Long before whaling fleets or marine parks, this coast belonged to the Mirning, and it belongs to them still. For the Mirning, the whale is no mere visitor to be watched from a railing; it is a totem and an ancestor, woven into a Dreaming that binds the people to the sea and to the great creatures that return to it each winter. To speak of the people of the whales is not a tourism slogan but a plain description of a relationship that has lasted across more generations than anyone can count, carried in song and story along this edge of the continent. The land around the bay falls within the Yalata Indigenous Protected Area, country of Anangu traditional owners, and the whale-watching site below the cliffs is run together with the community. Visitors, in other words, meet the whales on the Country of the people who have always known them – and that arrangement is part of what makes the place feel less like a viewpoint and more like a welcome.

The Bunda Cliffs that frame the bay are made of pale Wilson Bluff limestone, an ancient seabed laid down as Australia first pulled away from Antarctica, and they form part of the longest unbroken line of sea cliffs on Earth. Their height – sixty to a hundred and twenty metres of sheer white rock – is exactly what makes the viewing so intimate. The whales nurse in the shelter directly below, sometimes so near the base of the cliff that watchers look almost straight down onto the broad backs of mothers and the paler, smaller forms of newborn calves. Females stay for months, far longer than the males, and in a good season more than two hundred calves are born along this coast.

The whales that fill this bay each winter have come an enormous distance to do it. Southern right whales spend their summers in the cold, krill-rich seas near Antarctica, gorging to build the blubber that will sustain them through the breeding season. Then, as the southern winter closes in, they swim north – hundreds upon hundreds of kilometres – to the few sheltered coves scattered along Australia's southern edge. A nursing mother at the head of the Bight may eat almost nothing for months, drawing on her own reserves to feed a calf that drinks rich, fatty milk and grows visibly week by week. By spring the calves are strong enough for the return journey, and the bay slowly empties, the great dark shapes peeling away southward until the following winter calls them back.

Most of the Great Australian Bight is open, exposed, hostile to anything that floats. The head of the Bight is the exception: a pocket of calmer, marginally warmer water at the top of the curve, sheltered just enough that a whale can rest and a newborn can find its strength. That single quality of geography is why the species concentrates here, and why the place has quietly become a measure of the whole population's health – when the count of calves rises or falls, scientists feel it first on this coast. The waters fall within the Far West Coast Marine Park, the protections layered over them and redrawn more than once. But the essential fact is older than any park boundary. The whales chose this bay, long before anyone thought to name or guard it, and they keep choosing it.