Warroora sits on the Minilya–Exmouth Road, about 18 kilometres south-east of Coral Bay and 177 kilometres north of Carnarvon, hemmed by neighbours whose names ring through this coast: Ningaloo Station to the north, Gnaraloo to the south, Minilya to the south-east. The camping is deliberately raw. Sites scatter along the shore at places called 14 Mile, Sandy Point, The Lagoon, Black Moon Cliff, and Elle's Beach, reached by soft-sand tracks that demand a high-clearance four-wheel drive with the tyres let down. There is no water on site and no rubbish collection; whatever you carry in, you carry out. The Horak family, who acquired Warroora in 1994, have run it with a light touch ever since, and the absence of infrastructure is what keeps the place feeling like the edge of the map.

Before it was a cattle station, Warroora was a lifeline. The land once formed part of Minilya Station under George Julius Brockman, who prized this coastal country for a single reason: milkbush, a hardy native shrub that could keep sheep alive through the driest seasons on almost no water. When the inland runs failed, Brockman shifted his flocks here, and the milkbush carried them. In 1906 H. G. Lefroy bought the property — 280,000 acres of what the records bluntly called 'virgin country' — having a schooner, the Rescue, slated to land fencing wire the following year. He stocked it with 2,000 ewes from Brick House Station, and by 1908 the run was already turning out 84 bales of wool.

Out here, everything turns on water, and Warroora's story is partly a story of bores. When Percy St. Barbe Ayliffe and H. R. Read bought the station from Lefroy in 1922, it ran 13,000 sheep across 271,000 acres. Within three years they had divided it into eleven paddocks and sunk a single bore that reached water at 1,780 feet below the surface — and that one shaft poured out a million imperial gallons a day, enough to supply seven paddocks. In a landscape where rain is an event and evaporation is relentless, that buried river was the difference between a viable run and abandoned ground. The station's later turn from sheep to cattle, and from wool to wilderness tourism, all rests on that same hard-won groundwater.

The lagoon at Warroora looks gentle, but this coast asks for respect. In 2013 a couple holidaying here drowned; the woman's body was recovered soon after, the man's a week later at Elle's Beach. The reef that makes the snorkelling glorious also funnels currents that can catch the unwary, and the remoteness that draws people means help is hours away. The same year-after-year tension between access and protection plays out in policy too. In 2015 the station owners had to renegotiate their pastoral lease, with the state excising sections of land along the World Heritage–listed Ningaloo Coast for conservation and tourism — the recurring bargain of this entire shore, where wild beauty and human use are forever being re-drawn on the same map.