June 2nd 2026
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WellBeing Magazine
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A softbreeze blows as we stalk the shoreline at midnight — bare toes treading the cold, damp sand, our eyes straining for shadows along the water’s edge. The Milky Way’s canopy of stars is electric this far from bright city lights, but the sea remains inky black. Soon, I’m assured, flatback turtles will appear, using a window that opens two hours either side of the high tide to shorten their slow, silent lumber up the beach to nest.
On Bare Sand Island’s tiny turtle rookery, around 650 middle-aged beauties return every winter to lay their eggs. These are Australia’s own sea turtles — the only species endemic to our shores — yet what we know about flatbacks very much depends on the growing body of research gathered by the insomniac scientists and volunteers gathered on this beach.
There’s a love story about the God of the West Wind who tempers the sea and softens the wind just long enough to allow mythical kingfisher lovers Alcyone and Ceyx to safely lay a clutch of eggs on their floating nest. Over the ages, this time of calm became known as the halcyon days — the winter solstice — and we witness its soothing effect as the flatbacks appear like clockwork in numbers that keep the team of AusTurtle researchers on the move.
Red headlamps piercing the midnight gloom, I lend a hand as the team records egg temperatures, measures carapaces and tags flippers — all of it adding to a pool of knowledge that will one day shiftthe flatback’s mysterious conservation status from “data deficient” to something more real.
Bare Sand Island’s pop-up, wintertime research camp on traditional Kenbi land is a no-frills, no-impact site, but it couldn’t be more rewarding for the turtle-loving volunteers who surrender a week’s sleep to help save the flatback.
Just far enough from Darwin to be considered remote, this otherwise uninhabited isle is an idyllic sweep of reef and sand on the edge of the Joseph Bonaparte Gulf. A territorial three-legged saltwater crocodile nicknamed Graham ensures there’s no swimming in the irresistibly blue sea, but the catches of queenfish are simply sensational and the sunsets, starry-night skies and wildlife encounters are surreal.
Natator depressus
Not much is known about the flatback turtle, named Natator depressus for its distinctively horizontal shell. Scientists stab at a one-in-1000 survival rate but nobody really knows how close to extinction the flatback is, given that both the Northern Territory government and the IUCN Red List call the turtle’s conservation status “data deficient”.
How flatbacks spend the 30 years between hatching and returning to nest for the first time on that very same Australian beach remains a mystery. But it’s one that Darwin’s all-voluntary AusTurtle team is working to uncover, and more than three decades of research on Bare Sand Island aims to give flatbacks a fighting chance against the onslaught of global warming.
I meet my first flatback at 2am, pacing the shoreline as the tide retreats. The four-hour window of nesting is fading when the first clusters of turtles appear, landing with uncanny timing using a “safety in numbers” approach against predators.
The night passes in a quiet rush. As each turtle makes her way up the beach, the team timestamp her track, scribbling numbers in the sand to form a “turtle queue” of sorts, before leaving each enormous, 90kg flatback to climb slowly into the dunes undisturbed.
On this night, 18 flatbacks labour up the beach to nest with awkward but undeniable determination. Over the space of a few hours, a turtle might clear one or more nesting sites until she finds one that’s just right. Then she patiently digs a deep egg chamber with slow, dexterous shovelling from her hind flippers and, finally, lays a clutch of 50 white eggs — the biggest of all sea turtles.
Only when laying begins do the researchers move silently in to measure each turtle’s carapace and record the temperature of the nest, read identification tags and secure tags to newcomers before removing any barnacles and leaving the turtle in peace.
Researchers to the rescue
When the turtles return to the sea and the sun begins to rise, the team and I circle the island one last time in search of previously laid nests that may have hatched overnight. When turtles hatch, not all of the 50 or so hatchlings make it to the surface before the nest collapses. The AusTurtle researchers quickly become rescuers, collecting the tiny stragglers trapped beneath the sand to release under the safety of darkness on the next high tide.
This, I quickly decide, is my favourite morning walk ever — six hatchlings are saved and my daughter Maya, whose all-night shift has made her one of the crew, is afforded naming rights. We head back to bed and reconvene after much-needed sleep for strong mugs of coffee at AusTurtle’s pop-up camp.
This Spartan collection of hot, sandy tents and tarps is a world away from glamping because, here, the ethos is zero impact (even the composted toilet waste bricks are removed). No ground fires are allowed, nor ground pegs from tents and there’s no water for washing. Sandy sleeping bags are de rigueur and, as it’s all volunteer-run, everyone pitches in — scientists and marine biology students, grey nomads, locals and young travelling turtle lovers too.
Research stints last a week and book out half a year in advance, and the reason people queue up to offer their time comes down to the magic these enigmatic turtles possess and the breathtaking beauty of the island.
Girthed by white sand and almost bereftof vegetation, windswept Bare Sand Island is a picturesque isle with high dunes that build up along its blustery southeastern fringe. A reef extends south towards neighbouring Grose Island and, at the bottom of the tide, the fishing is grand.
Darwin anglers come to camp and fish for queenfish and trevally then when they leave, Graham the croc resumes his sentry on the sand, recuperating after his own hunting trips to surprise seabirds and turtles along the reef’s edge.
Kenbi clan land
There’s no permanent waterhole on Bare Sand Island, yet the Kenbi women who hold the island sacred believe that seasonal pools from summertime monsoonal rain are connected to an equally revered waterhole on the mainland. Because of this, today’s visitors are not permitted to wander offthe beach, but scattered gunnery shells reveal a less respectful era when the island was used as a military firing range.
After the longest-running Aboriginal land claim in Australian history, native title over Bare Sand Island was finally awarded to the Kenbi clan in 2016. They call the island Ngulbitjik and visit regularly over winter to dig up its turtle nests for the eggs they mostly prefer to eat raw.
I meet with elders who arrive from Darwin with a boatload of Kenbi kids and their non-Indigenous mates. Here to plant their feet on their island, the kids join in when elders dig up one of last night’s nests and bag up the eggs.
Watching on, baffled and conflicted, it’s an incongruous end to a long joyful night spent marvelling at the determination these turtles exhibit to get their eggs safely ashore, but seasoned AusTurtle researcher Andrew Raith suggests I look at the bigger picture.
With a two decade-long involvement in AusTurtle and Bare Sand Island, Andrew Raith believes the flatback’s one-in-1000 survival rate is largely unaffected by Indigenous hunting. “These people have been living and using this resource for millennia, and these sea turtles are still here. So there’s the proof that they’re doing nothing to affect this population,” he says. “Harvesting a few nests gives the turtle nests of this island a value to those people, who will not over-harvest because it’s not in their interest to stop further generations getting access to the eggs and their protein.”
Later, when my eight-year-old daughter releases a handful of rescued hatchlings leftbehind in a collapsed nest, I watch them scamper along the wet sand towards the setting sun and ponder just how precious 43g of turtle truly is.
Sea turtles have evolved to produce large numbers of offspring, gambling on the fact that the majority will be lost. But they now face challenges far more critical than hunters and predators.
A future for flatbacks
After a sleepless week of turtle tracking, you might expect the research team to be a little frazzled. Instead, we get a cheeky invitation to join them for dinner — just as long as we bring the fish.
On our last night together, long after we’ve devoured a delicious queenfish curry, the turtles are slow to arrive. At 2am, the first clusters of females show up and the night’s work begins.
Recorded data shows that the same turtle pairs often hit the beach together, year after year, suggesting that these turtles communicate at sea. Scientists believe this indicates remarkable evolutionary change, but whether the flatbacks can adapt fast enough to face the challenge of global warming, only time will tell.
So far, their future appears dire. Scientists predict that rising sea levels will drown turtle nests and rising global temperatures will escalate nest temperatures too. Hotter nests will turn out more female hatchlings, and with less males for mating, turtle populations will become unviable.
Flatbacks nest right across Australia’s north from Broome to Brisbane, but the Northern Territory’s turtles are in a highly vulnerable position. They can’t escape the heat by migrating south to lay nests along cooler coastlines because the NT’s flatbacks are, quite literally, at the top of their territory.
I ask scientist Raith what happens if we lose flatbacks. “Sea turtles are an indicator species,” he replies. “So, if flatbacks go, you weaken the entire ecosystem and it won’t just be the turtles that disappear. It will be the invertebrates, the corals, the algae that sea turtles harvest and their predators too.”
In short, the entire ecosystem will collapse. “And that to me is way more important an issue to deal with than a few nests being utilised as a food source,” says Raith. “Humans are part of that ecosystem. We often see ourselves as being separate from that, but really we’re not.”
Make it happen
When to go: Flatbacks nest on Bare Sand Island from May to September.
Join a research camp: AusTurtle’s Bare Sand Island volunteer camps run from June to July each year. Week-long placements cost $800/person and include boat transfer from Darwin, all meals and tent accommodation (austurtle.org).
Join a tour: Sea Darwin’s turtle-watching tours depart Darwin at 4pm, reach the island in 90 minutes and stay for a guided turtle nesting encounter and dinner under the stars before returning around midnight (seadarwin.com).
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