There is a sculptural quality to the River Mouth landscape. This topography moves. As the Margaret River level rises and falls with the movement of seasons and changes in the volumes of water flowing from the catchment some 60 kilometres upriver, her banks expand and contract, shaping the surrounding sand banks and altering her course as she spills into the ocean at River Mouth Beach.

The river has a calm, brackish quality at odds with the wild, salt-pound of waves dumping on the shore. It’s a contrast played out by the people who come here. Young kids on boogie boards padling the river. Young guns on short boards race the wave face as it curls toward rock and shore. Around the closest point, rockpools call to young explorers, looked over by Layla–Russell Sheridan’s vivid sculpture of a woman breastfeeding a baby whale.

At the other end of the beach toward Cape Mentelle, day trekkers completing a section of the Cape to Cape track descend to soft sand and a river crossing for the day’s final push.