The Yapurarra people were the traditional inhabitants of this coast, living here for tens of thousands of years before European contact. Settlement arrived for livestock farming in the nineteenth century, and conflict followed. In 1868, a police constable named William Griffis abducted and allegedly raped an Aboriginal woman, then apprehended her husband. Local Aboriginal people freed the man and killed Griffis. In retaliation, government-approved armed squads of local white men spent the next three months killing around 60 Yapurarra people, including children. These massacres drove the Yapurarra from their lands. The harm done then runs through the present. The name Karratha itself is a Ngarluma word meaning 'good country' — a name that carries an irony worth sitting with.

Vast iron ore reserves were discovered across the Pilbara in the 1960s. Railways were built to the coast, ports expanded into industrial zones, and Karratha was constructed from 1968 specifically to house workers. Road and rail causeways connected it to Dampier — no longer a separate island but part of the Burrup Peninsula. Then in the 1980s, the North West Shelf oil and gas field was found offshore, adding another extractive industry to the roster. The workforce model that took hold is called FIFO — fly in, fly out. Workers arrive for a two-week rotation, then fly home for a week. Their families don't move here. The companies don't pay enough for that. They stay in trailer parks and motel-style accommodation. The result is a city with 17,000 people that functions more like a work camp with good infrastructure.

The Burrup Peninsula holds something that the mining town itself cannot match: one of the largest concentrations of ancient petroglyphs on Earth. The Ngarda-Ngarli Aboriginal rock engravings at Murujuga — some older than 47,000 years — are carved into dark red rocks across the peninsula. Human faces, animals, and abstract patterns cover thousands of boulders. A 700-metre boardwalk at Ngajarli, also called Deep Gorge, lets visitors walk among them, and the afternoon light is when the images read most clearly. The site sits within the detached southern portion of Murujuga National Park, open 24 hours and free of charge. Around the engravings, just out of frame in photographs, are the pipes and storage tanks of one of the world's largest liquid natural gas facilities.

Between March and October, on nights around the full moon at spring tide, the Pilbara coast produces a spectacle called the staircase to the moon. The tide goes far out, exposing mudflats ribbed with tiny ripples. The rising moon reflects off the water caught between those ridges, and the effect — viewed from a southeast-facing beach — is of a golden staircase climbing toward the moon across a dark flat sea. Hearson's Cove, just north of the Ngajarli turn-off on the Burrup Peninsula, is the best viewing spot. The Visitor Centre publishes exact times. It is the kind of phenomenon that requires no interpretation, only patience and a clear sky.

Karratha Airport handles several flights daily from Perth — two hours non-stop — via Qantas and Virgin Australia. The terminal is small but modern, with car hire available from the major companies. By road from Perth, the North West Coastal Highway runs north along the coast. Karratha sits 1,535 kilometres from Perth; allow at least 15 hours of driving across largely empty terrain. The coastal road continues east toward Port Hedland, where turtles nest on beaches next to iron ore loading terminals. West lies Exmouth and the Ningaloo Reef, where whale sharks arrive predictably each April.