Faure Island wears a French name, like so much of Shark Bay. Nicolas Baudin's expedition charted these waters in 1801, and Baudin named the island for Pierre Faure, the geographer aboard the corvette Le Naturaliste. The land itself is modest and low, its highest point just 26 metres above the sea. Red and white sandy plains roll across it, broken by claypans in the hollows and edged in places with limestone and red-sand cliffs that echo the nearby Peron Peninsula. Acacia shrubs dominate, with patches of mallee, spinifex, salt-tolerant samphire, and fringing mangroves. The climate is semi-arid and unforgiving: hot dry summers, mild winters, and an average of just 222 millimetres of rain a year, much of it erratic. Cyclones occasionally sweep through in summer, dumping water on a land that usually goes thirsty.

For most of the twentieth century, from 1905 onward, the Hoult family of Denham ran sheep and goats here, holding a pastoral lease that traced back to the 1870s. Livestock and the cats that followed European settlement did what they did across so much of arid Australia: they hollowed out the native fauna until nothing small and furred survived. In 1999 the Hoults sold the lease to the Australian Wildlife Conservancy, and the island's fortunes turned. The conservancy removed the sheep and then set about the harder task of eradicating the cats. They succeeded, and in doing so made Faure, at the time, the third-largest island anywhere on Earth from which feral cats had been completely wiped out. With the predators gone, the island became a blank slate, safe enough to fill again with the animals that belonged.

Guided by those sub-fossil bones, the conservancy began reintroducing the mammals that had once lived here. The boodie, a burrowing bettong that builds warrens like a rabbit. The Shark Bay mouse, a soft-furred native rodent. The banded hare-wallaby, a small striped marsupial that survives in only a handful of places on the planet. The western barred bandicoot, now also known as the Shark Bay bandicoot. One by one, they took hold, and four species went on to establish self-sustaining populations, breeding and spreading without further help. Faure now shelters some of the largest populations of these threatened animals in existence. Not every attempt succeeded; an effort to reintroduce the greater stick-nest rat failed. Restoration is never guaranteed. But on this small red island, animals that had slipped to the edge of extinction are once again digging, breeding, and running free under the stars.

The wildlife above the waterline matters just as much as the mammals below it. Faure is a vital breeding ground for seabirds and a crucial stopover for migratory waders travelling the East Asian–Australasian Flyway, the great aerial highway that links Siberia to the Australian coast. Together with tiny neighbouring Pelican Island, it forms an Important Bird Area of more than 5,800 hectares, home to nesting fairy terns and to more than one per cent of the world's populations of red-necked stints and pied oystercatchers. Offshore, the island guards a secret of the bay itself: the Faure Sill, a vast underwater sandbank stretching from its shores, helps trap and concentrate the salty water that makes possible the ancient living stromatolites of nearby Hamelin Pool. Even the geography here is busy keeping rare things alive.