Coronavirus: Boomtime for regional WA as new window on world opens up

Towns across WA are enjoying a tourism mini-boom as the state’s citizens make the most of their success in containing coronavirus.

‘Everyone has been determine­d to get away’: Hayden, left, Kristy, Justin and Hannah Covington at Nature’s Window, Kalbarri, on Friday. Picture: Justine Rowe

In the bustling tourist town of Kalbarr­i, a 6½-hour drive north of Perth, social distancing is how far it is from your caravan to the pub.

Like other tourism hotspots across Western Australia, Kalbarri is enjoying a mini-boom as the state’s citizens make the most of their success in containing coronavirus.

In what may be the world’s most pleasant hostage situation, West Australians have been effect­ively barred from leaving the state due to a hard border closure that has been in place since early April.

With the annual winter pilgrim­age to Bali off the table, West Australians have been fannin­g out across the state in record­ numbers and Kalbarri, with its spectacular cliffs and gorges, has become a go-to ­destination.

As tourism operators in the rest of the country grapple with an uncertain future and beg for an extension of government assistance, the biggest challenge for most West Australian businesses has been keeping up with the unprecedented demand.

Melissa Daniels, who runs the 76-room Kalbarri Edge Resort, says the business has just recorded its best ever month.

“It’s been unbelievable, we’ve barely been able to keep up,” she said. “We could have sold every room we have twice over.”

Rex Smith’s Big River Ranch has had to knock back twice as many requests for trail rides in the past 10 days than he has in the 4½ years he has owned the business. He has just had to buy a “Sorry, we are full’’ sign.

“I’ve never seen Kalbarri this full, and I believe it’s the same all the way from Perth to Broome,” Mr Smith said. “We almost need traffic lights in our main street.”

Kalbarri’s caravan parks are overflowing, the adventure playground on the foreshore is teeming with children, and hundreds are gathering each morning for the daily feeding of the pelicans.

The local supermarket — really a glorified deli — is swamped each morning by the rush for milk. The store has had its best trading days on record.

Kalbarri’s beaches are packed with surfers, outnumbered only by the hundreds of humpbacks making their way up the coast in the world’s largest whale migra­tion.

There are still bottles of hand sanitiser at the doors of Kalbarri’s businesses, but most people walk straight past them. Increasingly, those bottles look more like a historic­al curio than a crucial weapon in the fight against the pandemic. There hasn’t been a case of community transmission in WA for more than three months.

Long queues of cars form each morning at the entry to the nearby Kalbarri National Park, where the Z Bend gorge has frequent logjams of visitors squeezing through narrow crevices on their way down to the Murchison River.

Hordes of people have been waiting in line to have their photo taken inside the Nature’s Window rock formation and on the ­re­cently opened Skywalk. Among them on Friday was the Covington ­family from Perth, who have spent the past week camping with three other families around the ­region.

“With everything that’s been going on, everyone has been determine­d to get away because they can,” Justin Covington said. “We are all hoping that things don’t get shut down again but you never know.”

The extraordinary demand has brought financial relief to businesses that sat empty during the early months of the crisis, and has vindicated Premier Mark Mc­Gowan’s commitment to the hard border closure.

Given that West Australians typically spend more outside the state than visitors from the east bring in, the border closure had begun to look like a cynical exercise aimed at boosting domestic tourism when cases around the country were plummeting.

But the subsequent outbreaks in Victoria and NSW have justified the health reasons for the border stance, while delivering the economic boost