The Manbarra are the traditional owners of Great Palm and its sister islands. In their telling, the Palm group was shaped in the Dreaming from the fragments of the Rainbow Serpent, an ancestral being broken apart and scattered across the sea. When James Cook sailed past in 1770 and named these the Palm Isles, perhaps two hundred Manbarra lived here. He sent men ashore who, by his own account, found nothing worth observing and rowed back to the ship. The Manbarra would observe a great deal in the centuries that followed. By the 1890s, the Queensland Government had removed most of them to the mainland, emptying the island of the people who had always known it.

In 1918 a cyclone destroyed the Hull River settlement on the mainland, and its residents were shipped to Palm Island. The reserve had been gazetted in 1914 with a colder purpose in mind: an official had judged the island suitable as a penitentiary, a place to send those the administration wished to punish. So it became. Over the next decades, families were removed here from at least fifty-seven different language groups for offences that were often no offence at all, including simply being of mixed descent. A bell tower governed daily life. It rang at eight each morning to summon everyone to parade, and those who failed to line up had their rations cut. The tower still stands in the square, a plain monument to how completely lives were once controlled.

Resistance ran through this history like a current. In June 1957, seven men, Willie Thaiday, Albie Geia, Eric Lymburner, Sonny Sibley, Bill Congoo, George Watson and Gordon Tapau, led a strike against poverty wages, poor rations and the harsh rule of the superintendent. The spark was an attempt to deport Geia for defying an overseer. For five days the community held firm. Then police arrived from Townsville by RAAF launch, raided the leaders' homes at dawn, and shipped the seven men and their families off the island in chains, scattered to other settlements. Half a century later, in 2007, the Queensland Government formally apologised to the surviving families. The strikers had asked only for dignity, and were punished for it.

On 19 November 2004, a Palm Island man named Mulrunji, known in life as Cameron Doomadgee, was arrested for causing a public nuisance and taken to the watch-house. He was thirty-six. Within an hour he was dead, his ribs broken and his liver torn nearly in two. When the post-mortem findings were read aloud at a public meeting, grief and fury erupted, and the police station, courthouse and an officer's residence burned. A coroner later found a senior sergeant's blows had caused the fatal injuries; a jury acquitted him of manslaughter. In 2016, the Federal Court found the police response to the unrest had been racially discriminatory, and islanders subsequently won a record class-action settlement. Mulrunji's name is spoken on Palm Island still, a man and not a case.

Today around 2,400 people live here, the great majority Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, identifying as Bwgcolman or Manbarra. The community is young and overwhelmingly its own. In 2018 it marked a hundred years since the settlement's founding with the Deadly Didge and Dance Festival, three days of song and ceremony meant not to forget the past but to insist on a future. Elders speak of education, of opportunity, of children who will know both their own languages and their own worth. The island that was chosen as a prison is, to the people who call it home, simply home, held in trust for the community and defended as such.