Pormpuraaw sits on the western coast of Cape York Peninsula, roughly halfway between Karumba and Weipa, where the Edward River meets the Gulf of Carpentaria. It is the home of the Thaayorre and the Wik-Mungkan peoples, bordering the country of the Kugu and Wik. This is a land of two waters, the salt of the Gulf and the fresh of the rivers and wetlands behind the coast, and the culture is shaped by the meeting of the two. People here speak of being saltwater and sweet-water people, their identity rooted in the tides, the river mouths and the seasonal flooding of the plains. The community's name itself comes not just from a word but from a story, a Dreamtime account in the Thaayorre tradition involving a burnt hut, or Pormpur. Around six hundred people live here, on country their families have held since long before any mission existed, country whose languages, ceremonies and law carry the memory of that land in detail no map can hold.

In 1938 the Anglican Church set up the Edward River Mission on this coast. As at so many places across Cape York, Aboriginal people from the surrounding country were gradually drawn from their traditional lands into the mission settlement, their lives reorganized around an institution they had not chosen. The arrangement lasted until 1967, when the Church could no longer sustain it and the Queensland government's Department of Aboriginal and Islander Affairs took over. The community kept the name Edward River until 1987, the year it reclaimed its own name, Pormpuraaw, drawn from the Thaayorre story of the burnt hut. The renaming was a small but pointed reassertion of whose place this is.

On 28 July 1987 a Deed of Grant in Trust handed the land to the community to hold and manage on its own behalf. Because the shire operates outside the standard Local Government Act, looking after country rather than running a conventional municipality, its council's work looks different from most: fisheries, alcohol management, even running commercial ventures, all carried out by and for the community. A council of four elected Aboriginal residents and a mayor steers the shire. The community also runs an Indigenous Knowledge Centre, opened in 2002 in partnership with the State Library of Queensland and refurbished and reopened in early 2021 after pandemic delays, a place to hold and pass on the community's own knowledge.

The community's best-known voice speaks through art. The Pormpuraaw Art and Culture Centre, established in 2011, became one of the pioneers of ghost-net sculpture, an art form that turns marine rubbish into testimony. Using wire scavenged from the local tip and nets gathered off the beaches, artists like Jeannie Holroyd build large, vivid sculptures of turtles, fish, sharks and other creatures of the Gulf, the same fauna the discarded nets endanger. The works have travelled into major Australian museum collections, carrying Pormpuraaw's name and its message far beyond the Cape. There is a quiet justice in it: the gear that strangles the reef and drowns the turtle is unmade, strand by strand, and remade into a celebration of the life it threatened. On this two-waters coast, that is what reclamation looks like.