The drama is geological. The peninsula's red dunes are old inland sand, stained by iron, marching right to the lip of low cliffs. Below them the Shark Bay shallows glow with seagrass and clean white sand. From the clifftop lookouts at Skipjack Point, near Cape Peron, the water is so clear that the wildlife becomes a spectacle in itself. Patient watchers see manta rays glide past in slow formation, sharks cruising the drop-off, sea turtles surfacing for air, and the grey shapes of dugongs drifting over the grass. Inland, the flat plains are pocked with birridas, ghost-white clay pans that were once salt lakes, ringed with crusted gypsum. A high-clearance four-wheel drive and deflated tyres are the price of admission to the soft sand tracks that lead out to Bottle Bay and Big Lagoon.

For all its wildness, this land was worked hard. From the early 1900s the Peron Peninsula was a pastoral lease, Peron Station, where sheep grazed the fragile arid scrub. In 1922 station hands drilled an artesian bore, and three windmills pumped hot water from deep underground to nine watering points across the run. That same scalding bore still feeds an open-air tub at the old homestead, where visitors now soak in geothermal water that once kept the flocks alive. Decades of grazing, and the foxes, cats, and rabbits that came with European settlement, stripped the country of much of its native life. In 1990 the state government bought the lease, and in 1993 the land was gazetted as a national park, ending the era of sheep and beginning something far more unusual.

What followed was one of Australia's most ambitious experiments in restoration. Launched in 1995, Project Eden set out to do something close to impossible: turn back the ecological clock on an entire peninsula. When Baudin's French naturalists arrived in 1801, Shark Bay held 23 species of native mammal. By 1990, fewer than half remained, lost to grazing, rabbits, foxes, and feral cats. The peninsula's narrow neck made it defensible, so conservationists built a barrier fence, the Nanga Gate, and waged a relentless campaign of baiting against foxes and cats. Then, one species at a time, they tried to bring the lost animals home. Six were reintroduced. The work is slow, stubborn, and often heartbreaking: foxes were driven out, but cats proved tenacious, and several reintroductions failed even as bilbies and malleefowl took hold. Project Eden never restored the full menagerie, but it helped pioneer a model now used across Australia: protect the ground, then rebuild the wild upon it.

The park carries a French name from an age when France was racing Britain to claim this coast. François Péron was the zoologist aboard Nicolas Baudin's expedition, which spent seventy days charting Shark Bay in 1801. Péron was a driven, often exhausting man, and his shipmates left their names across the whole peninsula: Cape Lesueur for the expedition's brilliant young artist, and other capes and lakes for the French era. Long before the naturalists arrived, and long after the sheep departed, this has remained Malgana country. Wulyibidi endures beneath every European label, the oldest and truest name for a place where the desert spills into one of the most luminous seas on Earth.