Rottnest Island

Rottnest lies about 18 kilometres off the mouth of the Swan River and was joined to the mainland until rising seas cut it off around 7,000 years ago. Noongar people know it as Wadjemup, the place across the water, and associate it with the spirits of the dead; stone tools show that people lived there before the sea rose. In 1696 the Dutch captain Willem de Vlamingh landed, mistook its quokkas for large rats and called it Rottenest, the rat's nest.

After the Swan River Colony was founded in 1829, settlers tried farming and salt harvesting here, and then the colonial government turned the island to another use. From 1838 until 1931 it held a prison for Aboriginal men and boys brought from across Western Australia, deliberately far from their own country. More than 3,600 people were imprisoned there over its 93 years; they were held in a walled cell block known as the Quod, built in 1863 and 1864, and worked on the island's roads, walls and buildings, and at least 373 died and lie in unmarked graves north of the Quod. A boys' reformatory and, in the First World War, an internment camp followed.

In the Second World War gun batteries at Oliver Hill and Bickley were built to defend the approaches to Fremantle. From the middle of the twentieth century the island was managed as a holiday reserve, and it now takes hundreds of thousands of visitors a year. The Quod was used as tourist accommodation until 2018, when it was closed after decades of protest by Aboriginal people, and work with Noongar elders now protects the burial ground and tells the prison's story plainly.

For Perth, Rotto is an institution rather than a destination. Families return to the same holiday cottages year after year, often through a ballot for the busiest weeks, and children learn the island by bicycle. The absence of cars sets the tone: everything moves at walking or pedalling pace, and the settlement's lawns, jetties and pub foreshore are where the day ends.

Two traditions mark the calendar. In February thousands of swimmers cross the channel from Cottesloe Beach in the Rottnest Channel Swim, one of the largest open-water races anywhere, and in late November school leavers have long spent a week on the island after their exams. Fishing, sailing and diving clubs have used the bays for generations, and the moorings fill with mainland boats each summer.

The quokka has made the island internationally famous, and close-up photographs of the animals circulate widely; handling or feeding them is prohibited, and rangers press the point. Alongside the holiday island runs a second, quieter meaning. For Noongar people Wadjemup is a place of death and mourning, and the burial ground near Thomson Bay is treated accordingly, with visitors asked to stay outside its fenced area. Noongar guides now tell the island's history to those who want to hear it, and the Noongar name is used alongside the Dutch one.

Only a few hundred people live on Rottnest, most of them working for the authority that manages the reserve or for the hotels, shops, cafés and hire businesses in Thomson Bay. Rangers, maintenance crews, police and nursing staff make up much of the rest, and many workers commute by ferry or live in staff housing for a season at a time.

The visitors are the population that matters economically. Around 780,000 people come each year, the great majority for a single day, and the island's rhythm follows the ferries — quiet mornings, a crowded middle of the day around the main jetty, then a long emptying in the afternoon. Summer and the Christmas and Easter holidays fill every bed, while in winter the settlement can feel almost closed.

Everything else arrives by sea. Food, fuel and supplies come by barge and waste leaves the same way; water is drawn from the island's own bores and a reverse-osmosis desalination plant, and a wind turbine supplies about a third of its electricity alongside diesel generators. Accommodation is limited by design, because the whole island is a reserve, and pressure to add more of it is a recurring argument. So are the wear that heavy visitor numbers put on the bays and tracks, the welfare of the quokkas, coastal erosion, and the work of running a holiday island that is also a burial ground.

Rottnest is not a restaurant island, and many visitors bring a cool box from the mainland. What is there clusters in Thomson Bay — a general store, a bakery whose pies and sausage rolls are a fixture of the ferry queue, a fish and chip counter, a few cafés and a pub on the foreshore — with a smaller store and café serving the villas at Geordie Bay. Public barbecues stand near the main bays, and self-catering in a cottage or a tent is the usual arrangement.

The flavours are Western Australian. Western rock lobster, which locals call crayfish, is caught along this coast, and fish and chips is the standard island meal, made with whiting, dhufish or Australian salmon. Squid and herring are taken from the jetties and the rocks, and anglers work the beaches during the autumn salmon run. Coffee is taken as seriously as it is across Perth, and the drinks lists lean on Margaret River and Swan Valley wines and beer brewed in Fremantle.

Prices are higher than on the mainland because everything crosses the water, and the shops are small. Many people eat their best meal of the trip at the fishing boat harbour in Fremantle, where fish and chips, chilli mussels and Italian-Australian cooking have been served beside the boats for decades, a short walk from the Rottnest ferries.