Gnaraloo occupies a thin, dramatic margin of Western Australia. The homestead sits on rising ground about 500 metres back from the sea, with roughly 65 kilometres of coastline at its feet and the salt expanse of Lake MacLeod some 16 kilometres inland to the east. To the south lie Red Bluff and the Quobba homestead. This is dry country — barely 200 millimetres of rain in an average year, most of it arriving between May and July, against an annual evaporation rate around fourteen times that. When the rare deluges come, they come hard: in 1953 the station was drowned under 155 millimetres of rain in just two days. The reward for the harshness is the water itself, clear and warm, guarded by the long fringing line of Ningaloo Reef just offshore.

The lease has changed hands many times, and each owner left a name in the ledgers. Donald Fleming pioneered the run with his partner Arthur Nicol and called it 'Flemington.' By 1908 it covered 90,000 acres; under Frank Mottram in 1910 it ran about 1,500 sheep, a flock that nearly tripled within a year. Mottram sold to Dansy Powell and Harry Cordes in 1921, by which point the station spanned 190,000 acres with twelve paddocks, nine wells, and a stone-kitchened homestead. The Fleming family eventually regained it outright and held on until 1975. Paul Richardson bought Gnaraloo in 2005, and in 2025 it was put up for sale, its famous surf break listed alongside the wool sheds — a reminder that out here, romance and real estate have always shared a fence line.

Each summer, female loggerhead turtles haul themselves up Gnaraloo's beaches in the dark to dig nests above the tideline — and Gnaraloo Bay shelters one of the largest loggerhead rookeries on Earth. In 2008 the station launched the Gnaraloo Turtle Conservation Program, working under the state's Department of Environment and Conservation, with volunteers patrolling daily through the entire nesting season from November to February. A year later a feral-animal control program was added, because foxes and feral cats raid nests and devour hatchlings before they ever reach the water. The work has been recognised: in 2010 Gnaraloo took the Environment Protection category at Keep Australia Beautiful's Clean Beach Awards, honoured for protecting the critically endangered turtles that nest along its sand.

Gnaraloo sits hard against a UNESCO World Heritage area, and that proximity keeps it at the centre of arguments about what this coast is for. In 2015 the owners had to renegotiate their pastoral lease with the state, which carved out sections of land along the World Heritage–listed Ningaloo Coast for conservation and tourism. In 2021 came a new debate, as concerns were raised over a proposal to build wind turbines and solar panels on the ecologically sensitive site. The tension is the same one that has shadowed the whole Ningaloo coast for a generation: how to keep a place wild while letting people live, work, and visit there. At Gnaraloo, the question is still open.