Flinders called it "Bickerton's Island" and lingered just long enough to be unimpressed. In his Voyage to Terra Australis he noted a deep bay on the southern side that might shelter a ship from the northwest monsoon, and hills behind it high enough, perhaps, to gather fresh water. The surrounding country, he wrote, "had the appearance of being sandy and sterile." It was the verdict of a man passing through. The island is roughly twenty-one kilometres across, cut by deep indentations, with South Bay and North Bay biting into its coast. To the people who knew which mangroves held mud crabs and which reefs held fish, sterility was never the point. This was, and remains, sea country dense with meaning.

There is one community on Bickerton Island, and its name is Milyakburra. It sits on the eastern shore of South Bay, beside the airstrip, established in 1975 as a family outstation during the broader homelands movement that drew Aboriginal families back to their ancestral country. At the 2011 census the island's population was 176, the overwhelming majority Aboriginal, all of them here. Milyakburra today carries a school, a clinic, a women's centre, a store and a cyclone shelter against the savage wet-season storms that sweep the Gulf. The land is privately owned Aboriginal freehold, and its owners are represented by the Anindilyakwa Land Council across the water at Angurugu, on Groote Eylandt.

Bickerton does not stand alone. It is one piece of the Groote archipelago, eight kilometres east of the mainland and thirteen kilometres west of Groote Eylandt itself, with the mouth of Blue Mud Bay opening just beyond. The Warnumamalya share clan ties, ceremony and language with their neighbours across the strait, part of the wider Anindilyakwa nation whose fourteen clans hold this corner of the Gulf. Their language is spoken nowhere else on Earth, and it is famously intricate, with words that can stretch to fourteen syllables. From the air the island reads as a scatter of deep blue bays and red headlands ringed by pale shallows, a fragment of one of the most intact Aboriginal homelands left in Australia.

The whole archipelago, Bickerton included, lies within the Anindilyakwa Indigenous Protected Area, ten thousand square kilometres of land and sea country looked after by Aboriginal rangers who blend handed-down knowledge with modern conservation science. This is not empty wilderness. The islands shelter creatures vanishing from the mainland, among them the spotted, cat-sized northern quoll and the brush-tailed rabbit rat, and the surrounding waters are nesting grounds for threatened marine turtles. The Anindilyakwa call their sea country Makarda, and they care for it as deliberately as the dry land. On Bickerton, the work of looking after country is not a job imported from outside; it is the continuation of a relationship thousands of years old, carried now by the same families who have always belonged here.