedroom house a two-minute walk from calm water still trades in the low three hundreds. The town has roughly 1,500 residents, swelling in summer with fishing families from Adelaide, which is a six-hour drive east. Freehold title applies and the buying process is the standard Australian conveyancing route; non-resident buyers should budget for Foreign Investment Review Board approval and the additional stamp duty surcharge that South Australia applies to foreign purchasers. Rates and insurance are modest by national standards, and the town is connected to mains power, town water and NBN fixed wireless.

The bay itself is the drawcard. Streaky Bay is a huge, shallow, protected inlet with pale sand and calm turquoise water at the town jetty, safe enough that local kids swim off the jetty ladder all summer. Two hundred metres from the front gate you reach the foreshore lawn, the jetty and the boat ramp. Fifteen minutes west, the Westall Way loop and Smooth Pool serve up dramatic granite platforms, sea caves and surf beaches where you can go a whole morning without seeing another car. Sea-lion colonies at Point Labatt and the whales at Head of Bight are day trips north.

Life here revolves around the water and the oysters. There is a bakery, an IGA supermarket, a butcher, a pharmacy, a hardware store, a hospital with an emergency department, a primary and area school to year 12, and a pub with a solid schnitzel. The Streaky Bay Hotel and a couple of cafés along Alfred Terrace serve local oysters, King George whiting and southern rock lobster straight off the boats. A farmers and craft market runs monthly on the foreshore.

Getting here is a drive rather than a flight for most people: six hours from Adelaide on sealed highway, or a short hop to Ceduna Airport (110 km north) with connections to Adelaide. There is a coach service through town on the Eyre Highway. Once you are here, everything in the township is walkable, and most owners keep a tinnie or a 4WD for the surrounding coast.

For a buyer who wants space, safety, real community and genuine Australian beach frontage without a metropolitan price tag, Streaky Bay is one of the best value propositions on the continent. It rewards people who like fishing, quiet, big skies and long horizons more than nightlife.