The naming was almost an afterthought. Nicolas Baudin first marked the bay as Baie des Saints; then his naturalists François Péron and Louis de Freycinet, working up the charts from the same expedition, renamed it Baie Murat after Joachim Murat, Marshal of France and one of the most flamboyant soldiers of the Napoleonic Wars. The English version simply translates the French. It is a strange inheritance for a stretch of Wirangu country on the underside of the world - a bay carrying the name of a European cavalryman, fixed to the map by sailors who anchored briefly and moved on. Flinders and Baudin had actually met at sea that same year, 1802, two rival nations charting the unknown southern coast almost shoulder to shoulder, trading courtesies while their governments edged toward war.

On the shore of the bay sits Ceduna, the last sizeable town before the Nullarbor swallows the highway. Its name comes from the Wirangu word often rendered chedoona, understood to mean a place to sit down and rest - which is what travellers still do here before the long, treeless crossing west. For years locals simply called the settlement Murat Bay. Only when the railway arrived and labelled its siding Ceduna in 1915 did the older Aboriginal name take hold and stick. Today the town is known for its oysters, pulled from the cold, clean water of the bay and the bays beyond, and for the jetty at Thevenard where grain and gypsum still move out to sea past the same cape the French named for a minister of their navy.

Geography here is a matter of fine print. Murat Bay is the enclosed water bounded by Cape Thevenard and Matts Point; Denial Bay is the broader sound beyond, screened from the open ocean by the low islands of the Nuyts Archipelago. Together with neighbouring Tourville Bay, these shallow, sheltered waters form a recognised Important Bird Area - tidal flats and seagrass beds that draw migratory shorebirds along the southern coast. At low tide the bay drains to a glistening expanse of sand and mud, the kind of edge where wading birds probe and the light goes flat and silver under a very large sky.