Qualla: Bernier Island

Bernier Island: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On the Carnarvon foreshore, near the foot of the One Mile Jetty, a bronze child clings to a mother's skirts as she covers her eyes and points out to sea. The sculpture is called Don't Look at the Islands, and it points roughly toward Bernier, a low pale strip of limestone fifty kilometres offshore. The title is not a metaphor. It comes from what Aboriginal elders told the families left behind on the mainland after their fathers, mothers and children were loaded onto boats and taken to this island and never came back. Bernier today is a wildlife sanctuary of extraordinary value. It is also, and at the same time, a place of profound sorrow.

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Bernier Island: What Happened Here, 1908 to 1919

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1908 the Western Australian government opened so-called lock hospitals on Bernier and neighbouring Dorre Island. Over the next eleven years, more than 800 Aboriginal people from across the state, suspected of carrying venereal or other disease, were forcibly removed from their...

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Bernier Island: An Accidental Ark

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Bernier survives as a refuge for one reason that has nothing to do with intention: foxes and feral cats, the twin destroyers of Australia's small native mammals, never reached it. As a result the island holds one of the last colonies of the banded hare-wallaby, a long-eared marsu...

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Bernier Island: Seeding the Comeback

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Because Bernier's animals are so rare, the island has become a source as much as a sanctuary. Conservationists carefully capture wallabies here and translocate them to other predator-free sites to build insurance populations, so that a single fire, disease outbreak or stray cat c...

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Bernier Island: Holding Both Truths

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

It would be easier to tell only one of Bernier's stories. The conservation triumph is genuinely uplifting, and the island's beauty, all white beach and turquoise shallow, invites the gaze the memorial warns against. But the people who died here were not a footnote to a nature res...

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