The Ngaro were the original people of the Whitsundays, and Hook Island holds the evidence most plainly. The site at Nara Inlet is the oldest known indication of Aboriginal occupation in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, part of a presence in these islands stretching back at least nine thousand years. The middens in the cave, layers of discarded shell and bone, show the inlet was in steady use across the centuries, a sheltered place to camp and to work the surrounding reef. To stand where the rock art was made is to understand that the Whitsundays were never empty wilderness waiting to be found. They were home, navigated by canoe and held in memory long before any European chart gave them names. The cave is now reached by a short walking track from the anchorage, with displays that let visitors learn the story from the Ngaro point of view.

Hook is the second-largest island in the Whitsundays, and its shape surprised the first surveyors, who mapped it wrong. It runs in three long fingers, more like a piece of the Greek Peloponnese than anything tropical. Two of those fingers cradle the island's signature feature: the Nara and Macona inlets, fjord-like recesses that knife deep into the southern coast. Steep forested walls rise straight from still water, and the inlets make some of the most protected anchorages in the whole archipelago. When the trade winds blow hard across the open passage, the Whitsunday charter fleet ducks into Nara and Macona and lies quiet. On the island's northern coast the attraction turns underwater, where colourful coral draws snorkellers and divers to gardens growing in the clear shallows.

Hook Island has collected its share of odd footnotes. In December 1964, a Frenchman named Robert Le Serrec photographed what he claimed was a giant tadpole-shaped sea monster, twenty-four metres long, lurking in Stonehaven Bay. The pictures travelled the world. They were almost certainly a hoax. Le Serrec had told acquaintances years earlier that he had a sea-serpent scheme in reserve to make money, and in the photographs sand appears heaped along the creature's edges, exactly as you would weight down a monster-shaped sheet of plastic. Two years after the photographs, in 1966, a more earnest attraction opened: the Hook Island Underwater Observatory, a submerged viewing chamber for watching the reef without getting wet. It closed in 2010 after an assessment found the chamber poorly ventilated.

For a long time the only place to stay on Hook was the Hook Island Wilderness Resort, the cheapest on-land accommodation in a group otherwise priced for the wealthy. It was a budget traveller's foothold in an expensive paradise. The resort closed in February 2013, and its buildings slid into dilapidation, occupied now only by caretakers and security staff while visitors are kept to the beach below the high-water mark. The island returned, in effect, to the condition it has held for most of its existence: wild, steep, and largely empty. Plans for a new eco-resort have surfaced since, but for now Hook belongs to the yachts sheltering in its inlets, the divers over its northern reefs, and the ancient quiet of the cave at Nara.