Cossack was the original colonial port of the Pilbara — a pearling and pastoral supply town established in the 1860s that was abandoned at the turn of the 20th century when the harbour became too shallow for large vessels. What remains is one of the best-preserved ghost towns in Western Australia: a cluster of stone government buildings, the old gaol, the customs house, and several residences, all built from the buff-coloured Pilbara sandstone in the utilitarian colonial style of the period.
The town is about 60 kilometres from Karratha on a sealed road. A small gallery and backpacker hostel operate out of the old police barracks, and the site is managed as a heritage area. Walking the empty streets between the solid stone buildings, with the mangrove creek on one side and the wide tidal flat on the other, gives a clear sense of both the ambition and the precariousness of colonial settlement in this extreme environment. The cemetery contains the graves of Japanese pearl divers, Chinese labourers, and European settlers — a cross-section of the Pilbara's 19th-century workforce.