Kimberley-Region Travel Guide
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Most Aussies would be hard put to name a single settlement, river, or mountain in the Kimberley, so rarely visited and sparsely inhabited is this wilderness. It is an ancient land of red, rocky plateaus stretching for thousands of miles, jungly ravines, endless bush, crocodile-infested wetlands, surreal-looking boab trees with trunks shaped like bottles, lily-filled rock pools, lonely island-strewn coastline, droughts in winter, and floods in summer. The dry, spreading scenery might call to mind Africa or India. In the dry season (the Dry), the area's biggest river, the Fitzroy, is empty, but in the wet season (the Wet), its swollen banks are second only to the Amazon in the volume of water that surges to the sea.
Aqua and scarlet are two colors that will hit you in the eye in the Kimberley -- a luminous aqua for the sea and the fiery scarlet of the fine soil called "pindan." The area is famous for Wandjina-style Aboriginal rock art depicting people with circular hairdos that look more than a little like beings from outer space. It is also known for another kind of rock art known as "Bradshaw figures," sticklike representations of human forms, which may be the oldest art on earth. A mere 25,000 people live in the Kimberley's 420,000 sq. km (1,638,000 sq. miles). That's three times the size of England.
The unofficial capital of the East Kimberley is Kununurra. The small agricultural town serves as the gateway to wildlife river cruises; the Bungle Bungles, a massive labyrinth of beehive-shaped rock formations; and El Questro, a million-acre cattle ranch where you can hike, fish, and cruise palm-filled gorges by day and sleep in comfy permanent safari tents or glamorous homestead rooms by night (it's open from Apr to early Nov). The main town in the West Kimberley is the Outback port of Broome whose waters give up the world's biggest and best South Sea pearls. Linking Kununurra and Derby, not far (relatively) from Broome, is the Gibb River Road, an isolated four-wheel-drive track through cattle-station country that is becoming popular with adventure travelers.
Off the West Kimberley coast lies a jigsaw puzzle of 10,000 or more barely inhabited islands, the Bonaparte and Buccaneer Archipelagos, the latter named in honor of the pirate's pirate, William Dampier, who sailed here in 1688. In fact, much of the appeal of this coastline lies in the knowledge that few Westerners have laid eyes on it since the first explorers of the 17th century.
