Each winter, southern right whales make the Bight one of the most important nurseries on the planet. They come up from the Antarctic to the sheltered water at the Head of the Bight to give birth and to breed, gathering in numbers that can be hard to believe. Through the season, from roughly May into October, mothers nurse their newborn calves in the shallows directly beneath the cliffs. Here is the remarkable part: while they are in the Bight, they barely eat at all. The whales fast through their entire season in these waters, living on the blubber they built up feeding in the far south, returning to the Antarctic only when the calves are strong enough for the journey. The right whales were hunted to the edge of oblivion in the whaling era. Their return to the Bight in such numbers is one of the quiet conservation triumphs of the southern seas.

The whales share these waters with Australian sea lions, one of the rarest sea lions in the world, which haul out on ledges and beaches tucked along the base of the cliffs. For years they were almost impossible to see, hidden a hundred metres below the clifftops, until camera drones began revealing them from above after about 2017. Below the surface, the park protects an astonishing richness of life. Along the deep-water strip it shelters the benthos, the community of the sea floor, alive with red algae, sea squirts, bryozoans, molluscs and echinoderms, many of them found nowhere else on Earth. The reason for the abundance lies in the water itself: here the warm currents drifting from Western Australia meet the cold water of South Australia, and that meeting drives a richness of food that draws life from across the Southern Ocean.

The park's history is a patchwork of expanding care for these waters. The first Europeans to skirt this coast sailed in 1627 on the Dutch vessel Gulden Zeepaert, commanded by François Thijssen and carrying the senior VOC official Pieter Nuyts, for whom the land was named; and later the French explorer Bruni d'Entrecasteaux in 1792 with his ships La Recherche and L'Espérance, named for research and for hope. Whaling and sealing arrived around 1800 and faded by the 1840s as the catches ran out; from 1931 the whales of the region were placed under protection. The modern park grew in stages: a whale sanctuary declared in 1995, broader marine park protections through the later 1990s, and incorporation into a Commonwealth marine reserve in 2012. Today the South Australian waters are overlaid by the Far West Coast Marine Park, stacking state and federal protection to give the Bight close to the strongest safeguards available.

Protection on paper has not gone untested. In recent years, the deep water of the Bight became the target of proposals to drill for oil far offshore, in seas as rough as any on Earth. One company's own worst-case modelling described a blowout spilling tens of thousands of barrels a day for months, a spill on the scale of the Gulf of Mexico's Deepwater Horizon disaster, in the middle of a whale nursery. The plans provoked one of the largest coastal-environment movements Australia has seen, with national polling showing most people opposed. One after another the oil majors withdrew: BP, then Chevron, and finally, in 2020, Equinor abandoned its plans. For now, the calving ground is quiet again, given over to the whales that have used it far longer than any chart has named it.