The peninsula honours Francois Peron, a young French naturalist who joined Nicolas Baudin's expedition to Australia in 1800. He had volunteered, the story goes, on the rebound from an unhappy love affair, hoping to study the peoples he met along the way; instead he was assigned to work as a trainee zoologist. When the expedition reached Shark Bay in 1801, Peron made some of the earliest scientific records of the region's wildlife and its first inhabitants. He did not live to see his fame. Peron died in 1810 at just thirty-five, his health broken by tuberculosis, and his colleague Louis de Freycinet finished writing the expedition's official account after his death. His name endures on a peninsula he barely glimpsed.

For a century this was pastoral country. From the late 1880s, Peron Station ran sheep across the peninsula's arid scrub; by 1919 it covered some 263,000 acres divided into 25 paddocks and carried 12,000 sheep. The grazing came at a cost the land could not afford. When the Western Australian government purchased the station in 1990, the peninsula came burdened with a full set of introduced animals, goats, sheep, cattle, rabbits, foxes, and feral cats, that had ravaged the native vegetation and decimated the small marsupials. The land needed not just protection but repair, and the northern reach of the peninsula became Francois Peron National Park, whose Aboriginal name is Wulyibidi.

In 1995 an audacious recovery effort began here, fittingly named Project Eden. A fence was strung across the narrow neck of the peninsula, the Nanga Gate, sealing off the northern park, and an intensive baiting campaign went after the foxes and cats. The plan was to drive out the predators and bring back the native animals European settlement had erased, the bilbies, the bandicoots, the malleefowl. It proved harder than hoped. Of the species reintroduced, only the bilby and the malleefowl took hold for the long term, defeated again and again by the cunning of feral cats. Yet the attempt mattered. Project Eden became a template, honest about both its triumphs and its failures, for the predator-control efforts now reshaping conservation across Australia.

For all its scientific weight, the peninsula is first of all a place of staggering beauty. At Cape Peron and Skipjack Point, the Wanamalu Trail leads to platforms above water so clear that visitors watch dugongs, rays, and sharks glide through the shallows below. Inland, the old Peron Homestead preserves the pastoral past, and beside it sits one of the area's quirkier draws: a hot tub fed by an artesian bore. Because the peninsula lies within the Carnarvon Basin, a vast geological structure with no permanent fresh surface water, settlers drilled deep for it, and the water came up hot, around 35 degrees Celsius, and heavy with salt and minerals. Today travelers soak in that same ancient, mineral-rich water, drawn up from far below the red desert that gives this peninsula its unforgettable face.