In the early hours of Monday morning, a young woman’s body was found being mauled by a pack of dingoes near a shipwreck on a windswept stretch of white sand beach on an island off the east coast of Australia.
The island was K’gari, formerly known as Fraser Island, in southern Queensland, home to about 150 human inhabitants and a population of dingoes genetically distinct from those on the mainland. Called wongari in the language of its Butchulla traditional owners, the lean yellow and white canids are sacred to the First People and indelibly entwined in the cultural fabric of this world-heritage listed sand island.
K’gari itself has been described by Unesco as a patchwork of “majestic” tall rainforest, perched freshwater lakes and shifting sand dunes – an “exceptional” place and the largest sand island on Earth.
It would take almost 48 hours for the public to learn the name of the 19-year-old Canadian woman. On Wednesday, her father, Todd James, announced the loss of his “precious little baby girl” Piper.
Along with his heart-wrenching words, the pictures the grieving father shared of his daughter showed a vibrant and outdoorsy young woman doing what she loved. Riding dirt bikes. Fighting fire. Snowboarding. Surfing. Skydiving. Often, in the photos, Piper was hugging her family. Surrounded by friends and pets. Loved and loving, Piper seemed to zealously throw herself into life.
Hours later, the lifeless body of Piper James was given over to a Queensland coroner, tasked with answering a question first raised, but not speculated further upon, by police: how did she die? Did Piper drown, was she killed by the dingoes, or did some other fate befall her?
A coroners court spokesperson said that further scientific testing – and “some time” – would be required to produce a clear answer.
On Friday night, a spokesperson for the Queensland coroners court said the coroner had completed a “preliminary assessment”.
They said an autopsy had found physical evidence consistent with drowning and injuries consistent with dingo bites, but “pre-mortem dingo bite marks” were “not likely to have caused immediate death”.
There were extensive post-mortem dingo bite marks, the spokesperson said.
They said the coroner was awaiting pathology results to further assist in determining the cause of James’s death, which was expected to take several weeks.
There is no evidence that any other person was involved.
About 350km west of K’gari in Rockhampton, the Queensland premier, David Crisafulli, was asked if there would be a dingo cull on the island in wake of Piper’s death.
Crisafulli declined to answer directly.
“It’s a really troubling time, and we’re determined to get to the bottom of the cause, and then we’ll respond,” he said.
That a cull is being mooted at all before facts have been established astounds Central Queensland University senior lecturer Bradley Smith.
“I can’t believe that we are having this conversation in 2026,” he says.
Smith is finalising a second book on dingoes for Australia’s national science agency. It will seek to explain in plain language the past decade of genetic research into the animals, which has upended much of what he says are the prolific “myths and misconceptions” of this most controversial Australian land predator.
A human-animal relationship expert, Smith, who has long researched K’gari’s dingoes, estimates between 100 and 200 roam its beaches and sand dunes. Any losses to this closed island population would, he says, be “catastrophic to their viability”.
Dingoes are also a protected species – Australia’s only native dog and descended from south Asian wolves. This status does not prevent its mainland cousins from being poisoned, trapped and shot – even strung up in trees – for their predation upon livestock.
Dingoes are an “iconic Australian animal”, Smith says, and are specifically mentioned in K’gari’s heritage listing.
Overtourism on the island is increasingly putting dingoes and people into conflict, K’gari’s world heritage advisory committee (KWHAC) says.
Hundreds of thousands of tourists flock to the 120km-long island each year. Some deliberately feed the animals to coax them in for selfies.
Overtourism, KWHAC chair Sue Sargent says, directly increased the risk of humans being attacked by dingoes, by contributing to the number of animals habituated to humans. She warned it also threatened to “destroy” the island’s ecology.
Smith and others have suggested tourist numbers be capped. But Crisafulli has already ruled that out.
Smith says tourism and dingoes “are compatible” on K’gari, if visitor behaviour is changed.
“Many people love seeing dingoes in the wild, and specifically go to K’gari to experience it – I don’t want to remove that,” he says.
“This is a human problem – not a dingo problem.”
