Coral Coast Coast Australia

This has been Coast's biggest expedition ever.

We've come to Australia.

A country so dramatically defined by its ancient and diverse coastline.

With stories of a resourceful people

shaped by the tyranny of distance

and the extremes of climate and scale.

There's been a rich coastal culture here

for at least the last 50,000 years.

The true marvel of this coast is its power to inspire the imagination.

Any wonder that most Australians

choose to live along their dazzling coastline

and revel in its infinite horizons.

I'm on the cusp of West Australia's wild, remote

and famously wind-ruled Coral Coast.

It's a coastline that's blessed with

outrageously beautiful natural wonders.

But peel beneath the picture-perfect facade

and I'm told it also harbours some very dark secrets.

Joining me on this splendid adventure,

Dr Xanthe Mallett investigates the first European tragedy

on Australian soil in 1629.

So, all of this was the mass graves?

Three-billion-year-old life with Professor Tim Flannery.

These black rocks, they're not just rocks.

They're some of the oldest living things on our planet.

Dr Emma Johnston

up close with a 60-million-year-old fish.

And I'm tracing the mystery of a lost Australian battleship.

And why does no-one get off of Sydney alive?

This is Coast Australia.

In this episode, our journey runs from Wedge Island in the south,

across to the Houtman Abrolhos Islands,

up to Shark Bay, Carnarvon

and the remote North West Cape.

60 kilometres off the coast of Geraldton,

the Houtman Abrolhos are a cluster of 122 islands.

Named after a 17th-century Dutch explorer, Frederick de Houtman,

their featureless isolation

has deterred all but a hardy community of cray fishermen

and the occasional yachting tourist.

Historically, though, the Abrolhos are known for

a bizarre tale of murder and madness.

-Jeff.

-Hi, Xanthe. Welcome.

-Hello.

Anthropologist Dr Xanthe Mallett is starting out from Geraldton

to investigate a macabre tale of three men and a bloodbath

that took place 140 years before Captain Cook

first set eyes on Australia.

400 years ago, the spice trade was the resources boom of the time.

The Dutch East India Company

was the most wealthy and powerful institution in the world,

thanks to its control of the legendary Spice Islands

in modern-day Indonesia.

In 1628, the company's newly-commissioned Batavia

set sail from Holland to its eastern headquarters in Java.

By June 1629, it was sailing off the coast of western Australia

when disaster struck.

The Batavia hit a reef and was wrecked, with 40 lives lost.

Another 280 made it to land,

mostly here on the Abrolhos' Beacon Island.

Enter our first character, Commodore Francisco Pelsaert.

Having survived the loss of his ship,

Pelsaert now faces the grim reality of a barren outcrop

with no fresh water for his marooned charge

of soldiers, men, women and children.

He had to act quickly.

Cast off forward. Let's have the jib up.

OK, we've just got a gentle breeze.

With 48 desperate passengers in a longboat exactly like this one,

Pelsaert heads out in search of water, or so he claims.

I'm with modern-day mariner Jeff Brooks,

a Geraldton local and guardian of this historical replica.

You know the story of Pelsaert as well as anybody.

What do you think his thoughts were as he rowed off,

you know, into the distance, leaving all of those people...

-Mm!

-..on...on that island.

There's a lot written about it. Um...

-They were saving their skins. They were.

-Do you think?

-Absolutely.

If you're going sailing to the mainland to look for water,

which is what they were doing, why would you take 48 people?

The boat was already overloaded.

Be that as it may, they make an epic 1,700 kilometre journey

to Java in terrible conditions.

-They were at sea for quite a long time.

-Yeah, 30 days roughly.

That's a long time to be here, isn't it?

Yes. Not a lot of privacy. Not a lot of comfort.

A lot of salt water boils and the boat would have leaked.

Because all boats at that time leaked.

That was nothing compared to what was happening back on the islands.

With no water and little food, the second man in this story,

Jeronimus Cornelisz, steps up and begins a reign of terror.

I've come to Beacon Island to piece together a gruesome jigsaw

with the help of Jeremy Green, a leading maritime archaeologist

who pioneered excavations of the Batavia wreck

and has been studying its history for 40 years.

Jeronimus Cornelisz, who is the really

baddy, baddy person of this whole story,

came late off the vessel and he was then the most senior person.

And he had been involved in this fermenting mutiny

that was taking place before they were wrecked.

What was the mutineers' plan?

I think they were concerned that the food would run out.

So they wanted to reduce the number of people.

What happened in the beginning is they had a lot of sick people

and people who were weak and not able to do anything.

They were killed and buried rather quickly and clandestinely.

They then had another problem, the mutineers,

is they had a group of soldiers.

And the soldiers were extremely well organised, they were well-armed,

and for the mutineers, they were a real nightmare

because, you know, they were not likely to be able to overpower them.

The biggest challenge for the mutineers was their leader,

a young, determined soldier named Wiebbe Hayes,

our third and final character.

With covert killings under way,

somehow, Cornelisz manages to disarm and despatch Wiebbe Hayes

and his soldiers to West Wallabi Island.

Ostensibly, to look for water.

Was the hope that they would actually die over there?

Yes, that was the general idea.

After that happened, they then started to openly kill people.

So people who didn't behave themselves were killed.

In a grisly bout of medieval Hunger Games,

throats are slit, skulls bashed in.

115 people brutally murdered by Cornelisz and his mutineers.

In 1994, Jeremy started excavating and uncovered graves.

Previous graves were found and then we found this mass grave.

Um...there was a pit which, I suppose...

Well, you can see from that, that thing there...

This hole here would have been about three metres in diameter.

-So, all of this was the mass graves, but bodies are not here now?

-No.

This is typical of the mass graves that you see in Kosovo et cetera,

the kind of, um... Just all the bodies thrown in together.

This speaks very much to that clandestine, kind of covert burial.

-Yes.

-Lack of respect and probably foul play.

Yes, exactly.

A survivor of this orgy of rape and murder

swims over to West Wallabi Island to alert the soldiers.

I've come to West Wallabi with an Abrolhos local, known as Spags,

who's going to show me a remarkable historical site.

This is the area where Wiebbe Hayes, the soldier, set up his camp.

One of the survivors from over on the other island

managed to get over here and warn Wiebbe Hayes what had happened.

So that's when he, um... started fortifying things,

so that if they were attacked, they had a chance of surviving.

-And were they attacked?

-Yes, apparently they were, yeah.

This is an extraordinary structure,

built one and a half centuries

before the British established a colony in Australia.

Well, it was built in 1629, so, um...

Yeah, it's the oldest European building in Australia.

Wiebbe came here to find water. Did they find any?

-Yes.

-Which is lucky, really, otherwise they were in trouble.

Cornelisz and his gang then launched several attacks

on Wiebbe Hayes and his loyalist soldiers.

Just then, what should appear over the horizon, but a rescue ship.

Having made it to Java, Pelsaert was ordered to return to the Abrolhos

to rescue the survivors and cargo.

Pelsaert had arrived in the rescue vessel, the Sardam,

and appeared on the scene right when the battle's taking place.

So they obviously all looked around, "Oh, my God, Pelsaert's here,"

or, "The rescue vessel's here! Let's go!"

And the mutineers wanted to capture the rescue vessel

and Wiebbe Hayes wanted to warn Pelsaert what had happened.

It was a desperate boat race.

Wiebbe Hayes got there first and the story goes on from there.

If Wiebbe Hayes hadn't have got there first,

we would have had another story.

-So he's the real hero of the story.

-Oh, absolutely.

About the only one in the whole story!

Gang leader Cornelisz was executed on the Abrolhos by hanging.

Pelsaert returned to Java,

but his reputation was damaged for abandoning his ship,

its cargo and his passengers,

and within a year, had died of natural causes.

As for Wiebbe Hayes, the Dutch East India Company

sent him back to Amsterdam a wealthy man,

an officer and standard bearer for the army.

So this story isn't really about a shipwreck.

It's the classic tale of good versus evil.

Of a hero versus a villain.

And it culminated in a boat race,

the outcome of which decided the fate of 140 people.

Whether they lived or died.

And whether this story was ever going to be told.

Coming to wild places like this makes me wonder

what kind of people are drawn to such an isolated setting?

And does this strip of beach and ocean

function as much as a test of mettle as a playground?

Novelist and long-time local Tim Winton

has written that West Coasters live in the teeth of the wind.

And that's a sentiment that will chime with coastal dwellers

in many different parts of the world.

But maybe there's more to it than that.

Because you can detect in his words just the hint of a challenge.

It's a proud declaration of humankind's ability

to adapt to and to overcome unruly weather.

Welcome to Wedge Island.

Well, not so much an island as the tip of an isolated peninsula.

A shack community three hours south of Geraldton

and happily far away from everywhere else.

The locals first arrived as squatters on crown land in the '30s.

During World War II, government policy

was to move everyone off this coast in case of invasion.

And the shacks were used for target practice.

Soon after, the fishermen and farmers returned

to slap together their fishing and holiday shacks

out of whatever was to hand in the best Do-It-Yourself tradition.

For example, Noddy White and his 40-year-old pad.

-My humble abode.

-I love it!

-This is the first half.

-This suits me.

-Just this room.

-Right, so this is the first bit? Fantastic!

And like you say, you had to bring all this stuff?

Yes. Everything on trailers over sand track.

'Back then, off the highway, it was a hard couple of hours' drive

'over 36 kilometres of very rough tracks.

'Now it's 10 minutes on a sealed road.'

It was all recycled or second hand when it came here 40 years ago.

And some of this tin on there would be over 100 years old.

No!

Look at the electrics.

-Yes, we've got a few of those.

-Yeah.

The community here, I suppose to come into it,

you'd have to be the sort of person

who can muck in and get on with people.

There's always been that togetherness.

You know, like, community.

And kids look after other kids.

You never worried about your kids up here.

You know, it's...

I want to be carried out of here. I'll spend the rest of my days here.

There's room for all sorts here on what is still crown land.

With no running water, no mains electricity, no shops.

It's self-sufficient, off the grid.

Maybe an expression of Australia's anti-authority egalitarian spirit.

-Hello.

-Hey, Neil!

-Hello!

-How are you, mate?

The scatter of 350 shacks

squat behind another endless windswept beach.

Great for surfing, although some locals earn their living here, too,

such as cray fisherman Steven Dawe.

-How are you doing, Steven?

-Good day, Neil.

-Any luck?

-Not that good.

-Not that good?

-Nah. It's the worst we've done for a while.

Really? Oh!

But still, there's probably 2,500 worth of crayfish there.

Really? What is it about crays?

Is that just the best thing to go for here?

Oh, we've been into it for years.

My old man was a fisherman and my uncle's a fisherman and...

It's always the crayfish, that's the thing to go for?

Yeah. Well, they're worth a lot of money.

The most valuable fish on the coast, just about.

-This place, Wedge, is your livelihood?

-It is.

-Where I'd be without it, I don't know.

-Right.

You guys have done that before, haven't you?

While Steve and son head off to market, back in the community...

Well, not much is happening.

Except for Steve's wife, Helen,

who's busy with a rather unique hobby.

What you doing, Helen?

Oh, hello. Just tanning some skins.

-Right.

-Fish skins.

-Fish skins?

-Yeah.

-Oh!

So I've just taken them out of the bath.

What kind of fish is that?

This was a dhufish.

-Right.

-So that's one side of it.

-Oh, wow!

Oh, it's weird!

-It's like rubber.

-Yeah, it feels a bit like rubber.

-Very strong.

-Very strange, yeah.

-And it's a big... It's come off a big animal.

-Yeah.

So, what do you have to do to that before it's usable?

I have to take all the scales off.

And I do that by hand, just flicking them off, which is a bit messy.

What can you make fish leather into?

-I've used it, er...to make a dress once.

-Really?

I had, like, black suede and it had leather panels down the side of it.

-Uh-huh. Yeah.

-Um...handbags, wallets.

So I use the floor because, um...

-because it's old jarrah, it nails in well.

-OK.

Otherwise, I'd have to have a wooden frame. So this is easy.

And whose shack is this that we're nailing fish skins onto?

This is our shack, but this is where our daughter sleeps.

What do you think it is about this place?

I think probably to me, it's very...

It's like a romantic freedom.

We enjoy the best things in life, I think.

Like, the best food, the freshest food.

But at the same time, life's really simple.

Retreating from the heat of the land or the noise of the city,

the shack-dwellers of Wedge Island

have adapted to this magnificently untamed strip of coast

with a loving hand and a light footprint.

Red Bluff is a remote part of the Coral Coast,

130 kilometres north of Carnarvon.

Bizarrely, it was here that 57 German seamen turned up

in a crowded lifeboat in 1941.

Throwing their weapons in the water, they claimed they were responsible

for what is still Australia's worst naval disaster.

I'm here to examine the mystery

that's shrouded those events ever since.

1941, and Europe is consumed by war.

In Australia, in February, HMAS Sydney had returned a hero

after an illustrious campaign in the Mediterranean.

"Here's a story of heroes' homecoming

"after months in the European warzone.

"HMAS Sydney with her crew complete.

"But in all the actions which she fought,

"not a single casualty was sudden."

The Sydney and her 645 sailors

were now to be deployed on the seemingly-safer mission

of convoy-escort and home patrol.

But already in Australian waters, there were suspected Nazi raiders.

German war vessels pretending to be harmless merchant ships.

The HSK Kormoran, under Captain Theodor Detmers,

had been in the Indian Ocean for months,

armed and in disguise.

On the afternoon of 19th November,

100 nautical miles off the Western Australian coast,

the Sydney's captain, Joseph Burnett,

sighted what appeared to be a merchant ship.

I'm going to meet Wes Olson, a train driver by day

and one of the great writers and researchers on the subject,

so I can find out exactly what happened out there at sea

that evening of November, 1941.

-Hi, Wes.

-Hiya, Neil.

-How you doing?

Oh, I see you've come fully armed. So, which is which?

Well, this model represents HMAS Sydney.

Her main role is trade protection.

To protect merchant shipping plying these waters,

protecting this coastline.

And this model represents HSK Kormoran.

'Kormoran's job is to sink those merchant ships.

'She's loaded with mines and well armed.

'But nothing like Sydney.'

She's a warship. Sydney carries eight six-inch guns

mounted in the four turrets.

Kormoran's broadside is only four 5.9-inch guns.

-So one here...

-Uh-huh.

-One in the hold there,

another one in the hold here, another one under this flap here.

Right, so they're in disguise. They're...

Before the battle, those flaps are down.

-If you turn the ship over, the other side.

-Oh, right.

That's how she would have appeared to Sydney

before the Germans declared identity.

To all intents and purposes, she looks like a harmless merchant ship.

-But she's anything but.

-That's right.

Then, Sydney's Captain Burnett

signals the Kormoran to identity itself.

The German ship turns away and claims to be a merchant ship.

With no guns in sight on the Kormoran, Burnett is left guessing.

According to his shipping plot,

there shouldn't be any ship in the area.

So he has to be extremely suspicious.

It appears to be a bogus ship claiming the identity of another ship.

It can only be two things.

A raider or possibly the raider's supply ship.

But Detmers had an ace up his sleeve.

He would have known that Burnett had to identify his vessel.

If he'd tipped his hand by opening fire,

even at extreme range or moderate range,

he's telling Burnett, the enemy ship, what he is, a raider.

But he didn't do that. He kept his nerve.

Burnett is under instruction from Britain

to board raider or supply vessels,

so he continues to move in closer.

A fatal error of judgment.

The Kormoran is no match for the Sydney.

Detmers knows one way or another that he has already lost his ship.

It's life and death for the Kormoran.

They've got 360 contact mines on board.

Another 30 magnetic mines.

Just one shell in there, even if it's six inch, four inch, doesn't matter.

One shell and it's goodbye.

He waited till Sydney got to such a position

that he could use all his weapons to maximum advantage.

Do you think Burnett assumed that the Kormoran

either would not or simply could not open fire?

We would have to assume that.

Finally, the Kormoran raises her Nazi flag and fires on Sydney

with everything she's got.

Critically, the first hits are on Sydney's bridge,

the director control tower. It's the nerve centre.

Control, the gunnery.

So everything's lost in those first few seconds of the battle.

Captain Burnett and his senior officers are killed.

Are we talking minutes before the Sydney is so badly damaged?

We're looking at three to four minutes.

Devastated though Sydney is, she has nonetheless

done enough damage to Kormoran to finish her, as well?

She got in some hits, some critical hits, caused a fire.

So that effectively stopped Kormoran,

but she did not get that lucky hit. She didn't get the mines.

Detmers' tactics had won.

So he first of all outthought Burnett and then he outgunned him.

That's right.

As the Kormoran sinks,

the Germans take to the lifeboats and most survive.

But the Sydney goes down with all 645 sailors lost.

And why does no-one get off of Sydney alive?

I mean, there's lifeboats.

The upper decks have been swept with shellfire, cannon fire.

Most of those boats have been damaged in the battle.

Back on the mainland, the first people knew of this terrible battle

was when five German lifeboats were picked up at sea.

Two other lifeboats reached this coast. One at Red Bluff.

315 Germans survived, but theirs was the only account of the battle.

The Australian government was slow to announce the disaster

and refused to release details of the German account

for another 16 years.

With no corroborative information,

there was a suspicion of deception that lingered for decades.

Conspiracy theories and hoaxes flourished

until 2008, when both wrecks were discovered and surveyed,

proving the original German story.

Ha-ha! That's it!

That's HMAS Sydney.

The wrecks lie off this coast,

80 nautical miles or so in that direction.

And they're under 2.5 kilometres of water.

No human being can dive so deep.

So the wreck site is inaccessible to the loved ones of the lost men.

These haunting images tell of Sydney's final moments.

While those aboard desperately fought to save her,

her bow was hit by a torpedo and broke off.

It was a catastrophic end.

Sydney now lies deep on the ocean floor.

Silent and alone with her ghosts.

At the westernmost tip of Shark Bay,

one island stretches out with a curious history.

In 1616, Dutch Captain Dirk Hartog

was the first European to set foot in Western Australia.

He left an engraved pewter plate on this island,

which now bears his name,

and then carried on north to the Spice Islands.

80 years later, Flemish Captain Willem de Vlamingh passed by

and replaced the plate with one of his own.

The French then annexed the island in 1772,

marked by a couple of coins.

But for all that, no Europeans took root in Western Australia

until Major Edmund Lockyer claimed it for the British in 1826.

Aboriginal history in Shark Bay dates back 30,000 years,

but an unique life form has lived in these waters

continuously for billions of years.

Palaeontologist Professor Tim Flannery

investigates what makes this World Heritage site

so very important to all of us.

It hardly ever rains and the summer heat can be extreme,

but Shark Bay is a site of international historical

and ecological significance.

And it all boils down to salt.

This water's as warm as a bath.

Oh! And it's intolerably salty.

That makes it a hostile environment for most living things.

But there's one thing that thrives here.

These black rocks. Well, they aren't really rocks,

they're some of the most primitive living things on the planet.

They're called stromatolites.

And in effect, they're living fossils.

I'm meeting Dave Holley,

who looks after the Shark Bay Marine Park, to learn more.

Hi, Dave. Great to meet you.

Hi, Tim. Nice to meet you, mate.

Well, they look a bit like a cross between a cauliflower and a rock.

And if we have a look at one, you can see a dome

on a bit of a column, basically.

So they're quite unique-looking.

What actually creates them?

It's a really simple life form. It's called arcaya.

And it's been around for billions of years.

3.5 billion years, in fact.

Evolutionary life began with colonies of bacteria.

Like the ones that created these stromatolites.

Basically, what happens is this organism

binds sediment in the water and creates a mucus.

This mucus traps the sediment,

a reaction occurs with the super-salty water

and it creates a limestone.

So over time, it creates this layer called a stromatolite.

And you can really see that algal layer there now.

Yeah. Trapping that sediment within it.

-Yes.

-Binding it and creating those layers which build up...

-Yeah.

-..over time.

So for billions of years, these things dominated the planet.

And yet today, we can only find them in a couple of places.

So, what's so special about Shark Bay?

Shark Bay, in Hamelin Pool, where we're standing now,

is critical because of that super-salty water.

A sill, or barrier in the bay,

coupled with a hot, dry climate and shallow waters

mean that the evaporation rate is very high.

The resulting hypersaline water is twice as salty as the sea.

What happens is that predators

which would normally graze upon the organisms within the stromatolites

can't stand that super-salty water.

So that allows the stromatolites to grow and develop.

For three quarters of Earth's history,

the only creatures that were building reefs in the world's oceans

were the stromatolites.

And as they built, they produced a peculiar by-product.

One that we can all be thankful for.

See any bubbles coming off it?

-Is that oxygen?

-Yeah.

-That's still slimy, so it's alive.

-Yep.

Three billion years ago,

Earth's atmosphere was about 1% oxygen. So not much.

And they produce oxygen. So the air we breathe today,

which is around about 20-21% oxygen,

is as a result of these structures pumping oxygen into the atmosphere

over many millions and billions of years.

They're sort of the model, aren't they, that scientists use

-when they think about searching for life on other planets.

-Absolutely.

I mean, you know, if the conditions

were such as they were here three billion years ago

and we found structures like this,

then there'd be a good chance life, at some point, would follow.

Incredible to think what a little more salt in the water can do.

900 kilometres north of Perth,

the town of Carnarvon was founded in 1883

as the supply centre for Gascoyne region's growing wool trade.

But the success of inland pastoral stations

and the survival of communities along this coast

was severely threatened by extreme isolation and huge tides.

So I'm off to find out how the locals set about tackling

this serious coastal obstacle.

The solution was simple, but grand.

A one-mile jetty that goes so far out to sea, ships could berth.

Seven years in the building,

the Carnarvon jetty was completed in 1897

and it was an instant hit.

Heavily-laden horse-drawn wagons

travelled up and down the length of the jetty

to meet the waiting ships.

For a while, they were even in the habit

of hoisting sails on the wagons

to catch the wind and make the journey even quicker.

And then finally, railway technology arrived.

The tracks and locomotives to pull the wagons full of cargo.

But getting the cargo to the jetty was another challenge

that inspired an ingenious solution.

Cameleers, mainly from Pakistan,

were the first to organise a commercial transport system

from the sheep stations to the jetty.

Because horse and oxen were completely unsuited to the heat

and to the terrain, but the camels lapped it up.

Carnarvon quickly became Australia's third-biggest wool port.

By the 1920s, motorised vehicles had replaced the Gascoyne's camel teams.

With little trace of it left in the town now.

But today, it's a jaunty little tourist train

that runs the one-mile dash.

Encapsulating the jetty's stretch of history

is lawyer, entrepreneur, and local councillor, Lex Fullarton.

Was the jetty good to your family?

Oh, absolutely.

Legend has it that my uncle, Burton Fitzpatrick,

had his wool going out one way off to London,

but the return journey brought the greatest bounty of all.

Single-malt Scotch whisky.

And legend has it that he had a bath on his veranda at Dory Creek,

some 100 miles east of here,

and he filled it with single-malt Scotch whisky and bathed in it.

-Bathed in it?

-LAUGHTER

Road transportation killed off the jetty in 1984,

but history may repeat itself.

What I'm looking forward to

is Carnarvon continuing its place in the maritime map,

in the construction of the new jetty, which was promised in 1946.

So, you're still holding out for that hope?

When the new jetty is constructed,

it will put Carnarvon back in its rightful place

of being the port for the Gascoyne.

Heading north, the arid Cape Range National Park

is a spectacularly-coloured vista of rugged limestone ridges,

plateaus and canyons that roll into the Indian Ocean.

But not all is as it seems,

as marine ecologist Dr Emma Johnston

discovers in Yardie Creek Gorge.

Right over the dunes here is the Ningaloo Marine Park.

And at my feet, a coral skeleton.

Evidence of an ancient coral reef

that grew here some 100,000 years ago.

Cape Range gorges, like Yardie Creek, were formed 20-million years ago

by layers of ancient marine life.

And across the sand bar, in its more familiar underwater setting,

is a living reef.

The magnificent Ningaloo Marine Park.

A fringing reef which differs from the Great Barrier Reef

in that it hugs the shoreline.

Meaning you can actually walk out to it.

The largest fringing reef in Australia grows right here,

literally within arms' reach.

See those dark patches in the water? That's the growing reef.

And it stretches from here, nearly 300 kilometres to the south.

The Leeuwin Current,

a wide ribbon of warm water from the north,

allows the coral to flourish at Ningaloo.

And the range's low rainfall

means little runoff to cloud the crystal-clear water.

It's a wonderland of tropical reef fish.

And a particular giant of the ocean

that's nearly as old as some of this coral seascape.

A fish with an ancestry that dates back 60 million years.

Which I have to travel out a little further to see.

I'm hoping to get up close and personal

with the largest fish in the world.

Not just the largest fish, the largest shark.

And I'm really excited. I've never done this before.

-Hello.

-Hi, Emma. Welcome.

-Hey, how are you doing?

-Good, thank you.

I'm joining fellow marine biologist Dr Mark Meekan,

who's been studying the mysterious whale shark for more than a decade.

-Hey, Mark.

-Hey, Em.

-How you doing?

-Good, thanks. Good to see you.

-Yeah, good to see you.

Whale sharks are probably one of the better-known sharks in the ocean,

but, in fact, we know very little about them, really.

We have no real idea where these things are going.

We haven't closed the migration loop yet.

We're going to head over there. What will we do when we find it?

Well, we're going to jump in the water

and the first thing, hopefully, you're going to do, is take a photo.

OK. What do I need to take a photograph of?

Well, you're going to take a photo of the spot and stripe patterns

just behind the gills and just forward of the dorsal.

We've looked at those over the years

and can show they're individual to each animal.

So effectively, we can tell who's who.

They've got a fingerprint on the outside and I can just take a shot?

-OK.

-Exactly. We keep a library of those.

We compare those fingerprints later

and we can see if we've seen that shark before.

Do you see many of them come back?

About 25% of them come back every year.

Ningaloo isn't the only place

that whale sharks gather around the Indian Ocean.

There's aggregations in the Maldives, in the Seychelles,

in Mozambique, in India, parts of Oman, places like that.

With a whale shark spotted, we jump in and head to our position.

And then...

..out of the blue, a shadow looms.

My first sight of a whale shark

with its retinue of remora fish

moving languidly through its domain.

It's an incredible animal.

About eight metres long, mouth open to feed on plankton.

There are rules about how close tourists can get to whale sharks.

As a scientist, Mark has a special permit

to approach the shark as required.

I take some photos

and Mark moves in to take a skin sample.

Here at Ningaloo, we treat these sharks very well.

But they go into the waters of South East Asia,

where people see them in a completely different light.

They don't see them as an eco-tourism resource,

they see them as a meal.

So, the whale sharks are hunted for food?

Absolutely. In fact, they're called tofu fish.

Because they cook up at about the consistency of tofu, believe or not.

The other thing they do with them

is they use their fins for advertising, if you like.

They hang them outside of restaurants and sort of hoardings

to show that they're actually selling shark fin soup.

And then, an incredible sight.

I watch as Mark moves right up to the fish

and scrapes off parasitic copepods from its lips

and catches them in his net.

Copepods are little crustacea

that attach to the shark and chew into its skin.

The shark has no way of ridding itself of the painful irritants.

Mark's action is so welcome

that the shark effectively stops dead

to have its lips brushed clean.

And then follows us for more brushing.

If you had a microscope, you could see the little pointy, sharp legs

that basically hang...cling to the surface of the shark.

And their mouth parts basically chew away at the skin

and create a little bloody sore.

You'll get this sort of irritated patch of skin on a shark.

And so it's really no surprise that

when you actually start taking them off, the shark likes it.

Mark takes one final look underneath and we say goodbye.

Skin samples, electronic tags and photo identification

will improve our knowledge of whale shark movements

so that we can engage the relevant governments around the world

with the long-term aim of protecting this mysterious giant of the ocean.

When autumn leaves turn gold in the southern half of Australia,

caravans are dusted off,

fishing rods are loaded up

and so begins the annual pilgrimage north for some senior adventurers.

Brendan Moar drops in on Australia's peripatetic grey nomads

basking in the Coral Coast's winter sun.

A funny thing about the Australian coastline,

no matter how remote or how isolated it is,

there is something you can count on.

There will always be a caravan park there.

Yes, even out here, on the tip of the North West Cape,

near the town of Exmouth,

which itself is 1,200 kilometres north of Perth

and 3,000 kilometres from Darwin,

where the desert crashes into the sea.

Tucked below the Vlamingh Head lighthouse is the ultimate escape.

From the big smoke to the red dust.

Natasha Tate and her husband run the place.

So, who was rolling up in 1984 and staying here?

Um...well, I think that's when our little secret started to get out,

that this was a magical piece of the coastline

that people could come and hide on for a few months of the year

and get away from it all.

So we've had a few grey nomads that started then

that are still coming today.

We're that isolated that we don't get any TV,

we don't get any telephone,

internet services, or even mobile services.

Power comes 17 kilometres down the road from Exmouth.

With just five inches of rain a year,

all water has to be pumped from the artesian basin below,

desalinated and filtered clean of iron and calcium.

Grey nomads have been in my life for as long as I can remember.

I've been bought up on caravan parks, obviously,

so from when I was two years old, you know,

you'd still find grey nomads around

that would remember me in a nappy, unfortunately!

'Such as the park's veteran guests, Norm and Jean Beauchamp,

'from Busselton, south of Perth.'

Knock-knock. Anyone home?

-Yeah. Come in if you're good looking.

-Well, I am!

'They've been coming here for 30 years.'

-How do you do?

-Man, you guys have got the life of Riley here, haven't you?

Yeah. Well, somebody's got to do it, haven't they?

We were going to Darwin and we come to the crossroads.

Either come back here or go to Darwin.

I said to Jean, "Do you really want to go to Darwin?"

She said, "No, I don't." I said, "Good."

-Came back.

-And we came back here.

And done some more fishing!

Just over the dunes from the caravan park,

the beach stretches forever.

But Norm and Jean have their secret spots.

-Yeah?

-I take it, do I go in the middle?

-Er...yeah.

-Yeah?

So without saying a word, they know exactly what to do,

where their spot is and I'm just following in behind.

Reckon you can cast out?

Ah, it's been a while. It's been a while.

LAUGHTER A lot to learn.

'After just 10 minutes, Norm hooks a stunning fish of the day.'

-That's a bluebone.

-That's a bluebone?

-Yeah.

Gosh, it's a beautiful fish!

All done.

-Knock-knock. The fish is going in?

-Yes, right now.

-This is a great little set-up, isn't it?

-Does us.

Could you have imagined when you visited here for the first time

that you'd still be coming here in 30 years' time?

No, we never thought about getting old.

You just live the good life every day.

LAUGHTER

You know, after spending a day with the grey nomads,

I think I'm starting to get it.

Retirement plus the open road, plus this coast,

well, it all adds up to a good life.

150 kilometres south of Cape Range, near the middle of Ningaloo Reef,

Coral Bay is a blissfully peaceful stopover

along the wilder reaches of this isolated coastline.

Now, I'm a stranger in a strange land. You might have noticed.

So I can hardly come all the way to Coral Bay

without having a wee nosey at the coral.

'But I'll admit to a reticence about my venturing

'beyond the golden sand into the crystal waters.

'It's obvious, really. The wildlife.

'A power-walking perentie sharing the beach is all right,

'but beneath the waves, the natives can be a little more unfriendly.'

-Hi.

-Hi, how are you going?

I'm just wondering, is there anything out there with big teeth?

No, no big teeth out there, I'm afraid.

Look, the biggest species of shark don't come in here.

You're saying the S word.

I know, but they're not dangerous. They're like big puppy dogs.

-Just like puppy dogs?

-Just like puppy dogs.

I'll hold that thought.

-Yeah. You'll be fine. Have fun.

-Thanks.

'So this is what I've been missing.

'Australia at its wonderland best.

'A kaleidoscope of reef fish, coral, turtles

'and who knows what lurking in the blue beyond.'

The Coral Coast is quite literally

the western frontier of this continent.

And it's that sense of remoteness

that's the attraction for the people who seek this area out.

And also, about the sheer scale of the place.

You feel as if you can't even scratch the surface

because every corner you go around, every bay you enter

seems to offer something more fascinating, more spectacular,

more immense.

'It's been a truly stunning and memorable adventure,

'yet I feel we've only just begun to experience

'this distinctive island nation.

'To meet its people, discover their history and stories

'about living along a vast, ancient and diverse coastline.

'How they've shaped each other

'into this great southern land...

'..called Australia.'