It was a video seen by millions of people worldwide: a diver swimming through Indonesian waters thick with plastic pollution on a scale he said he'd never seen before.

But one of the frontlines of this global problem is much further out of the spotlight, on remote Australian beaches so pristine and well protected that some require a permit before you can set foot on them.

"That is the vision you'd imagine when you go to these beaches — they're so remote and totally untouched," said Luke Playford, sea country facilitator with the Dhimurru Aboriginal Corporation.

In reality, ranger groups spend hours each week cleaning up beaches untouched by humans but covered in their rubbish — and it's still not enough.

While the rubbish was historically waste from fisheries, these days it is increasingly domestic: hairbrushes, shampoo bottles and coat hangers have all been collected in recent months.

Map Map of Nhulunbuy

"One of the biggest ones is thongs — discarded thongs, toothbrushes and lighters, quite a bit of medical waste," Mr Playford said.

It is also coming in greater quantities than the rangers, who look after 70 kilometres of beaches tarnished by marine debris within an Indigenous Protected Area, have the capacity to handle.

"Last year was the biggest year on record for marine debris on our coastlines so I thought the pattern would continue," he said.

So far, it has.

Rubbish 'from the water to the tideline'

Earlier this week, Blue Douglas drove out to Cape Arnhem.

The area is about an hour by dirt track out of Nhulunbuy and is well-travelled by Mr Douglas, who grew up in the north-east Arnhem Land mining town and visits the cape three or four times each year.

This time, the once-unspoiled white sand landscape looked different to the one he'd grown up with.

Caves Beach in Cape Arnhem was rubbish-free when Blue Douglas grew up nearby. ( Supplied: Blue Douglas )

"The tide was out but from the water to the top of the tideline was absolutely covered in debris and liquor [bottles] and basically plastic, which is what nearly all of it was," he said.

"Cigarette lighters, bottle tops, squid lures, bits of broken net — I could go on for an hour."

"They've obviously been punctured in some way to ensure that when they're thrown off the side of the boat or something they sink."

He was so taken back by the sheer quantity of rubbish, he spent his visit hauling garbage into the back of his twin-cab ute.

Mr Douglas, who has never seen the issue so severe, believes its management needs to come from within the remote community.

"It's something we're currently working on and the community's response has been very positive," Mr Playford agreed.

But given the magnitude of the problem, some locals are feeling overwhelmed.

"You'd need an army to clean it up — it's massive, the amount of rubbish down there," Nhulunbuy resident Kylie Tune said.

Ms Tune is new to Nhulunbuy and recently found herself cleaning up just one small patch of coastline.

"You know those huge canvas bags you use for putting wool in in a woolshed?" she asked ABC Radio Darwin's Liz Trevaskis.

"We filled one of them and six other big, huge garbage bags. But each tide brought in another half a bag worth of rubbish.

"It's huge."

Ranger groups say the culturally significant beaches have become a dumping ground. ( Supplied: Blue Douglas )

Indonesia the likely origin

Dr Frederieke Kroon, a research scientist at the Australian Institute of Marine Science, believes poor disposal practices have combined with local water movements to produce a garbage hotspot.

She also shed light on local suspicion that the rubbish was likely to have entered the Gulf of Carpentaria from Indonesia and been carried to Cape Arnhem by conditions.

"The currents and the winds this time of year certainly would contribute to debris accumulating on those beaches," she said.

"The currents in the gulf are very circular — they're turning around and around and around."

The bags of rubbish are filled with domestic waste — toothbrushes, coat hangers and hard plastics. ( Supplied: Blue Douglas )

Alarmed by the scale of rubbish, Mr Playford began to photograph the packaging and countries of origin of the debris and found that most of it came from the Indo-Pacific region.

He has also seen modelling that showed rubbish entering the Gulf of Carpentaria with the north-westerly winds that travel from the Indonesian region each wet season.

"When the season changes and we get our dry season and the south-easterly winds kick in, they push that debris onto the beaches on the western side of the gulf," he said.

But he believes the rubbish isn't washed back out with the first seasonal rains.

"Some of it can be buried under the sand on the beach.

"Cyclone events can sometimes cause it to then be excavated and released back out to sea, but our aim is to get it off the beaches to prevent that happening."

Blue Douglas spent the day loading rubbish into his ute. ( Supplied: Blue Douglas )

Bite marks found in plastic

In the next few weeks turtles will attempt to make their way up the shores of Cape Arnhem to lay eggs for this year's nesting season.

"Just for that turtle to make it out of the sea and have to go through a minefield of plastic rubbish and waste, and then try to dig through it to lay their eggs poses a big challenge for turtles," Mr Playford said.

It's not just turtles that are impacted, either.

Mr Playford and his team have sighted bite marks from marine life on plastic objects and believe some have no doubt consumed it and died.

Additionally, the area carries significant cultural value for the local Yolngu people, which factors in to which beaches the rangers triage with their time.

"It's beyond our capacity to do all our beaches each year, so we've got to prioritise where we focus our efforts," Mr Playford said.

"That is definitely a consideration, the cultural values of the landscape."

Last year more than two tonnes of rubbish was collected from Cape Arnhem. ( Supplied: Dhimurru Aboriginal Corporation )

It also distracts from other duties in peak visitor season when they should be patrolling land and water, servicing camp sites and conducting dry season burn-offs.

Instead, Mr Playford's team regularly spends half a day travelling to some beaches and half a day cleaning them up, before surveying debris that ultimately winds up in landfill.

"You only get so far and then you've got to come back the next day or a couple of days later to continue," he said.

"I think we need to address the problem at its source and try to help these countries with their waste management systems to stop the plastics entering the ocean in the first place.

"It's not just happening in Indonesia, it's happening all over the world.

"We're just experiencing the problems from there coming over here."