Australia Highseas

Australia Highseas here lies off the southwestern shore of Western Australia, with the Indian Ocean opening westward from a coast known for Mediterranean conditions. Beyond the shore, rainfall and vegetation change toward the arid interior, where the Great Sandy, Little Sandy, Gibson and Great Victoria deserts form a vast dry region. The nearby southern shore of the state is exposed instead to the Southern Ocean.

The maritime setting preserves traces of early European contact. Dutch explorer Dirk Hartog's expedition landed at Cape Inscription on what is then Dirk Hartog Island on 25 October 1616, the first recorded European landing in Western Australia. Other Dutch and British navigators encountered the coast during the seventeenth century, often after storms or navigational errors carried ships away from the Brouwer Route. Shipwrecks became part of the coast's later history.

The land belonged to Indigenous peoples long before those voyages. They had occupied and travelled across Western Australia for tens of thousands of years. Coastal waters thus connected an old inhabited shoreline with the routes by which outsiders first charted the region.

British navigation and settlement eventually linked this shoreline to a colony centred on Perth and its port at Fremantle.