It’s the tail end of 1873, November, and a clergyman is rugged up against a sluggish dusk. Along a Newfoundland coastline, Reverend Moses Harvey makes his way towards a fishing boat on the shore; he’s approaching the knot of fishermen who summoned him. The men, just in from the sea, are clustered around the carcass they’ve surfaced, a creature dredged inadvertently from the depths of Logy Bay, tangled in their herring nets. Harvey’s not there on church business. Instead, he’s made a name for himself locally as a collector of curiosities and the fishermen have offered him their haul: a giant squid, dead on arrival …

Thirty minutes north-west of Adelaide is a stretch of South Australian coastline synchronously, gloriously, luminous and bleak. In the language of the Kaurna people, the traditional owners of the land, it is Winaityinaityi Pangkara, ‘country belonging to all birds’. And from where I’m standing, not far from its northernmost point, I can see just a fragment: a shoreline so planar and still that it’s difficult to tell where solid ground transitions to water. It’s low tide, a Sunday in late January, and there is no one else in sight. There are the birds though, more numerous than I’d expected given the time of day and the settling heat …