The Wessels run in an almost straight line from Buckingham Bay and the Napier Peninsula out into the Arafura Sea, splintering into a procession of slender islands. Marchinbar is the largest. Beyond it lie Guluwuru, Raragala, Rimbija and a scatter of smaller landmasses, many of their bays still unnamed on any chart. This is Yan-nhangu sea country, part of the wider Yolngu world. The Yan-nhangu are saltwater people in the truest sense, their society, religion and language shaped by intimate coexistence with the ocean rather than the land. Their dialect once carried from the Crocodile Islands in the west all the way east to the Wessels. Today only a handful of fluent speakers remain, and the work of keeping the language alive has become its own quiet act of survival.

Morry Isenberg waited thirty-five years before sending his coins to be authenticated. When the results came back in 1979, they were startling: five of the nine were Kilwan, minted in a medieval East African trading empire that dealt in gold, ivory and enslaved people across the Indian Ocean. Before this, only one Kilwa coin had ever surfaced outside Africa, in an excavation in Oman. So how did these reach a beach in northern Australia? Theories range widely. Indian Ocean trade routes linking Africa, Arabia, India and the Spice Islands existed a thousand years ago, and ships, wrecks or even ballast could have carried such coins far. The mystery deepened in 2018, when amateur archaeologist Mike Hermes found another suspected Kilwa coin on nearby Elcho Island. No theory has closed the case.

The European name arrived by way of catastrophe. In April 1636, two small Dutch yachts assembled in the Banda Islands, the Cleen Amsterdam and the Wesel, set out under Gerrit Thomas Pool to chart the unknown southern coasts. Pool was killed on New Guinea eleven days into the voyage. The merchant Pieter Pieterszoon took command, pressed on, and brought back enough of a chart that the islands kept the name of one of the little ships. Nearly two centuries later, Matthew Flinders softened the spelling to Wessel. The thread of names runs strangely tidy here: the German towns of Wesel and Arnhem, which gave their names to these islands and to Arnhem Land, sit barely sixty kilometres apart in Europe.

Behind the navigational charm lies a darker chapter. Through the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, smallpox swept this coast, carried perhaps by Makassan trepang fishermen from the north or spreading down from the First Fleet's arrival in 1788. Whole Yolngu clans were wiped out before Europeans ever settled here. What survives now is a wilderness of cliffs, beaches and clear water, protected as a Commonwealth marine reserve and famed for its biodiversity and endangered species, though the same currents that once brought traders now deliver tides of plastic to its shores. Reaching the Wessels still means a boat from country, or a flight into Gove and a tour from there, into one of the most remote and least-visited corners of the continent.