Groote Eylandt lies about fifty kilometres off the Arnhem Land coast, opposite Blue Mud Bay and some 630 kilometres from Darwin, a low, sprawling landmass of 2,326 square kilometres rising in places to the 219-metre Central Hill. Its traditional owners, the Anindilyakwa, are organised into fourteen clan groups forming two moieties, the kinship halves that govern marriage, ceremony and obligation. Their language is famous among linguists for its sheer complexity; words can run to fourteen syllables, and its grammar was once thought unrelated to any other Aboriginal tongue. Across sandstone shelters all over the island, rock paintings thousands of years old depict turtles, fish, spirit figures, and the high-prowed sailing boats of visitors who came from far across the sea.

Those painted boats were praus, and they belonged to Macassan traders from Sulawesi, in what is now Indonesia. From at least the early 1700s, perhaps far earlier, they rode the monsoon winds south each year to harvest trepang, the sea cucumber prized in the kitchens of southern China. They camped, smoked their catch, and traded with the Anindilyakwa, leaving behind tamarind trees that still grow wild, words absorbed into local speech, and even the name of the community of Umbakumba, from a Malay phrase for the lapping of waves. This was Australia's oldest sustained international trade, and it ran for generations until the White Australia Policy abruptly cut it off in 1906.

European settlement came in 1921, when the Church Missionary Society built a mission at Emerald River. After a cyclone wrecked it in 1943, the mission moved to the Angurugu River. One detail of that mission era reaches, improbably, into every airliner flying today. In 1925, a boy named David Warren was born on the Groote Eylandt mission, the son of a missionary and reputedly the first non-Aboriginal child born on the island. When David was nine, his father died in an aircraft crash over Bass Strait. Decades later, David Warren invented the flight data recorder, the "black box" that listens for the truth inside disasters. It began, in a sense, on this remote shore.

Beneath the western side of the island lies one of the richest manganese deposits on Earth. Mining began on 25 July 1964 under the Groote Eylandt Mining Company, GEMCO, and the company town of Alyangula rose to house its workers. Today GEMCO is run by South32, supplying a significant share of the world's manganese, the metal that hardens steel. The wealth is real, and so is the cost. Royalties have flowed to the Anindilyakwa in the tens of millions, yet much of the community still lives in hardship, and residents have raised alarm about manganese dust and heavy metals in the environment and in their own bodies. The mine is expected to close around 2032, after some sixty-five years, and the island is already planning for what comes next.

The modern story of Groote Eylandt is one of Aboriginal people reclaiming control. Under the Aboriginal Land Rights Act, the island became Aboriginal freehold in 1976, and the Anindilyakwa Land Council, one of only four such bodies in the Territory, now speaks for its owners. The whole island and its waters fall within the Anindilyakwa Indigenous Protected Area. Visitors, once admitted only by permission, are now welcomed to a resort and to some of the finest sport-fishing in the country, where sailfish, marlin and giant trevally run. But permission still matters here, in law and in spirit. This is Ayangkidarrba, and after every navigator, missionary and miner, it remains Anindilyakwa country.