Five main islands make up the group — Vanderlin, North, West, Centre and South West — strung across roughly 2,100 square kilometres of sea and land off the Northern Territory coast. Vanderlin is the giant of them, thirty-two kilometres long and thirteen wide. They lie at the mouth of the McArthur River, where the freshwater of the Gulf country finally meets saltwater, and the shallows between the islands and the mainland hold extensive seagrass beds. Those meadows feed dugong and sea turtle, which is why this stretch of coast has fed people for millennia. Rock formations rise from some of the smaller islands; mangroves crowd the channels; the light off the water is hard and bright.

Most of the islands are Yanyuwa country, part of Wurralibi Aboriginal Land, and some are still lived on, full- or part-time. The Yanyuwa call themselves li-Anthawirriyarra, people of the sea, and their knowledge of this place is carried in kujika — songlines that thread island to island, naming reefs and currents and the deeds of ancestral beings. The Dugong Hunter songline runs through this very water, holding the skill of the maranja, the dugong and turtle hunters of excellence who once worked these beds from bark canoes and dugouts. This is not heritage in the past tense. It is a way of knowing the sea that elders have worked, in recent decades, to record before it is lost — drawing, writing and singing it down for the generations coming after.

The European record here is a string of near-misses and misreadings. In 1644 the Dutch navigator Abel Tasman saw the group, took it for part of the mainland, and called it Cape Vanderlin after one of his ships — a name that stuck to the largest island. Long before and long after that, fishermen from Macassar in Sulawesi came each year to harvest trepang, the sea cucumber prized in Chinese kitchens, and processed it on these shores well into the early twentieth century. They left stone fireplaces, scattered artefacts, and tamarind trees grown from the seeds in their food scraps — living markers of a trade that linked this remote coast to Asia centuries before Flinders ever arrived.

North Island holds the small Barranyi (North Island) National Park, where free campsites sit near Paradise Bay with drinking water and barbecues. Just north-east, three tiny islands — Pearce, Urquhart and Hervey — form an Important Bird Area, identified by BirdLife International as a breeding ground for thousands of terns that wheel above the sea in season. Across the whole group, visitors can negotiate with traditional owners to camp and fish. That arrangement reflects a hard-won fact: in 1977 the Yanyuwa lodged the country's first claim under the Aboriginal Land Rights Act, and over the decades that followed these islands were returned to them — the last few small ones not until 2015, the law catching up at last with what the Yanyuwa had always known to be true.