The Bay of Fires (larapuna to the palawa) is one of Australia's most dazzling sights: miles of brilliant white sand, turquoise water and, above all, huge granite boulders covered in an intense orange lichen that looks hand-painted. That contrast of white, sky blue and fiery orange, under the clear skies of north-east Tasmania, is what makes it unmistakable.
It stretches for about 50 kilometres, from Binalong Bay in the south to Eddystone Point in the north, and takes in almost deserted beaches, lagoons, coastal forest and some of the best free beachfront campsites in the whole country. The southern section, between Binalong Bay and The Gardens, is the most accessible and has the most photographed orange rocks; the rest is wilder and more remote.
It's a place to switch off: swim, walk along the coast, fish, snorkel among sheltered marine habitats or simply watch the sunset over the glowing granite. Its name doesn't come from the colour of the rocks but from the fires of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people that a British navigator saw along the coast in 1773. Today it's still a place of deep palawa connection, with walks guided by the community itself.
The larapuna coast was a meeting place for the Tasmanian Aboriginal peoples (palawa), whose shell middens can still be seen in the sand. The name 'Bay of Fires' was given by Captain Tobias Furneaux in 1773, when he saw from his ship the many Aboriginal fires burning on the beaches, a sign of how populated the coast was. You can read more on the Bay of Fires history page.
Read the full history ↓The island south of the mainland, once Van Diemen's Land: home to one of the most feared penal colonies of the empire and the scene of the tragic Black War against the Palawa people. Today it is a haven of wild nature, with more than a third of its area protected as a World Heritage Site.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The oldest name for this coast is not 'Bay of Fires' but larapuna, in palawa kani, the revived language of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people. Long before any European ship sailed past, larapuna was the country of the Aboriginal peoples of north-east Tasmania, who had lived on it and cared for it for thousands of years. Tasmanians were one of the most isolated human populations on the planet: they were cut off from mainland Australia around 10,000 years ago, when sea levels rose and Bass Strait formed, and they developed a culture of their own, adapted to the island.
The evidence of that presence is still visible on the beaches: shell middens, mounds of shells built up over generations of gathering shellfish, still peek out from the dunes around the bay. This was a seasonal meeting place for groups like those that tradition records in the region, who made the most of the plentiful shellfish, fish and seabirds, as well as the plants and animals of the coast.
Fire, which would later give the bay its European name, was a central tool of that culture. Tasmanian Aboriginal people used controlled burning to keep grasslands open, encourage plants to regrow and keep the animals they hunted close by. Those fires burning along the coast, part of a way of managing the landscape refined over thousands of years, were exactly what caught the attention of the first European navigator to pass by.
The bay's European name was born of a telling misunderstanding. In 1773, British captain Tobias Furneaux, in command of the Adventure (one of the ships of James Cook's second expedition, from which it had become separated), was sailing along the north-east coast of Tasmania when the crew spotted numerous fires burning on the beaches. Furneaux took them as a sign of a densely populated coast and named the place 'Bay of Fires'.
Furneaux was right about the essentials: the coast was indeed inhabited, and the fires belonged to Tasmanian Aboriginal people. What Furneaux failed to grasp was that these were not random campfires but part of a deliberate system of managing the land with fire, as ancient as it was sophisticated. The name was fixed on nautical charts and, over time, became the tourism brand of one of the most beautiful coastlines in Australia.
The irony is bitter: the name celebrates the evidence of a human presence thousands of years old that later colonisation came close to wiping out entirely. Today, as the name larapuna is restored and the depth of palawa culture is recognised, the story of those fires is being read again, not as a logbook curiosity but as the signature of a people in their own country.
European arrival in Tasmania, then Van Diemen's Land, was especially devastating for its original inhabitants. From the early 19th century, sealers operating on the islands of Bass Strait abducted Aboriginal women from the north-east coast, including the larapuna area, taking them to the islands as forced labourers and partners. That violence, together with diseases brought by settlers and the seizure of land by pastoralists, triggered a demographic catastrophe.
In the 1820s and 1830s, conflict between settlers and Aboriginal people escalated into what is known as the Black War. The colonial government pushed campaigns to 'remove' the survivors; many were moved to settlements on islands in the strait, such as Wybalenna on Flinders Island, where large numbers died from disease and dispossession. The Tasmanian Aboriginal population, which numbered in the thousands before colonisation, was reduced to a handful of people within a few decades.
For a long time, the false myth spread that Tasmanian Aboriginal people had 'died out'. It is a historical lie: the descendants of the north-east communities, many of them linked precisely to the women taken by sealers to the islands of the strait, such as Flinders and Cape Barren, survived, kept their identity and today make up the palawa community, which firmly asserts its cultural continuity and its connection to places like larapuna.
That 'extinction' story was not innocent: for generations it served to deny the very existence of a people and, with it, their rights to the land. The revival of the language through the palawa kani project, which reconstructed names like larapuna from historical records, and the recognition of the continuity of the Bass Strait families were key steps in dismantling that myth and giving the north-east coast back its true name and history.
The recent history of the Bay of Fires is, to a large extent, a story of return. The Tasmanian Aboriginal community has reaffirmed its bond with larapuna through land management initiatives, the recognition of palawa kani place names and, above all, the wukalina Walk: a guided multi-day walk, owned and run by the community, that crosses larapuna (Bay of Fires) and wukalina (Mount William) while sharing palawa culture, stories and connection to this coast with visitors. It is one of the few tourism experiences in Australia entirely in Aboriginal hands.
At the same time, the bay was protected as a Conservation Area, which preserves its beaches, dunes and coastal ecosystems and keeps open the free campsites that made it famous among travellers and caravanners. The challenge is to balance its growing fame (the bay regularly appears on lists of the world's most beautiful coastlines) with the conservation of a fragile and culturally sensitive environment, where ancient middens sit alongside tourists' footprints in the sand.
For visitors, knowing this history changes the experience completely. The orange rocks, white sand and turquoise water are still spectacular; but knowing that this place is called larapuna, that the fires that gave it its name belonged to a people who had managed this landscape for thousands of years, and that this people is still alive and returning to its coast, turns a simple paradise beach into a place full of memory and present.
