A list of some 400 words of the Otati language was taken down by Charles Gabriel Seligman, and a further 60 by George Pimm, members of Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits in the late 19th century.
[3] The area around Shelburne Bay has been described as some of "the most beautiful coastal and island country in Australia, if not the world",[4] and was home to over 30 rare and threatened species of fauna as the double-wattled cassowary and the palm cockatoo.
[4] When word leaked out in 1985 that a joint Japanese Australian consortium, Shelburne Silica, proposed mining the white silica sand dunes at Shelburne Bay and was seeking a mining lease to work over 765 square kilometres (295 sq mi) of dunefields, in order to extract and export 400,000 tonnes a year for the Japanese glass manufacturing industry, the displaced Wuthathi and Australian conservation activists, the latter headed by Don Henry of the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland, mobilized to challenge the plan through the courts.
[11][4] The consortium produced documentation claiming that the Wuthathi people were extinct, though one descendant, Alik Pablo, artfully demonstrated his knowledge of the bay when miners lawyers tested him with an upturned map to confuse him.
Eventually the then Prime Minister Bob Hawke, included the Shelburne Bay in one of the four conservation areas he marked out as crucial to the national interest, the others being The Daintree Wet Tropics, Kakadu and the Tasmanian Wilderness.