The orange is the bay's signature, and it surprises people to learn it is alive. The granite itself is grey, but it is coated across the splash zone in a hardy coastal lichen that glows a deep tangerine, a slow-growing organism that thrives on salt spray and sun. Set against the squeaking white quartz sand and the clear blue-green water, the effect is almost too saturated to believe, three colours that should clash but instead define one of the most photographed coastlines in the southern hemisphere. The bay runs for some fifty kilometres, from Binalong Bay in the south to Eddystone Point in the north, a long ribbon of pale beaches, sheltered lagoons and those burning rocks.

Long before Furneaux gave it an English name, this coast was larapuna, in the reconstructed palawa kani language of Tasmania's Aboriginal people. It was a gathering place, where family groups remembered today as the Panpe-kanner, Leener-rerter and Pinter-rairer came together along the shore. The middens and stone tools they left are a record of unbroken connection to this country across countless generations. That heritage is not a closed chapter; larapuna remains deeply significant to the palawa community, and the dual name now sits openly alongside the colonial one. To stand on these beaches is to stand on a meeting place that was loved and used for thousands of years before the first European sail appeared on the horizon.

The nineteenth century brought a harder trade. In the 1840s, bay whaling was carried out along this coast, the same brutal industry that stained beaches up and down Tasmania, hunting the whales that once passed close inshore. The nearby town of St Helens began life as a whaling station before settling into its present role as the easygoing gateway to the bay, about 160 kilometres east of Launceston. The whales are protected now, and the coast has been given over to slower pleasures: camping behind the dunes, fishing, surfing, swimming, birdwatching among the lagoons, and simply walking the long empty sand. That mix of protection and quiet recreation is built into the land itself. The northern end of the bay falls within Mount William National Park, a refuge that helped save the Tasmanian Forester kangaroo; the southern stretch, anchored by the bright sands of Binalong Bay, is a conservation area where camping and beachcombing are the order of the day.

For somewhere this remote, the Bay of Fires has drawn an outsized share of attention. In 2005 it was named the world's second-best beach by Conde Nast, and in 2008 the guidebook Lonely Planet crowned it the hottest travel destination on the planet for the year ahead. The accolades brought visitors, but they have not crowded the place; the beaches are long enough and the region quiet enough that you can still walk a curve of sand and meet no one. That is the real draw. In a world running short of empty coastline, larapuna offers kilometres of it, framed in white and orange, exactly as wild as it has always been.