The Australian sea lion is found in no other country on Earth, and there are perhaps fewer than twelve thousand of them left – among the rarest seals in the world, and listed as endangered. What makes them so vulnerable is hidden in their biology. Unlike almost every other seal, they breed on a strange seventeen-and-a-half-month cycle, neither yearly nor tied to the seasons, with a pregnancy of around fourteen months – the longest of any seal. Pups arrive slowly and infrequently, and the colonies do not even breed in step with one another. A population that recovers this slowly cannot easily afford a single bad decade. Point Labatt is one of the few mainland windows into a species running quietly out of margin.

You watch from above, and that distance is the whole arrangement. The colony sits at the foot of an unbroken wall of cliff that begins here at around sixty metres and climbs to a hundred and thirty-five metres at Cape Radstock to the southeast – the rock a pale calcarenite laid over the deep red granite of the Hiltaba Suite, formed when sea levels settled to their present height some seven and a half thousand years ago. A purpose-built platform, fifty metres up, lets visitors look almost straight down onto the breeding beach without disturbing a single animal. Once, before 1988, people snorkelled with the sea lions in the water below. Now the watching happens from the clifftop, and the beach belongs entirely to the seals.

Watch long enough and the scatter of bodies resolves into a society. Bulls – dark, massive, scarred from fighting – patrol stretches of sand and surf, while paler females rest in clusters with their pups. A mother will leave her pup ashore and head out to sea to feed, sometimes for days, diving deep and far along the continental shelf before returning to a beach full of near-identical youngsters and somehow finding her own by its call and its scent. The pups, meanwhile, gather in loose nurseries, sparring and dozing and venturing into tide pools to learn the water. It is a slow, sunlit, faintly chaotic scene, and the sounds of it – the bleating of pups, the bellow of a challenged bull – carry up the cliff to the people leaning on the rail above.

The land that makes all this possible was given away. For years the country above the colony was grazed farmland, until in 1972 Ron, Myra and Ellen Freeman donated it specifically so the sea lions could be protected. That single act of generosity became the seed of three overlapping reserves – the Point Labatt Conservation Park on the land, the Aquatic Reserve and the West Coast Bays Marine Park in the water below – and earned the headland a place on the national register of important wetlands. Today only two spots in South Australia let you see Australian sea lions easily in the wild: Seal Bay on Kangaroo Island, and this lonely clifftop on the Eyre Peninsula. Both are accidents of geography made permanent by choice – and here, the choice belonged to one family who looked at a beach full of endangered seals and decided to give it to them.