The little (150km+) peninsula surounding Shark Bay has quite a bit going for it. To begin with, there are a colony of stromatolites, bacteria that has hardly changed for the past 3 billion (yes, billion) years, and are responsible for changing the atmosphere to 20% oxygen so that life as we know it could start. Or, as Caroline put it, a bunch of rocks in the sea.
The bay is also the first landing site for the Europeans, the Dutch who landed here 300 years before Cook. Neither they nor the French who followed showed much interest in the land, and as soon as they did, Britain was quick to claim it as their own.
Just to contrast my ramblings of how big a place Australia is, today we bumped into Dirk, the guy who rented our first camper from Sydney. So not only did we meet one of the few Australians we know in one of the remotest places in the country, it’s also about as far as you can get from Sydney. Maybe the world is quite small after all.