Australia Highseas

The Yinggarda and Thalanyji offshore waters face the Indian Ocean along Western Australia. Behind the coast, the land combines arid interior landscapes with more temperate country in its southwest. The far northern Kimberley is tropical. Its southern coast, meanwhile, is bounded by the Southern Ocean. This distribution of climates is a consequence of the land's immense north-south and east-west extent.

Human occupation of the wider continent reaches back more than 50,000 years, possibly as far as 70,000. Indigenous Australians had spread throughout Western Australia long before the seventeenth-century arrival of European explorers. The Dutch made repeated contacts with the coast, often accidental when ships strayed from the Brouwer Route. British settlement began at King George III Sound in 1826 and at the Swan River in 1829.

Aboriginal groups maintained trade and kinship routes from the dry coast into the interior, carrying pearl shell, ochre, plant foods and knowledge across country. Dutch and later British navigators encountered a coastline already dense with meaningful places, although safe freshwater and anchorages remained scarce. Seasonal movement let communities use scattered wells, river pools and coastal foods.