IN JANUARY 2022, in the receding wake of a record king tide, the buried remains of a Kaurareg woman were exposed in the dunes above Long Beach, on Muralag (Prince of Wales Island) in the Torres Strait. The huge tide – ten centimetres higher than when monitoring began in 2015 – eroded swathes of beach and sand. Kaurareg community and archaeologists safely excavated the Ancestral remains, using the opportunity to learn about the woman’s short life and her death before she was safely reburied away from the beach. But the inundation represented a distressing front in the preservation of First Nations archives and cultural heritage. This wasn’t simply a lens into Kaurareg life in the past but also a discomforting vision of the future.