Long before any sail appeared on the horizon, this peninsula was home. Edel Land is the traditional Country of the Malgana people, and it sustained them through resources that an outsider's eye would easily miss. Stone for tools was quarried from a natural source at Crayfish Bay. Food came from the sea in the form of fish, and from the hardy plants that cling to the dunes. Most precious of all in this dry, salt-rimmed land was fresh water, drawn from a soak called Willyah Mia on the peninsula's eastern shore. To live here was to know exactly where the water was — a knowledge measured in generations, and a reminder that the land Europeans would later call 'discovered' had been intimately understood for thousands of years.

In October 1616, a Dutch East India Company captain named Dirk Hartog overshot the usual route to Batavia and bumped into the unknown. He made landfall on the island just off this peninsula — the island that now bears his name — and nailed a flattened pewter plate to a post to record his visit. He was not quite the first European to reach the Australian continent; Willem Janszoon had touched the far north a decade earlier. But Hartog was the first to set foot on its western coast, and his plate became the oldest known European artefact left on Australian soil. From the heights of Edel Land you look across the water to the very island where that strange, accidental meeting between the Old World and this one took place.

The names on this coast are Dutch because the Dutch came first. In 1697, the navigator Willem de Vlamingh spent more than two weeks exploring Shark Bay, and somewhere along this exposed western shore he looked up at the cliffs and named the peninsula's blunt end Steyle Hoek — Steep Promontory. The English-speakers who followed simply translated it, and Steep Point was born. De Vlamingh is best remembered for what he did on Hartog's island, where he found the 1616 plate weathered and loose, lifted it, and nailed up a fresh one recording both Dutch visits. The naming of Edel Land's headland was almost a footnote to that act — yet it stuck, and three centuries later travellers still drive to the place the Dutch called steep.

Edel Land occupies a curious moment in its own history. It is wrapped into the Shark Bay World Heritage Site, celebrated for the marine wonders just offshore, yet as a national park it remains a proposal working its way toward full status — a wild place being formally recognised for what it has always been. The peninsula is rugged and largely roadless, its tracks shifting through soft sand, its appeal precisely its remoteness. In spring, wildflowers brighten the low heath. The eastern shore looks over the protected waters of Shark Bay; the western side meets the full force of the open ocean and the cliffs that run south toward the Zuytdorp coast. Between those two faces lies a thin, dramatic ribbon of land at the very end of the continent.