“Nhanganha Gutharraguda. Nhanganha puguda.” The words float across the scrub, tumbling over trees; a soft song carried in a cloud of notes. “Ngai nari Capes. Ngayi Nhanda Yamaji.”
My guide, Darren Capewell, a man universally known as “Capes,” is engaged in an Aboriginal tradition known as singing to Country. Born to a Nhanda mother and a Malgana father, he sings to the acacia trees and the wattle bushes, the thorny devils and the willie wagtails, the red earth beneath our feet. And he sings to his ancestors, asking them for safe passage through this land.
We are parked inside the entrance to Francois Peron National Park, the tires of our 4WD freshly deflated to better handle the sandy track that runs like a spine through the center of the park. Francois Peron occupies a thumb of acacia-covered sand dunes, dotted with saltwater lagoons and fringed by azure seas with manta rays, dolphins, and rare manatee-like dugongs. Together with Dirk Hartog Island, this remote peninsula makes up Shark Bay, or Gutharraguda in the local language, a UNESCO World Heritage site 500 miles north of Perth in Western Australia.
Capes’s ancestors first inhabited the area some 30,000 years ago, hunting emus and kangaroos, setting traps for fish in the shallows, and building mounds of discarded shells and bones known as middens. His grandfather was the area’s last Nhanda chief; his mother was born in the bush here. And now Capes runs cultural tours of the lands he wandered as a child through his company Wula Gura Nyinda Eco Adventures, highlighting the deep spiritual connection the Nhanda and Malgana people share with Shark Bay.
Francois Peron National Park is a vast horizon of low-level shrubs and stunted trees, polka dots of spinifex on a rust-red canvas. I’m visiting on a day tour in August, during Manggathayina, the cold season, and recent rains have daubed the bush with splashes of green. “The land is happy, the birds are happy, I am happy,” says Capes with a big smile, as we watch a kangaroo bounce across the track in the distance. “But it’s not what nature looks like, it’s what nature feels like.” He takes a big gulp of saltwater air, sucking it deep into his chest, his eyes closed, his thick arms stretched wide in an invisible embrace. “Breathe it in, brother,” he says, looking at me looking at him. “Looks good, feels better.”
Darren “Capes” Capewell says he tries to show visitors “the spirit of Country.”
Courtesy of Tourism Australia
We set off on foot into the bush, Capes talking to the ground in front of him—Yakunda milniya—“Stay away, snake.” He shows me the karara tree, whose roots the Malgana and Nhanda once sharpened into spears for hunting kangaroos, and the desert karijon, known as the compass tree for the way it helps you tell north (the rough side of the trunk) from south (the smooth side). We munch bush bananas and suck on girrinyinangu berries, while Capes tells me about the medicinal properties of nearly every plant we pass and how the oil in emu fat is good for arthritis.
Later, on the drive up the peninsula, we cross several large clay pans speckled with centuries-old saltbush plants, dried-up lagoons that the Malgana and Nhanda believe to be the footsteps of their creators. A few signs along the way (scattered oyster shells, an old water tank) point to the peninsula’s more recent past, when local boats dredged the waters here in the late 1800s and early 1900s and the peninsula was a single vast pastoral station grazed by thousands of sheep.
Red dunes meet turquoise sea at Skipjack Point, where dugongs and manta rays swim among the clear waters.
Courtesy of Tourism Australia
At Skipjack Point, in the far north, a nub of coastline separates two curves of bone-white beach, empty stretches that separate cliffs the color of burnt orange from a sea so turquoise it looks like it’s been Photoshopped. Capes points out a dark shadow in the deeper waters—some of Shark Bay’s richly biodiverse seagrass meadows, the largest in the world—then lots of smaller shadows closer to shore: rays, turtles, and some of the 30 or so shark species that give Shark Bay its name, including a juvenile tiger shark, gliding through the shallows with a casual menace.
Skipjack Point marks the start of the Wanamalu Trail, a 2.7-mile clifftop walk north to Cape Peron, at the very tip of the peninsula. We follow the trail on foot over terra-cotta dunes and above one of the bone-white beaches. “This is where the desert meets the ocean,” says Capes, as we stand at the edge of Cape Peron, on the border between orange and blue. Currents converge below us, the meeting of “two waters,” or Gutharraguda, that gives Shark Bay its Indigenous name.
Due west across the bay, at the northern tip of Dirk Hartog Island, Cape Inscription marks the point where, on October 25, 1616, Dutch sailors became the first Europeans to set foot in what is now Western Australia. The British followed in 1699, with William Dampier naming the area Shark Bay and producing the first records of Australian flora and fauna. The bay’s remarkable wildlife also captivated French expeditions of the early 1800s, most notably the naturalist François Péron—after whom the national park is named.
Péron recorded 23 species of mammals on the peninsula, but by 1990, with stock-keeping degrading the land and introduced predators such as foxes and feral cats taking their toll on the local wildlife, fewer than half that number remained. As we make our way back through the park, Capes tells me about the conservation projects that are attempting to reverse this damage and return the area to the way it was before European settlement.
Native animals that have been reintroduced to the region include wallabies and bandicoots.
Courtesy of Tourism Australia
Project Eden (in Francois Peron National Park) and Return to 1616 (on Dirk Hartog Island) have both focused on increasing vegetation, removing invasive animals, and reintroducing native wildlife. Dirk Hartog has been declared feral-free, and eight formerly locally extinct species, including the stick-nest rat and the rufous hare-wallaby, now thrive there. It’s a harder job in Francois Peron, which is attached to the mainland, but reintroductions of malleefowl, a ground-dwelling bird, and bilby, a small marsupial with big ears and a long snout, have succeeded in establishing viable populations once more.
We park, for one last time, by a road sign that warns of malleefowls crossing and step out onto the soft sandy track. Capes scans the horizon, his eyes moving across the acacia trees and the wattle bushes, and takes a deep breath. “Looks good,” he says, glancing over at me. “Feels better,” I reply.
Tours run by Wula Gura Nyinda Eco Cultural Adventures include kayaking and stand-up paddleboarding in Shark Bay, day and overnight 4WD tours of Francois Peron National Park, and a monthly three-day World Heritage Walking Tour that visits both Francois Peron National Park and Dirk Hartog Island.
