The Manbarra people, also known as Wulgurukaba, are the traditional owners of the Palm group, which they understand as the scattered fragments of the Rainbow Serpent left in the Dreaming. When James Cook named the islands the Palm Isles in 1770, perhaps two hundred Manbarra lived on Great Palm. We do not know what they called it; that name was lost in the upheavals to come. By the close of the 19th century the island's population had been reduced to around fifty, the Manbarra removed to the mainland by the Queensland Government. The sea country remained, ringed by seven named fringing reefs, but its people had been pulled away from it.

One Palm Island life travelled further than most, and came home only after death. In 1883 a young Manbarra man, Kukamunburra, was taken by an American circus agent and toured through the United States and Europe as a sideshow performer, renamed Tambo. He died of pneumonia in Cleveland in 1884, aged about twenty-one, and his embalmed body was displayed for paying crowds for decades. In 1993 it was found, almost by accident, in a funeral parlour. The anthropologist Roslyn Poignant identified him, and in February 1994 Kukamunburra was at last buried in his own country. The reburial, with traditional rites long suppressed, helped rekindle Manbarra and Bwgcolman identity, a homecoming a hundred and ten years in the making.

War briefly turned the island into something else. In July 1943 the United States Navy built a naval air station at Wallaby Point, on the sheltered water of Challenger Bay, ideal for flying boats. Seabees poured concrete ramps and a parking apron, moored eighteen Catalinas, and built fuel tanks for sixty thousand barrels of aviation gasoline, much of it set on coral aggregate dredged from the reef at low tide. For a season this quiet corner of the Coral Sea hummed with patrol aircraft. Then the war moved north and the men left. The rusting steel rails that once launched the Catalinas, and the submerged wrecks of the aircraft themselves, still rest in the bay, slowly going to coral.

Great Palm sits inside the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, its western waters a Habitat Protection zone and the rest a Conservation zone, where fishing and extraction are limited to keep the reef whole. The island lies in the cyclone belt, and the weather can turn violent: Cyclone Justin lingered near here in 1997, drowning the area in flash floods, and Cyclone Tessi crossed directly over in 2000. Between storms, the volcanic ground throws up mangroves and rainforest, mango and banana and wild plum. Freshwater is scarce enough that islanders built dams, Bamboo Dam high near Mount Bentley and Solomon Dam below, to hold what the wet season delivers.

Great Palm is the only inhabited island in its shire, home to a community of around two thousand, almost entirely Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander. Tourism has come slowly and uneasily, weighed down by the island's hard history, though its rainforest, reef and tropical fish would tempt any traveller. What thrives instead is the life of the place itself: art studios and a knowledge centre, surf lifesavers and boxers, festivals of song and dance. The island carries a reputation it did not earn and is steadily outliving. Seen from the water at dawn, with the mountains catching first light, it asks to be understood as what it has always been to its people, not a paradise lost, but country held.