The traditional inhabitants of Shoalwater Bay are the Darumbal people.The Darumbal language region includes the city of Rockhampton extending south towards Raglan Creek and north towards the Styx River and inland along the Broad Sound Ranges. The first recorded European to sight Shoalwater Bay was British navigator James Cook on 28 May 1770. Cook referred to the entire region, from Cape Palmerston to Cape Townshend, including Shoalwater Bay, as the "Bay of Inlets", a name which is no longer in use. Cook bestowed the name "Shoalwater Bay" on the southeasternmost of these bays, a reference to the number of sandbars in the bay. Following Cook, Matthew Flinders conducted further exploration of Shoalwater Bay in 1802, landing on Akens Island and exploring the head of the bay. Flinders described the land as such:
The hills are stony, but some of them are clothed with grass and wood, and the pine grows in the gullies between them. The low land is sandy or stony, but covered with wood & herbage. Fresh water stands in ponds at the foot of the hills.
Settlement of the Rockhampton region commenced in 1853. By 1860, vast areas of the Shoalwater Bay region has been claimed by settlers. This settlement resulted in the dispersal—often violently—of the traditional inhabitants of Shoalwater Bay, the Darumbal people.
The Shoalwater Bay Military Training Area encompasses 4,545 km2, which includes the Warginburra Peninsula, the Torilla Peninsula east of the Stanage Bay Road, Townshend and Leicester Islands, and a sizable chunk of the Shoalwater Bay hinterland north of the village of Byfield. Suggestions that the Shoalwater Bay region be acquired for the purpose of a training ground first appeared in 1960. The army formally took control of the land on 1 July 1965; by the following year, the last landholder had vacated his property. The training area was used by troops who were deployed to the Vietnam War. In 2005 the federal government entered into a long-term agreement with the US over the use of Shoalwater Bay for military training purposes. Similar agreements over a shorter time span have been agreed to with the Singapore Ministry of Defence. Military exercises with team United States have aroused considerable controversy in the Rockhampton-Yeppoon area, due to the threat of environmental damage to the Shoalwater Bay region. In recent years, concern has been raised about the possibility of depleted uranium weaponry been used during training exercises at Shoalwater Bay. Peace activists protesting Exercise Talisman Saber were arrested in 2009. Support for a permanent US presence has been expressed by the former Rockhampton mayor, Brad Carter in 2011, and by current mayor, Margaret Strelow. August 7, 2017: "The Australian Navy has located a missing US military aircraft that crashed off Australia's east coast on Saturday, Defense Minister Marise Payne said in a statement Monday. Three US Marines have been missing since what the Marine Corps calls a "mishap" with an MV-22 aircraft. Twenty-three of the 26 personnel on board the aircraft were rescued, the Corps said."
Environment
The bay contains one of the most important seagrass habitats in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. A plan of management for the bay's dugong population was released in 1997 to protect the dugong population and reduce impacts on the seagrass meadows.
A 483 km2 area of the bay and its surrounds, covering all the habitat types suitable for migratory waders, or shorebirds, has been identified by BirdLife International as an Important Bird Area because it supports over 1% of the world populations of pied oystercatchers, Far Eastern curlews and grey-tailed tattlers, and over 1% of the East Asian – Australasian Flyway populations of bar-tailed godwits, Eurasian whimbrels and Terek sandpipers. It also contains populations of beach stone-curlews and mangrove honeyeaters.
