In 1908 the Western Australian government opened so-called lock hospitals on Bernier and neighbouring Dorre Island. Over the next eleven years, more than 800 Aboriginal people from across the state, suspected of carrying venereal or other disease, were forcibly removed from their country and shipped out to the islands. The men were confined mostly here on Bernier; the women and children mostly on Dorre. Many arrived in neck chains. They were cut off from their families and subjected to crude, experimental treatments in facilities that were never adequate to keep them alive. When weather stopped the supply boats from Carnarvon, the food simply ran short. It is conservatively estimated that more than 200 people died on the two islands and were buried in unmarked ground, far from the country that gave them meaning. In 2019, at the centenary, Western Australian minister Alannah MacTiernan called it 'a really horrific piece of Western Australian history.' The memorial on the Carnarvon foreshore was installed that April, a century after the last detainees were taken from that very shore.

Bernier survives as a refuge for one reason that has nothing to do with intention: foxes and feral cats, the twin destroyers of Australia's small native mammals, never reached it. As a result the island holds one of the last colonies of the banded hare-wallaby, a long-eared marsupial that once ranged across the mainland and now clings to existence on a handful of islands. It is also a stronghold of the Shark Bay mouse, known to Aboriginal people as djoongari, a native rodent reduced to a few thousand individuals worldwide. Alongside them survive the western barred bandicoot and the rufous hare-wallaby. For several of these animals, Bernier and Dorre are quite literally the only places on Earth where wild populations have endured without human rescue. The island is a strict A-class nature reserve, and its 2.6-hectare satellite, Koks Island, sits just off the lighthouse at the northern tip.

Because Bernier's animals are so rare, the island has become a source as much as a sanctuary. Conservationists carefully capture wallabies here and translocate them to other predator-free sites to build insurance populations, so that a single fire, disease outbreak or stray cat cannot extinguish a species in one stroke. Banded hare-wallabies from Bernier have helped found new colonies on Faure Island and on Dirk Hartog Island to the south, part of an ambitious effort to return the bay's lost mammals to ground they have not touched in over a century. Every animal moved is a small hedge against extinction, and every one of them traces its survival back to this thin, fox-free island where nothing larger than a wallaby has ever held the upper hand.

It would be easier to tell only one of Bernier's stories. The conservation triumph is genuinely uplifting, and the island's beauty, all white beach and turquoise shallow, invites the gaze the memorial warns against. But the people who died here were not a footnote to a nature reserve. They were Aboriginal men, women and children with families, languages and country of their own, taken by force and left to die in sight of a coast they could not reach. Bernier and Dorre are part of the traditional country of the Malgana people, whose connection to this region stretches back tens of thousands of years. The animals matter enormously. So do the people. The bronze figures on the Carnarvon foreshore still face the water, refusing to let the islands be remembered only for what they shelter now.