Twilight Cove marks the eastern limit of the Baxter Cliffs, the point where they finally give way; far off at the western end, Point Culver marks the other. It lies about 26 kilometres south of the Cocklebiddy roadhouse on the Eyre Highway, down rough tracks through the coastal scrub of the Nuytsland Nature Reserve. The cove has carried other names. The local Aboriginal language of the area, recorded as Willilambie, was documented by Daisy Bates, the writer and ethnographer who spent decades among Aboriginal communities across this part of Australia, and an older name for the place was Malbinya. Layers of naming for a shore that few outsiders ever see.

Beautiful as it is, this coast does not forgive carelessness. Like much of southern Western Australia, Twilight Cove is exposed to king waves, the sudden, outsized swells that surge far up rocks and beaches without any visible build-up, sweeping people off ledges that seemed perfectly safe a moment before. The Bight has no shelter here; the Southern Ocean rolls in unobstructed all the way from Antarctica, and the same swell that carved the Baxter Cliffs still hammers this shore. Anyone who reaches the cove is reminded, gently or otherwise, to keep their distance from the water's edge and never to turn their back on the sea.

The cove takes its name from a ship that died here. On the night of 24 May 1877, a fierce gale drove two vessels ashore, the Twilight and the Bunyip, both carrying wire and insulators for the construction of an overland telegraph line. The Twilight, anchored in the cove discharging cargo, was driven onto the beach near midnight and became a total wreck; the loss was reckoned enough material for a hundred miles of line, setting the work back six weeks. Years later, on 31 August 1896, a third ship, the Swift, struck a rock and was wrecked nearby. Through all three disasters, remarkably, every crew member survived. The Swift now lies stranded inland, the coast having marched seaward by roughly three metres a year in the long decades since, leaving the old wreck high and dry above the tideline.

There is nothing easy about Twilight Cove. No facilities, no fuel, no phone signal, just the long approach from the highway and the wide empty curve of the Bight at the end of it. But that is precisely the appeal for the travellers who make the trip: a chance to touch the water along a coastline that mostly refuses to be touched at all, where the cliffs run sheer for hundreds of kilometres and the ocean keeps its distance behind a wall of stone. Here, for a moment, the wall opens. The reward for the rough drive is a remote, wild beach at the seam where the Nullarbor finally meets the sea.