Rinyirru is the second-largest national park in Queensland, sprawling from the shores of Princess Charlotte Bay south toward the little town of Laura. To grasp the scale, the park is larger than Trinidad and Tobago. Through it run the Normanby, Morehead and North Kennedy rivers, threading between more than a hundred permanent lagoons - billabongs that hold their water long after the floodplain dries. In the early morning the lagoons mirror the sky so perfectly that the waterbirds seem to walk on light. Brolgas and the taller, rarer sarus cranes stalk the shallows; magpie geese rise in clattering thousands; black-necked storks - the jabiru - pick through the margins on stilt legs; comb-crested jacanas trot across the lily pads as though the water were solid ground. It is, by any measure, one of the richest gatherings of waterbirds in the country.

Long before any European reached these rivers, this was home. The fertile coastal strip supported numerous Aboriginal clans, and the floodplain is dense with their presence still - occupation sites, ceremonial grounds, and the named places where stories live in the land. This is the country of the Lama Lama and Kuku Thaypan peoples and related clans and families, whose ancestors read these wetlands as a calendar and a larder and a library all at once. The colonial frontier came late and came hard to Cape York, in the 1870s and after. That the descendants of the first people are still here, still connected to this country, is not a footnote. It is the heart of the place.

In 2011 something remarkable happened: the land was returned. More than half a million hectares were transferred to Aboriginal freehold, held by the Rinyirru (Lakefield) Land Trust, and the park was reborn under a category that says its purpose out loud - jointly managed by the Rinyirru Aboriginal Corporation and the Queensland Government as Cape York Peninsula Aboriginal Land. Traditional Owners and rangers now care for the country together, weaving fire management, cultural knowledge and conservation science into a single way of looking after a place. The name change to Rinyirru was part of that return - a word that belongs to the land itself, restored to it.

Rinyirru is crocodile country in the fullest sense, and the park makes no apology for it. Estuarine crocodiles - the largest living reptiles on Earth - patrol these rivers and lagoons, and they have done so since long before there were people to fear them. The rule for visitors is blunt and absolute: do not camp within fifty metres of any water, do not stand at the edge to fish, do not assume the quiet lagoon is empty. This is the price and the privilege of a wetland that still works. There are bush campgrounds scattered through the park and two with showers, at the Kalpowar and Hanns crossings, but everything here runs on respect - for the water, for the crocodile, and for the people whose country this has always been.