Shark Bay
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How it came to be
Shark Bay lies at the westernmost point of the Australian continent and is called Gathaagudu, 'two waters', in the local language. Aboriginal occupation goes back 22,000 years, when most of the area was dry land; rising seas flooded the bay between 8,000 and 6,000 years ago. Many shell middens have been found, especially on Peron Peninsula and Dirk Hartog Island.
In 1616 the Dutchman Dirk Hartog landed and left a pewter plate inscribed with the date at the north end of the island. In August 1699 the English explorer William Dampier entered the bay and named it Shark Bay, and in 1712 the Dutch East India Company ship Zuytdorp was wrecked offshore. Pastoralists settled in the 1860s and 1870s, pearling grew from 1870, and in the first half of the 20th century Norwegian factory ships took up to 1,000 humpback whales a season.
The bay holds seagrass beds of 4,800 square kilometres, among the largest in the world, and about 10,000 dugongs, some 12.5 per cent of the world population. In Hamelin Pool cyanobacteria began building stromatolites about 1,000 years ago. Wild dolphins at Monkey Mia have mixed with people since the 1960s. An area of 23,000 square kilometres, about 70 per cent of it sea, was inscribed in 1991.
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