The year 1802 found Matthew Flinders midway through the first circumnavigation of Australia, charting a coastline Europeans had barely glimpsed. The Gulf of Carpentaria tested him; it was hot, shoal-ridden and poorly mapped, and his ship was beginning to rot beneath him. So an island that offered easy provisions was a gift, and he named it accordingly. Flinders had a habit of letting the land speak through his charts, honouring the abundance he found, and Bountiful Island joined a string of such names across the region. Decades later, in 1841, Captain John Lort Stokes brought HMS Beagle through the same waters, calling at the Bountiful Islands as he surveyed this remote corner of the Gulf in finer detail.

Today the islands' importance is measured in wings. Tiny as they are, at roughly 450 hectares of land, the Bountiful Islands qualify as an Important Bird Area because they shelter more than one percent of the global population of two species. Up to 2,000 pairs of roseate terns nest here, slender and pale, their plumage flushed faintly pink in the breeding season. Alongside them crowd a far larger throng: somewhere between 26,000 and 30,000 pairs of crested terns, one of the great seabird gatherings of the Gulf. For these birds the islands' very emptiness is the attraction. With no people and few predators, the open sand becomes a safe place to lay eggs and raise the next generation above the reach of the tide.

It is easy to underestimate a place this size. The whole island group amounts to only about 4.5 square kilometres of dry land, low enough that a big tide seems to threaten to swallow it and flat enough to vanish behind the curve of the sea from a few miles off. Yet that smallness is precisely the point. Surrounded by the warm, shallow, turtle-rich waters of the southern Gulf of Carpentaria, the Bountiful Islands offer exactly what a nesting seabird or an egg-laying turtle most needs: bare ground, safe from the mainland's predators and far from human disturbance. The islands draw their significance not from grandeur but from isolation, a few hundred hectares of sand doing ecological work out of all proportion to their footprint.

The Bountiful Islands belong to the wider Wellesley group, the scatter of islands across the southeastern Gulf that Flinders named for a colonial governor. These are the home waters of Aboriginal peoples whose connection to this sea country runs deep, among them the Kaiadilt, whose heartland lay on Bentinck Island in the South Wellesley group not far to the south. The Kaiadilt were among the last coastal Aboriginal people in Australia to maintain their traditional life largely undisturbed, navigating these islands by canoe and reading the reefs and tides with extraordinary precision, until the upheavals of the twentieth century forced most of them from their country. The low islands of the Gulf, Bountiful among them, were never empty in the way a passing chart-maker might assume; they sat within a living map of sea country known and named long before any European sail appeared.