The island takes its name from Peter Dorre, pilot of the Dutch ship Eendracht, which sailed this coast in 1616 during the early European charting of what was then called New Holland. The Dutch left their names on capes and islands all along Shark Bay, more than two centuries before Britain claimed the west of the continent. Cape St Cricq marks Dorre's southern tip, Cape Boullanger its north, both later additions from French surveyors. A narrow channel just 500 metres wide and only four metres deep separates Dorre from Bernier Island to the north. The bay itself is a UNESCO World Heritage area, prized for seagrass meadows, dugongs, and the ancient living stromatolites at Hamelin Pool, and Dorre sits at its exposed north-western corner, where the sheltered water gives way to the open Indian Ocean.

Between 1908 and 1919, the Western Australian government ran what it called lock hospitals on Bernier and Dorre. More than 800 Aboriginal people, suspected of carrying venereal or other disease, were taken from their families and country across the state, shipped to Carnarvon, and ferried out to the islands. Aboriginal men were confined mostly on Bernier; women and children, mostly here on Dorre. Many were brought in neck chains. Once landed, they had no way home and little contact with the families they had been torn from. The care was a fiction. Rations were meagre and often cut off when rough weather stopped the boats, and the treatments inflicted on them were crude and experimental. It is conservatively estimated that more than 200 people died on the two islands, buried in unmarked ground far from their own. Elders later passed down a warning to those left behind on the mainland: do not look at the islands, for the grief of looking was too much to carry.

Foxes and feral cats never reached Dorre or Bernier, and that single accident of isolation has made them priceless. The islands shelter the last naturally surviving populations of several mammals that foxes and cats wiped out across the mainland: the banded hare-wallaby, the rufous hare-wallaby, the western barred bandicoot, and the Shark Bay mouse, a small native rodent that Aboriginal people call djoongari. For some of these animals, these two strips of sand are the only wild homes left on the planet. In recent years, conservationists have carried wallabies from Bernier and Dorre to rebuild populations elsewhere, including a major release onto nearby Dirk Hartog Island. The island that once held people who could not leave now guards creatures that would otherwise be gone, an irony that does not soften the history so much as sit uneasily beside it.

Dorre is a strict A-class nature reserve, closed to casual visitors, and that protection is why it works as a sanctuary. There are no resorts, no jetties, no tracks worn by tourists. The Malgana people are the traditional custodians of these islands and the Shark Bay region, their connection to this country stretching back tens of thousands of years. From the deck of a passing boat you see only low scrub, white beaches, and a lighthouse blinking at the far end of the chain. It is easy, from out on the water, to read the island as simply beautiful and wild. The harder reading is the truer one. This is a place that did terrible things to vulnerable people within living memory, and it is also a last ark for animals our own carelessness nearly erased. Dorre asks you to hold both at once, without letting either disappear behind the other.