The island's name comes from a mistake. In 1696 the Dutch navigator Willem de Vlamingh anchored offshore, saw thousands of small marsupials scurrying through the scrub, and recorded them as large rats. He called the place Rottnest — rat's nest. The animals were quokkas, and they had been there far longer than any European chart. To the Whadjuk Noongar people the island is Wadjemup, meaning place across the water. Sea levels rose roughly seven thousand years ago and severed it from the mainland, leaving a limestone ridge nineteen kilometres off Fremantle. Between 1838 and 1931 the colonial administration used that isolation as an instrument, holding around 3,700 Aboriginal men and boys in the Quod, an octagonal prison in Thomson Bay. More than 370 died there. The Wadjemup Project, established with Noongar elders, now governs how those burial grounds are marked and interpreted, and any honest rottnest island ferry bus tour passes that history rather than around it. The built fabric records each successive purpose. The Vlamingh Head lookout sits on the island's highest ground at 45 metres. Oliver Hill and Bickley Point carry gun emplacements installed in the late 1930s, when nine-inch batteries were sunk into the limestone to guard the approaches to Fremantle Harbour. Wadjemup Lighthouse, first lit in 1851 and rebuilt in 1896, remains the oldest stone lighthouse on the Western Australian coast. Salt lakes — Government House Lake, Herschel, Baghdad — occupy the interior, hypersaline and pink in certain light, ringed by tea-tree and coastal wattle. What draws roughly 780,000 visitors a year is the coastline: sixty-three beaches and twenty bays, from The Basin's sheltered reef pool to the swell at Salmon Bay. No private cars are permitted. Movement happens by bicycle, by the island's coach network, or on foot, which is why Rottnest Island guided bus tours and bike-and-ferry pairings dominate the market. The commercial centre at Thomson Bay, addressed at 1 Henderson Ave, Rottnest Island, Western Australia 6161, holds the settlement's oldest surviving cottages alongside the ferry terminal. Protection is legislated rather than incidental. The island is an A-class reserve, its surrounding waters a marine reserve since 1988, and the admission fee of 21.5 AUD per adult for a single day visit funds that management directly. The quokka population, estimated between 10,000 and 12,000, persists here in numbers found nowhere on the mainland. A rottnest island ferry bus tour is, in that sense, a passage into a conservation estate that happens to have beaches.