Chapter 11: Dirk Hartog Island

Dirk Hartog Island is not our favourite place.

And I want you to notice that, because you’ve been waiting for it. It would be our favourite — it has every qualification — except that we’d just been to Ningaloo, and there’s only one of those, and it turns out that once you’ve found the actual favourite, you can’t go on handing the title out to everywhere you love. So Dirk Hartog isn’t our favourite. It’s just one of the best places in the country, and I’ll have to make do with saying so.

To get there, you drive as far west as it is possible to drive in Australia. Then, when the road runs out, you drive further west than that. And then you drive further west again, until there is no more west to be had, and you have come to the edge of the continent — and then you get on a barge, and you go past the edge.

Dirk Hartog Island is off the end of the world. I can prove it to you with a single fact: the Royal Flying Doctor Service does not come here. I told you, a long way back, about a kidney stone at Carnarvon Gorge, and how I’d been frightened but not truly — because I’d still been inside the reach of the Flying Doctor, the great net stretched out under everyone in the outback. Out here, you are past the edge of that net. There is no one flying to you. Hold that thought; we’ll need it later.

But first — Shark Bay, which is the body of water you cross to get there, and which is one of the great wildlife places on earth. It’s famous for four things: dolphins, dugongs, whales, and — the name is not decorative — sharks. The dolphins, I’ll be honest, underwhelmed us. The dugongs were marvellous. And the whales overwhelmed us completely, and to explain why I have to tell you the thing I learned in Shark Bay that I have not stopped thinking about since.

The humpbacks are migrating. They spend the southern winter up in the warm Indonesian waters, birthing their calves, and then they bring those calves all the way south to the feeding grounds near Antarctica. It’s a long way for a newborn, down the open coast. And waiting along that coast are the orcas, who regard a humpback calf as the finest thing on the menu. So the mothers run their calves down the coastline as tight to shore as they can, the adults placed deliberately between the babies and the open sea, a moving wall of mother between the calf and the thing that eats calves.