Lieutenant Phillip Parker King, of the British Royal Navy, was the first person to chart the Kimberley coast region of northwest Western Australia, over multiple voyages between 1818 and 1820 at the helm of His Majesty’s Cutter Mermaid. Today, dozens of expedition cruise ships follow in Mermaid’s stern wave, as they ply their routes between the pearling town of Broome / Rubibi and either Wyndham or Darwin. As King was diligently making notes, sketching maps, collecting plant specimens, and avoiding crocodiles, what did he make of the staggering beauty of the Kimberley? Of the blinding turquoise that is the Indian Ocean, splashed against a palette of red earth, banded sandstone cliffs and white beaches? Of a reef, hundreds of kilometres across, that rises daily from the sea like a mirage only to disappear the same day? Of the oldest rock art depictions of humans found anywhere? Of a tidal surge so dramatic it would become known as ‘the horizontal falls’?

All of these are big questions, but if I could huddle over a cold beer to pick the brain of Lieutenant King, I’d start with what, if anything, he knows about the vanished tribe, ‘the giants of the north’. Aged then in his mid-twenties, King had a lot on his plate: keep the crew alive, manage relations with Aboriginal communities he encountered, write daily detailed logbook notes. It’s fair to assume that if he did encounter the Yawijibaya Aboriginal people – a ‘saltwater’ community who lived on High Cliffy Island and hunted in the seas around the Kimberley’s Montgomery Reef – he had no way of knowing they represented a separate language group from mainland Aboriginal people living just a few kilometres away.

The existence of the Yawijibaya people might sound improbable, in which case, you can watch a  video, still on YouTube, which features black-and-white documentary footage shot by a French film crew in 1929, showing the Yawijibaya rafting, fishing, and hunting, at Montgomery Reef. By the mid-1930s, the estimated 300 Yawijibaya, whose forebears flourished here for almost 7,000 years, had vanished.

Their fate remains unknown, but I’m equally fascinated by the description, ‘giants of the north’, which came about as passers-by reported the Yawijibaya to be physically impressive, “some standing seven feet tall”. I imagine I’d be a fair specimen myself if my diet was, like theirs, one-hundred-percent turtle, dugong, stingray, shark, and fish. Theories abound about their disappearance, but here I’m inclined to apply Occam’s well-honed Razor: the simplest theory is probably the correct one. We’ll know more as cultural anthropologists, geneticists, and historians continue to weigh in, but I think it likely the Yawijibaya just decamped to the mainland, for whatever reason, then mingled in with other Worrorra language groups. Time will tell, but in 2024, this remains one of the world’s human mysteries.

The Kimberley region offers additional astonishing examples of the presence and cultural practices of Aboriginal tribes, some going back 40,000 years, and we have the world’s oldest and most extensive rock art galleries to tell us about it. It’s estimated there are at least 100,000 rock art sites in the Kimberley, many of the finest only accessed via expedition ship or helicopter. A writer could produce multiple books (and several have), on the two distinct rock art traditions associated with the region: Gwion Gwion and Wandjina.

The figures known to Aboriginal people as Gwion Gwion are near-impossible to describe. As depicted in photographs for this story, these tall, lean, wraith-like bodies are as much apparition as human. The elaborate headdresses some wear, or the tote-bags, spears and boomerangs they carry, seem to indicate some kind of ceremony. Debate goes on about their ancestry and age, though scientific dating suggests some examples are well over 17,000 years old. Some Gwion Gwion sites are well known and well photographed, but the location of many remains secret, even when traditional owners (i.e. the Aboriginal elders associated with a particular language, art, country), and academic experts, have visited. By contrast, the Wandjina have generally been painted in the last 5,000 years, but they are every bit as other-worldly.

The Wandjina spirit-beings bring clouds and rain and are always depicted as full-face figures with no mouths, because anything they’d say would not be for our ears. Many Wandjina sites are still visited and the paintings refreshed by traditional owners. I can personally report viewing Kimberley coastal sites with paintings of both styles; a brilliant coffee-table book with stunning photographs, reproduced with the permission as well as the input of traditional owners, is titled We are coming to see you.

We can forgive Lieutenant King meanwhile for not waxing lyrical about the extraordinary ‘Horizontal Falls’ of Talbot Bay, 255km north of Broome, as he was focused on the entire Kimberley coast, not just the highlights. Sir David Attenborough has no doubt rued the day he announced them as “one of the world’s great natural wonders”, prompting tourism operators to quote him breathlessly ever since, but from my perch in a boat tender alongside six other punters, this great tidal rush between two narrow gorges is exactly as advertised – roaring, powerful, loud. While tours have previously ridden these waters, there has been consultation with stakeholders, including traditional owners in the last year which led the West Australian government to announce in March 2024, that from 2026 tour boats will no longer be able to travel through the falls. Perhaps the best way to appreciate this site is from the air, where often you truly appreciate the grandeur and scale of the Kimberley’s otherworldly landscapes.

Less than 100 kilometres northeast of Talbot Bay lies Montgomery Reef, named in 1821 by then Captain King after his ship’s surgeon Andrew Montgomery. At low tide, around 300 square kilometres of it is exposed, with dozens of ‘waterfalls’ funneling the ocean into deeper channels as it rushes off the reef. For full jaw-dropping effect, this is best seen from above, by helicopter, seaplane, or drone camera.

Eastern Reef Egrets patrol the ‘sinkholes’ that pockmark the reef when the ten-metre tide falls and marine animals are suddenly exposed. Green turtles, everywhere at Montgomery Reef, get caught too, and it’s not unusual to see turtles as they make their way to the channels that run into deeper water. As the Yawijibaya could no doubt tell you, a green turtle doesn’t have a green shell, but is layered in greenish fat, the result of its seagrass diet – a tasty, stranded morsel for any predatory seabird keeping a beady eye on the reef.

Lalang-garram/Camden Sound Marine Park includes Montgomery Reef and is the first to be jointly managed by traditional owners and the state government of Western Australia. Its name features a Worrorra word which translates as “the saltwater as a spiritual place as well as a place of natural abundance”.

The marine park also encompasses the most important humpback whale nursery in the Southern Hemisphere. Whale species recorded here include humpback, minke, and the false killer whale. From June to November, up to 40,000 humpback whales migrate north from Antarctica to their breeding grounds in Camden Sound. The warm, shallow waters are ideal for newborn humpback calves, and the shoreline and seafloor provide protection from predators. The marine park is also home to six species of threatened marine turtles, rare Australian snubfin dolphins and Indo-Pacific humpback dolphins, dugongs, saltwater crocodiles, and several species of sawfish.

With the recent unprecedented marine heatwaves occurring across the globe, coral reefs of the Kimberley coast, and the soft-coral species that colonise Montgomery Reef in particular, have gained wider scientific attention for their resistance to high ocean and air temperatures. Some species have even been transplanted from Montgomery to other coral reef systems, to see if they grow as successfully. A November 2020 paper titled Coral Reefs in the Kimberley Adapt to Survive provides an excellent summary: “Corals here have adapted to thrive in extreme environmental conditions, including high temperatures, wind, and sun exposure, making them some of the most robust and resilient coral communities known to science. Some of the Kimberley’s intertidal reefs can remain exposed at low tide for over three hours.

During this prolonged period, they can be subject to potentially damaging levels of UV light and extremely high temperatures, yet the hardy Kimberley corals survive. Many of the platform reefs sit above sea level, meaning that on a falling tide they appear to rise from the ocean. Montgomery Reef, 20 kilometres off the Kimberley coast, is one of the most spectacular places to see this phenomenon. While Kimberley corals remain susceptible to bleaching from elevated temperatures, their bleaching threshold of thirty-two degrees Celsius is significantly higher than that of typical coral reefs, which show signs of stress in prolonged periods of temperatures over twenty-nine degrees Celsius.” Hope then, for the longer-term outlook of some coral species.

On 30 September 1820, King’s survey vessel weighed anchor in Careening Bay (so named by King himself, and part of today’s Prince Regent National Park), where he had the ship’s carpenter carve ‘HMC MERMAID 1820’ into a huge boab. This was no random act of tree graffiti: the Colonial Office had instructed King to ‘leave some evidence which cannot be mistaken of your having landed’. The carpenter did his job admirably and the boab still stands, estimated now to be over 800 years old. Captain King was formally promoted to ‘Admiral of the Blue’, then the Royal Navy’s fourth highest rank, in 1855, a year before his death. Today, Phillip Parker King isn’t especially widely celebrated, though he tackled the Kimberley coast with diligence and daring, representing humanity at its resilient best. Mention his name to any Kimberley boat skipper though, and you’ll get a glimmer of recognition for a job mightily well done.