Michelin chef trades Paris for WA outback at luxury Bullara Station
Many visitors to WA head north for aquatic adventures but the interior of this sparsely populated region has its own intriguing attractions.
The ute wends down the unsealed track, leaving a brushstroke of crimson dust upon the new morning sky. Crunching to a halt outside the old shearing quarters, now converted into a boutique dining room, Toby Fisher inspects the boxes being unloaded from the tray. Inside are glossy capsicums, eggplants the hue of an Arabian night and potatoes rich with the bouquet of fresh earth.
“All picked just hours ago,” Fisher grins. “I’ve cooked in some of the best kitchens in the world and I can tell you, truly, they are not working with produce this fresh … of this quality.”
Once a fixture of Michelin-starred kitchens from England to France, London-born Fisher was on the outback adventure of a lifetime when he passed through Bullara Station in Western Australia’s Gascoyne region with his wife, Maree, a pastry chef, in 2023. “We fell for it – so wild and remote and unlike anything we’d experienced before. We just went for it.”
Located between Perth and Broome – about 1300km in either direction, with the Indian Ocean buttressing one flank and the imposing interior of WA guarding the other – Bullara is as far removed from Parisian haute dining as Fisher could cook up. “That’s the point,” he guffaws, before continuing in a more serious tone. “This is honest, this is real. This is what growing produce and cooking is genuinely about. I place an order for beans or tomatoes or garlic and it is all picked for me that very same day. We eat with the seasons, and only with what comes from the land and the sea right here in the region.”
The decree of a six-week live sheep export ban in 2011 was the ultimate catalyst for Bullara owners Tim and Edwina Shallcross to expedite their plans to create a nature retreat at the station. Forty per cent of their business had vanished overnight, but for Edwina the decision was not solely economic. “I’ve always been a traveller … but station life doesn’t really allow us to explore the world, so we thought we’d invite the world here instead. Tim was a bit suspicious at first, inviting strangers into our backyard, but now you’ll usually find him over by the campfire most nights with a six-pack making new best friends.”
What began as a few rustic campsites and a shearing-shed kitchen pumping out 28,000 scones a year has metamorphosed into one of WA’s most alluring station stays, where fresh food, untamed nature and boutique comfort, including luxury safari tents, dreamily coalesce.
Bullara is emblematic of a shift in perception within the tourism dynamic of the Gascoyne region, where travellers have habitually gazed out to sea with their backs firmly to the hinterland. The coral gardens of Ningaloo remain the region’s headline act, with their seasonal aquatic procession of whale sharks, humpbacks and manta rays. But the seemingly arid interior is beginning to reveal its secrets from behind its imposing limestone ridges, plunging gorges and dense curtains of spinifex.
Situated 90km south of Exmouth and 70km north of Coral Bay, which is serviced by regular flights from Perth to nearby Learmonth Airport, Bullara remains a working cattle station, with its highly coveted Droughtmaster beef shipped to discerning tables worldwide. The genial bovines are a fixture of the station, roaming freely along with a coterie of curious goats and sheep. Equally, the cattle are a permanent fixture of the Bullara dining room, known as The Table, where communal meals are the welcome crescendo of a day spent strolling bush trails, trekking to the marine breeding sanctuaries of Exmouth Gulf or swimming with the exotic giants of Ningaloo.
Dinners are hosted amid the chattels of station life, the walls adorned with evocative bric-a-brac. Guests congregate around the open fire over drinks, including the home-ground favourite of Ningaloo Gin with grapefruit soda, before taking their seats. Plates are served communally, with strangers quickly becoming friends as tall stories from the road are regaled and “must-see” locations are shared.
Guiding us all, Fisher allows the ingredients to dazzle. During my visit, the week’s menu features a hyper-local “reef and beef” offering of pit-barbecued beef fillet and Exmouth king prawns, grass-fed sirloin with a homemade fermented black garlic mayonnaise, and spiced beef meatballs plated with jewelled couscous and smoked eggplant puree – a nod to the intrepid cameleer trains that were once the lifeline of these remote frontiers. Equally, Maree’s desserts speak directly to the generous soils of the Gascoyne, where mango, pineapple, passionfruit and banana thrive in the sub-tropical climes.
Stretching from the Shark Bay peninsula, with its coastal villages of Denham and Monkey Mia, to Exmouth in the north and Mount Augustus in the east (a little-known 1.6 billion-year-old rock twice the size of Uluru), the Gascoyne remains WA’s most sparsely populated and enigmatic region. It spans more than 135,000sq km, laced with unsealed roads, yet supports fewer than 10,000 people.
Food is etched into its very DNA. The insatiable European appetite for the spices of Indonesia would see Dutchman Dirk Hartog inadvertently make landfall here in 1616, marking Australia’s debut on European maps. The land’s traditional owners, who include the Yinggarda, Baiyungu, Thudgari, Wajarri and Malgana peoples, long thrived on its native produce and are now actively working to preserve knowledge of these foods within their communities.
Few other parts of Australia carry such premium culinary pedigree; 80 per cent of the state’s fruit and vegetable crops and much of its seafood, including Shark Bay prawns, scallops and crab, are said to originate here. The epicurean heart is Carnarvon, 900km north of Perth and midpoint between Shark Bay and Ningaloo. With its One Mile Jetty heritage precinct on Babbage Island, the town has also become a tourism drawcard. Visitors can explore its museum and pastoral history and learn the tragic tale of the Lock Hospitals of Bernier and Dorre islands, where more than 800 Aboriginal men, women and children were exiled between 1908 and 1919. The “Don’t Look At The Islands”memorial, a bronze sculpture depicting a small child turning away from the outposts in anguish, is a deeply affecting reminder of this unsettling history.
Once serving as a port for the nearby sheep and cattle stations, Carnarvon’s future was secured by the commercialisation of banana crops in the 1940s. Bananas were first planted in the Gascoyne a century earlier by pioneering Chinese migrants, the first place in Australia to grow the fruit. While cavendish by cultivar, the proximity to both the hearth of desert and the temperance of the coast means Carnarvon bananas take twice as long to grow as those in competitive markets such as Queensland, resulting in a much smaller and creamier fruit, known as the Carnarvon sweeter banana.
Driving south into Carnarvon, the road passes through a neatly woven patchwork of plantations. Plump avocados, plantains and citrus sway in the breeze, sustained by the Gascoyne River that predominantly flows beneath the earth; what the locals affectionately call the “upside-down river”. Its rare emergence from the subterranean, typically after cyclonic rains to the north, is ever cause for celebration, with locals lining its desolate banks on deckchairs to await the approaching waters.
The irreverently coined Fruit Loop drive gives visitors direct access to the plantations, including their shopfronts selling produce and culinary fare such as jams and sauces, often via makeshift cash deposit boxes. Most of these properties proudly carry a direct line back to their migrant founders, among them Portuguese, Croatian and Vietnamese.
Bumbak’s is perhaps the most coveted stop on the trail, as fabled for its mango smoothies and ice-cream as its pickles and preserves. Jo Bumbak is the steward of the family business today, best known for her impassioned campaign to eradicate waste from the food supply chain (what locals put down to a supermarket obsession with aesthetic uniformity over exceptional quality) through food preservation and value adding.
“Carnarvon is extremely local,” Bumbak says, adding that she still has no business website and relies exclusively on word of mouth. “The growers all work with each other and deal with the same issues, whether it’s weather or waste. Visitors see that. It’s a real community, real people, real produce.”
I spot a man with a dog on a tractor moving through rows of red dragonfruit perched like Christmas baubles on trellised vines, and pull over. “You can grow things here that you can’t grow anywhere else in Australia,” says Warne Whitcroft of Gascoyne River Plantations as he peels back the layers of the fruit’s rubber-like skin to reveal the beetroot-coloured flesh. “People are finally becoming more interested in where their food comes from. It’s a positive thing.”
This rejuvenated interest in the produce of the Gascoyne is not exclusive to gastronomic tourists. In 2023, Whitcroft had a rather well-heeled new neighbour move in; mining entrepreneur Andrew Forrest, further expanding his Harvest Road Group agricultural business specialising in mango production.
On a tip from Fisher, I pull into Borich & Sons and stock up on fresh asparagus, snake beans and a medley of sweet peppers. “Any tomatoes?” I inquire. “The rain’s a little late and you’re a little early,” the woman manning the storefront replies. “Come back next week.” I recall the words of Fisher: “We eat with the seasons.”
With my loot secure, including fresh goat meat from Mundillya Homestead and Shark Bay scallops and prawns caught in waters I swam in just hours before, I set out for my ultimate destination, Quobba Station, 80km north of Carnarvon. Established in 1898, Quobba is both a working sheep station (home to 10,000 Damara meat sheep) and an eco-tourism sanctuary unlike any other in WA.
Lined by 80km of unbroken coastline and the blinding salt pans of Lake MacLeod, the latter mined for its culinary-grade salt, Quobba is secluded and seductive. With the asphalt ending at the station’s eponymous blowholes, the dirt track beyond into Quobba traverses gnarled clifftops, beneath which the ocean throws itself against the rocks. The natural world here remains truly unbridled.
It was in these waters – further south, beyond the horizon – where HMAS Sydney II was sunk by the German raider Kormoran on November 19, 1941. All 645 Australian sailors perished. A sombre plaque rests here at the land’s edge, amid the scrub and stone. Of the Kormoran, 318 sailors would survive, with seven of its highest-ranking officers later discovered in the caves at Red Bluff, at the northern reaches of Quobba Station.
Today Red Bluff is a surfing mecca and home to Quobba’s most quixotic campgrounds, replete with an exclusive selection of semi-permanent eco retreats and bungalows. With no phone or internet coverage within cooee, we are left to watch nature’s quiet spectacle. The sun is quickly swallowed by the sea, its embers painting the sky in dramatic tinctures of red, purple and blue before the incandescent stars take over for a rousing second act. All that is left to do is fire up the barbecue.
In the know
Bullara Station has a range of accommodation options, including camping, cottages and glamping; Safari Hut tents that sleep four from $450 a night, minimum two-night stay.
Quobba Station also has camping and basic huts, plus glamping tents at Red Bluff Retreat, from $280 a night for two, minimum five nights.
The annual Gascoyne Food Festival celebrates the culinary highlights and diversity of the region with a range of ticketed and free events, including dinners and workshops. The festival runs from July 26-August 31. Between May and October the Gascoyne Growers Markets take place at Carnarvon Visitors Centre each Saturday.
Held each April, the Jamba Nyinayi Festival at Coral Bay is one of the leading First Nations-led events in WA. The celebration of music, dance, storytelling and local food is curated
by Baiyungu elder and cultural leader Hazel Walgar.
Julian Tompkin was a guest of Gascoyne Food Festival.
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