Lau Umbagai stands on a sandy cay that exists for just a few hours a day and recalls how, not far from here, at age seven or eight, he killed his first green turtle. “The first time, you have to dive in and grab it with your hands, like this,” he says, feigning a forward leap with fingers splayed as if he were about to catch a basketball. “After that, you can use a spear.”

The story helps Woddorda man Umbagai, 25, explain the connection his Dambimangari people have to the land and sea in this patch of the north-west Kimberley. It includes Yowjab, or Montgomery Reef, a scientific wonder about 20 kilometres offshore that, as each of the region’s famously huge tides ebbs, gives the appearance of rising from the sea like a humungous sandstone and dolomite submarine. The turtles, a mélange of birds and the occasional crocodile love it, as fish tumble off the mesa in cascading waterfalls or are trapped in pools that form on the top.