The Coorong begins where the Murray River, after a journey of more than two thousand kilometres across the continent, finally reaches the sea near the Murray Mouth. From there the lagoon stretches south-east, sheltered behind the Younghusband Peninsula, which separates it from the open ocean. It is a place defined by the mingling of waters: river flow, rainfall, groundwater, and the sea all meet here, and the balance between them shapes everything that lives in the park's 467 square kilometres. Fresh water sustains the land animals; salt water feeds the astonishing birdlife. Since the Goolwa Barrages were built across the river's mouth in the late 1930s, that delicate balance has been a managed, anxious thing, and the lagoons are now considered critically endangered as freshwater flows have dwindled.

In 1964, South Australian author Colin Thiele set a small novel here, the story of a lonely boy living among the dunes who rescues an orphaned pelican and names him Mr Percival. Storm Boy became one of the most loved children's books in the country, filmed in 1976 and again in 2019, and it fixed the Coorong forever in the national imagination as a place of wild solitude and unlikely tenderness. The pelicans are no fiction. At Jack Point, just off the Princes Highway and about seven kilometres north of Salt Creek, sits the largest pelican rookery in Australia, where these huge, prehistoric-looking birds gather to breed on the sand flats. Watching a pelican come in to land on the still lagoon - all ungainly approach and sudden grace - it is easy to see why Thiele reached for one as his hero.

Long before the novelists and the national park, this was, and remains, Ngarrindjeri country - part of what they call their yarluwar-ruwe, their sea country. The Coorong carries songlines, the threaded creation stories that map the land and water, and it holds a long inheritance of living here sustainably, reading the lagoon's moods and tending its life. That knowledge is not a relic. The Ngarrindjeri Aboriginal Corporation now works alongside government scientists on the "Healthy Coorong, Healthy Basin" program, sharing landcare practices honed over countless generations to help heal a system under strain. The people who first understood this water are again being asked to help save it - a recognition, hard-won, that their custodianship was knowledge all along.

The park was proclaimed in 1967 as a refuge, and a refuge is exactly what it is. When drought grips the inland, migratory birds pour into the Coorong's wetlands from across the hemisphere, making it one of Australia's great gathering places for waterbirds. Banded stilts stipple the sand flats; flocks rise and turn like smoke. Beneath the surface, Coorong mullet, mulloway, and bream draw both recreational anglers and the commercial fishers who have worked these waters for generations. The Coorong is not a postcard wilderness sealed off from people - it is a working, breathing edge of the continent, equal parts ecosystem, fishery, sacred country, and the windblown setting of a story Australians tell their children. Stand on the dune wall at sunset, ocean roaring at your back and lagoon glowing pink before you, and all of it makes sense at once.