Red dunes, blue lagoons

Next to the open waters of Shark Bay, green streams and blue lagoons ripple amid deep red dunes in Francois Peron National Park, one of several protected areas upon the bay. In the tinted bedrock below the dunes, cut-out cave shelters offer proof of Aboriginal peoples' long history fishing and shellfishing the rich bay (known in the Malgana tongue as Gutharraguda, or 'two waters'). Just offshore, something even older sways in the waves: The bay's seagrass fields are one huge clonal plant, sprouted millennia ago from a single seed and now considered the largest organism on Earth.