Coast Australia

Coast is on its biggest expedition ever.

After exploring Britain and Europe for eight years,

we've hopped hemispheres to an extraordinary continent.

It's the furthest that Coast has ever travelled.

We've come to a land so majestic and so massive,

it's breath-taking.

And makes me wonder, why I haven't been here before.

But now, I can finally say...

This is Coast Australia.

It's a country, an island and a continent.

Blessed with over 60,000 kilometres for us to explore

on our greatest adventure yet.

For some, this is what Australia is all about.

Fantastic beaches, shimmering sands,

fabulous coral reefs and exotic marine life.

But that would be a disservice to this vast and fascinating continent

with the sixth longest coastline in the world

and a history of humankind that stretches back

at least 50,000 years.

Australia is 30 times bigger than Britain.

The Great Barrier Reef alone

is spread over a larger area than the UK.

The scale is astonishing.

So it's little wonder most Australians

proudly huddle by the coast,

magnetically drawn by the splendour,

the opportunity and the lifestyle.

Our task is to capture the dazzling diversity

of this young, modern nation but ancient land

as we discover the secrets, the scenery,

and the stories of its people.

With such an epic canvas, you might ask, where do we start?

From the Kimberley, the series features stories

in seven other regions.

Darwin and beyond, the Great Barrier Reef,

The Gold to Sunshine Coast, Sydney, Victoria,

Tasmania, and the Coral Coast.

I've gathered a team of experts

who will take us on this exciting journey.

Writer, palaeontologist and an Australian of the year,

Professor Tim Flannery, is peerless in his knowledge

of the history and formation of the continent.

Marine ecologist, Dr Emma Johnston,

a New South Wales Scientist of the Year,

explores the stunning biodiversity of Australian waters.

Anthropologist, Dr Xanthe Mallett,

uses her forensic experience to unravel stories of the past.

Landscape Architect, Brendan Moar, is passionate about

the geography of the shoreline, and the folks who call it home.

And Miriam Corowa, journalist and saltwater woman herself,

investigates the social evolution of this dynamic coast.

And as for me? Well, I get the job of a lifetime,

because I get to be your guide

and with 80 percent of Australians living on the coastline

and so many stories to be told, I'd better get cracking.

For Coast Australia's inaugural journey,

we're in one of the world's last great wilderness areas,

the Kimberley in the north-west corner of the continent

where the first humans may have arrived from Asia

a long, long time ago.

There's been a rich coastal culture, here,

for at least the last 50,000 years.

A way of life that was once embedded in the rocks

and the land of this coastline.

At the very least, it's now a repository of knowledge

for those who still live here today.

Best of all for me, this stretch of coastline

has many places associated with the dreaming,

and we'll be visiting a few of them along the way.

Joining me in this episode, Tim Flannery trips over dinosaurs.

And there is a pink dinosaur foot.

Xanthe Mallett explores a unique maritime war grave.

This is a raft.

If we do see a crocodile or a shark, do we have a safe word?

Brendan Moar takes to water on an ancient raft.

Emma Johnston dishes up the mud on migratory shorebirds.

And I investigate Broome's glittering place in history.

Look at that. It's like Jupiter compared to the Earth.

This is the Kimberley Coast.

Our journey stretches from Eighty Mile Beach in the west,

through Broome, around the Dampier Peninsula

and across the Buccaneer Archipelago to Freshwater Cove.

The Kimberley region of Western Australia,

is three times the size of England,

with a population of just 40,000 souls.

So, with so few people per square kilometre,

it's one of the most sparsely populated regions on planet Earth.

And so when it comes to getting around,

one of these is very useful.

Remote and rugged, this is a land where time began.

Ancient gorges and deep fjords, fan out to magnificent bays

dotted with primeval monoliths endless horizons everywhere.

I have to say, in all my travels, this is some of the wildest,

most edge-of-the-world-feeling coastline, I think I've ever seen.

There's also a very strong feeling from it

that if you were to have been here 200 years ago,

or even 2000 years ago,

it would've looked just the same.

This is a landscape that dwarfs humanity.

At four billion years,

Australia features some of the oldest land forms on Earth,

which means an endless cornucopia of history

for Palaeontologist, Tim Flannery,

who's stepping back in time to walk with dinosaurs.

Do you know what's really special about this place?

A hundred million years ago when these rocks were laid down,

India was just over there.

I'm walking along what's known as the Dinosaur Coast

on the Dampier Peninsula, just north of Broome.

Palaeontologists have recorded at least 15 types of dinosaur

that roamed this area,

leaving literally thousands of tracks and trackways.

I'm really lucky to get to see these,

because they're only exposed at a very low tide,

for a few hours, for a very few days every year.

Dr Steve Salisbury is a palaeontologist

with a special interest in the biomechanics of dinosaurs

how they're shaped and move.

- So what have we got here? - Dinosaur footprint.

I've walked over hundreds of those coming to meet you.

- You probably have. - So, Steve, I think I can see,

maybe some toes here, is that-- Am I looking at it right?

Yeah, so it's a three-toe track. So there's one, two, three.

That's the back of the footprint, so he's headed that way.

So what would this dinosaur look like you reckon?

Well, the reason we're interested in this one

is because this looks like tracks that in Spain and Portugal,

and then also North America, have been attributed to Stegosaurs.

Right. So Stegosaurs are the guys

with the big plates on the back.

That's right.

With the help of traditional custodian, Richard Hunter,

and research assistant, Nigel Clarke,

Steve is going to make a silicon cast of the footprint

for further museum studies.

So, Steve, how did these tracks form? And why right here?

Well, 130 million years ago,

this was part of a big floodplain heading out probably into a delta.

Back then, Australia was still part of the Gondwana supercontinent

that included South America, Africa and India

Here, periodic floods would have deposited

layers of mud on the sandbars that made up the floodplain,

which was bordered by dense forests of cycads and ferns.

Dinosaurs roamed the boggy terrain leaving their imprints everywhere.

Usually, the muddy prints would have dried up and crumbled away

but on the Dinosaur Coast, blankets of sand covered them

and preserved them, a fossilised landscape.

So, for instance, here,

this bigger one, you can see this is his big toe,

that's the second toe, and then the third, fourth and the fifth,

and then there's the small track

of a bipedal ornithopod dinosaur that's overprinted it.

So, Sauropod.

Great, big long neck, long tail, one of the classic dinosaurs.

Yeah, yeah. Brachiosaurus or Diplodocus that kind of thing.

Footprints form all the time.

We left a trail of them on the beach when we walked down here,

but rarely do they get preserved in the fossil record.

It's an incredible diversity of dinosaurs.

Like there's not really anywhere else in the world

that has such a level of diversity represented by tracks.

Comes away quite cleanly, doesn't it?

Yeah.

And there is a pink dinosaur foot...

...of all things!

Today's science teaches us about our geophysical beginnings

but there's a much older account that emanates

from the coast's indigenous Goolarabooroo people.

Richard has a fascinating and very different reading

of these ancient tracks...

...a Dreamtime story of Emu Man.

The first ancestral spirit that walked the Earth

So, what's the name of that Emu Man?

- Marella. Okay. Yeah. - Marella, yeah.

And did he bring something to the land when he came?

To Richard and his people,

Marella gave the knowledge through songs,

which are akin to oral heritage maps.

Laws to sustain balance

and well-being of the land and its people,

and passed down through the generations.

You know, plenty of Australia's coastline's spectacular,

but there's nothing like this.

Price's Point is just unique because it brings together

Aboriginal Australia and European Australia

in a way that no other place on the continent does.

It's the origin of the Dreamtime for Aboriginal people

across a great swathe of the continent,

and for European people, it's an incredible repository

of ancient knowledge, a vanished world.

The Kimberley weathers two distinct seasons

a searing dry and the surging wet...

which floods the rivers and bays that divide the rugged plateaus.

It's a dramatic wilderness sculpted by time, pressure and water.

The Kimberley region has the greatest tidal range

in the whole of the southern hemisphere.

And the second highest in the entire world.

The 12-metre tidal change, here,

is magnified by the shape of the coast.

The currents increase considerably to squeeze huge volumes of tidal water