The Crocodile Islands belong to the Yan-nhangu, whose very identity is bound to the sea. Strung off the coast of Arnhem Land in the Arafura Sea, the islands took their modern shape around five thousand years ago, when rising seas finally steadied. Milingimbi Island - Yurruwi in language - is the largest of the inner group; beyond it lie the outer islands, Murrungga the greatest among them. The names map a whole world: Rapuma, Gananggananggarr, Nilpaywa, Darbada, and more, each with its Yan-nhangu name and its place in the law. The Yan-nhangu language is spoken by the Bindararr, Ngurruwulu, Walamangu, Gamalangga, Malarra and Gurryindi peoples - clans whose connection to this sea country runs back beyond memory.

The islands earned their name honestly. On Murrungga, enormous freshwater lakes - Garratha, Riyanhuna and Ganbuwa - hold a large population of saltwater crocodiles, the apex hunters that give the archipelago its character and its caution. But the same wetlands and mudflats make this one of the great bird places of northern Australia. Beyond the lakes lie mangrove forests, coastal floodplains, pockets of monsoon rainforest, eucalypt woodland, and shallow seas threaded with reefs - a mosaic of habitats packed into a small stretch of sea country. BirdLife International recognises the Milingimbi Islands as an Important Bird Area for the sheer numbers of waders that gather here, and Murrungga has one of the most significant migratory bird nesting and breeding sites in all of northern Australia. Twice a year the skies fill with shorebirds that have flown thousands of kilometres along the East Asian flyway to feed and rest on these flats before continuing their journeys.

Laurie Baymarrwangga spoke Yan-nhangu, Djambarrpuyngu and several other languages of north-east Arnhem Land, and she devoted her long life to passing that inheritance on. With the anthropologist Bentley James she built the Yan-nhangu Atlas and Illustrated Dictionary of the Crocodile Islands, more than four thousand Yan-nhangu words set down with their meanings - a treasury for generations who would otherwise have lost them. She launched a junior rangers program and an online dictionary for schoolchildren, and she founded the Crocodile Islands Rangers to care for the sea country itself. When she died in August 2014, in her ninety-seventh year, she left her people not a relic but a living tool: their own words, written down, ready to be spoken again.

Baymarrwangga did not quite live to see her dream made official, but it came. In 2023 the islands were declared the Crocodile Islands Maringa Indigenous Protected Area - twenty islands, more than 78,000 hectares of land and over 730,000 hectares of sea country, brought into the National Reserve System on Yan-nhangu terms. The Crocodile Islands Rangers, run through the Milingimbi Outstations Progress Resource Aboriginal Corporation, now combine traditional knowledge with conservation training to manage land, sea and culture together, protecting some forty-odd threatened species along with the turtles and shorebirds. Access to the islands remains restricted, by permission of the land council. As the Yan-nhangu put it themselves: they want it to stay as it is - their country, cared for by them.