Naming was how Flinders made the unknown legible, and he often reached for England to do it. Point Culver is a small act of that homesickness, a navigator pinning a familiar shape onto a wholly foreign shore. The resemblance was practical as well as sentimental: pale, distinctive cliffs make superb landmarks from a pitching deck, and a name that called up a coast every British sailor knew helped fix the place in the memory of those who would follow. He was charting this coast on the same voyage that would take him on to name Fowlers Bay and the rest of the southern shoreline within weeks, the first inshore circumnavigation of the continent.

Point Culver marks a beginning. From here the Baxter Cliffs run unbroken eastward for nearly 200 kilometres, a near-continuous rampart of limestone where the land simply ends and drops into the sea, among the longest stretches of sea cliff anywhere on the planet. The walls rise between roughly 60 and 120 metres, sheer and pale, built from Toolinna Limestone laid down some 40 million years ago when this desert edge lay beneath a warm Eocene ocean teeming with the tiny marine creatures whose remains became the stone. To stand at the top is to stand on a fossil seabed, looking down at the living sea that made it.

For all its grandeur, this coast is famously closed. Along the entire cliff line there are only three places where a boat can reach the shore, and Point Culver is one of them, with Toolinna Cove and Twilight Cove the other two. Everywhere else the limestone meets the swell with no beach, no shelter, no way up or down, a wall that has wrecked the unwary and turned back the curious for two centuries. The land behind stayed unexplored long after Flinders sketched it from the water; the first overland parties did not push through to Point Culver until the 1860s, picking their way across the waterless scrub of the Nullarbor fringe to reach a coast that the sea had long since claimed as its own.

The great rampart that begins at Point Culver bears the name of a man who died trying to cross the country above it. The Baxter Cliffs remember John Baxter, an Irishman who came to Australia as a convict and remade himself as an overlander, then signed on as second to the explorer Edward John Eyre. In 1841 the two set out to cross the Nullarbor on foot, an act of grim endurance through some of the driest country on the continent. Near the cliffs, on the night of 29 April, the half-starved expedition fell apart: Baxter was shot dead in a desperate quarrel, and Eyre walked on toward distant Albany with only a young Aboriginal man named Wylie for company, the two of them surviving where the others had not. Baxter never saw the journey's end. The cliffs that carry his name are his memorial, a 200-kilometre headstone of white stone facing the sea.

To reach Point Culver today is still a small expedition. It lies within the Nuytsland Nature Reserve, far from any town, accessible only by a long haul across rough country to a place with no jetty, no railing, no concession to the visitor. The reward is one of the most elemental views in Australia. The Nullarbor runs flat and treeless to the brink, and then the world simply stops, a clean white line where limestone gives way to a vast fall of air and the dark, cold heave of the Southern Ocean. Whales pass below in season; the wind never quite stops; the swell that has been grinding at this coast for ages on end keeps grinding. It is the same view Flinders saw from his deck, the same wall that turned Eyre's party back from the sea, unchanged and indifferent, the edge of a continent meeting the edge of an ocean.