Ningaloo Station spreads across roughly 50,000 hectares of the Gascoyne, about 40 kilometres north of Coral Bay, with Cape Range National Park rising along its northern boundary and Gnaraloo and Warroora stations stretching away to the south. To the west lies the reason anyone remembers the name: Ningaloo Reef, a band of living coral that runs close inshore for hundreds of kilometres, close enough to wade out to. The station offers no luxury — just camp-sites for travellers who want the lagoon, the snorkelling, and the silence. It is a thin strip of working country pinned between a desert mountain range and one of the most biologically rich reefs on the planet, and for a hundred years its business has been wool, water, and weather.

The station has run since at least 1919, when it turned out a modest 33 bales of wool, worked as a partnership between Herbert William Cope and the brothers Douglas and Leslie Black. Good rains in 1923 — 16.5 inches by June — brought heavy lambing and a banner year. A new machine shearing shed and quarters went up that season, built from timber landed off the schooner Geraldton, and although a fire broke out in November it was caught before it could do real harm. Then came the record: more than 9,000 sheep shorn and 215 bales produced by a team of just seven men in three weeks. The Geraldton carried the wool away to Perth. For a remote run with no road to speak of, it was a triumph measured in fleece.

Getting stock to market from this coast was its own ordeal. In 1924 Mr Cope droved more than 1,200 sheep overland to the port at Carnarvon, a journey of twenty-five days across country where water could be found only every second day. That a mob could walk that far, that thirsty, and arrive with only a dozen head lost says as much about the drovers' skill as the animals' endurance. Cope retired and dissolved the partnership that June, leaving the Black brothers as sole owners. Drought, good seasons, and disaster traded places over the decades: the remnants of a cyclone flooded the station in 1945, and in 1953 it was deluged overnight. The Blacks sold to F. Lefroy and M. McBolt in 1937, and the Lefroy name would stay tied to this coast for generations.

By 2008 the fight here was not about wool but about who controlled the shore. The state's Department of Environment and Conservation moved to take over management of the camp-sites strung along the station's coastline, and the Lefroy family — by then holding the lease for more than seventy years — said they were given just five days to hand it over. More than 300 people rallied in protest, tourists and locals alike, unwilling to see the easygoing, low-cost camping they loved swept into bureaucratic control. The government also planned to strip a further 22 kilometres of coastline, some 22,000 hectares, from the station. It was the same argument echoing all along the Ningaloo coast: how to protect a place this precious without erasing the people and the easy access that had long been part of its character.