ELLIE DUNCAN’S VOICE bounces around the cabin of our four-wheel-drive as we hit another bone-rattling track etched deeply with corrugations. “There’s plenty of tigers and bronzies. Then there’s the mantas, cowtails and eagles. And if you see a wedgefish, there’s a number you should call because they’re critically endangered and extremely rare,” she says, regaling us with a bucket list for underwater aficionados. “And whale sharks, we’ve seen 15 at a time cruising past here.”
We’ve pulled up on the windward side of Dirk Hartog Island/Wirruwana on Western Australia’s sun-baked Coral Coast. “And plenty of humpies too,” Ellie continues. “And don’t even get me started on the mammoth bait balls we get. It’s so incredible to swim through them. They can last for weeks and attract, I reckon, thousands of feeding sharks.”
It’s 2pm on an early March day and the air temp is 30°C-plus. It’s a dry heat, and the breeze is picking up as we point the nose of the LandCruiser south-west towards Surf Point, where a lone dugong has been rummaging around in the seagrass beds for days – “growing fat and happy” in the turquoise waters around WA’s largest island. He’s disappeared now, though, and so we motor 10 minutes north to a bite of coast that broils with dorsal fins. Hundreds. “If we had more time, I’d get you in there,” Ellie says of the sicklefin lemon shark nursery. “They won’t bite – more afraid of you than you are of them.”
I long to wade in, too, not wanting to miss the opportunity to be the meat in this marvellous shark soup. But time is against us. We need to return to the homestead, pick up island director Kieran Wardle and skedaddle to the westernmost point of the island (and Australia) for what is widely billed as the country’s last sunset.
But more on that later…
PHOTOGRAPHER LEWIS BURNETT and I arrive on Wirruwana via a charter flight
