Wolf Rock (Double Island Point)

Four volcanic pinnacles rise out of deep water off Double Island Point, at the seaward end of the Cooloola sand mass, like the drowned summit of a mountain. This is Wolf Rock, the offshore, vertical end of the coast’s gradient. You cannot wade out to it. The rock lifts straight off a deep floor into open sea, with nothing between it and the current but water.

Like the other headland reefs on this coast, Wolf Rock is a two-oceans reef, warm-current tropical life sharing the stone with the cool-water south, each pressed to the limit of its tolerance; the mechanism of that meeting is set out on other pages. What sets Wolf Rock apart is where the overlap happens. Not on a shoal below a headland you can stand on, but on pinnacles standing alone in deep, swept, open water, which is exactly the address one particular animal needs.

Wolf Rock matters most because of a shark, and because of one stage of its life the rest of the coast cannot supply. The grey nurse shark looks like everyone’s nightmare, heavy-bodied, snaggle-toothed, its mouth fixed in a permanent grin of needle teeth. In plain truth it is a slow, placid fish that eats other fish and wants nothing to do with a diver. That fearsome look nearly finished it: for decades it was speared and hunted as a “man-eater” on the strength of its appearance alone, until the east-coast population crashed to a critically endangered remnant. Wolf Rock is one of the very few places these sharks gather, and gather all year round, and the only known site on the east coast where pregnant females come to carry their young. A large share of the population’s breeding females turns up on these pinnacles. Which is why the rock is closed to fishing: a no-take green zone in the Great Sandy Marine Park, sealed off because so few of these harmless-looking monsters are left, and because so many of the ones that remain depend on this single set of stones to carry their pups to term.

It has company. Leopard sharks, slender, spotted, harmless bottom-dwellers, lie on the sand below the pinnacles through the day. Through the warmer months manta rays soar in on the current, wings spanning several metres, to hang above the rock while little fish clean their skin, filtering plankton with a wide, slow grace that makes them one of the most loved animals in the sea. Here again are animals we are taught to fear or overlook on sight, turning out on acquaintance to be gentle, doing quiet work in the web, and needing our protection far more than we ever needed protecting from them.

Read from a boat, Wolf Rock is a famous dive site, four stones and a churn of big animals. Read as country, it is something narrower and more precious: the one address on the whole east coast where the pregnant females of a critically endangered shark are known to gather. What the rock holds, warm-water coral and cool-water sponge alike, lives at the edge of its tolerance, and a warming sea leans on all of it. But the grey nurse’s undoing was never the temperature. It was us, and the fear we hung on a harmless face. Whether it comes back turns on one plain question: can we leave a rare and gentle thing alone on its four pinnacles long enough to recover?