Timeless beauty along the East Kimberley Gibb River Road
It’s the dry season and the Gibb River Road in Western Australia’s remote Kimberley region is awash with people.
It’s the dry season and the Gibb River Road in Western Australia’s remote Kimberley region is awash with people. There’s the tribe of caravanners from Perth who wear identical T-shirts with the words “Gibb River Road 2017” inscribed beneath a picture of a boab tree.
The German backpackers have blown three tyres east of Ellenbrae Station and are now working for their keep at a local homestead while they wait for replacements to arrive. The woman from Melbourne is walking the Emma Gorge track nine years after her first visit, while her infirm husband waits for her at the picnic ground. “We live in such a beautiful country,” she says, “yet so few of us get to see it.”
This is arguably Australia’s most beautiful landscape, a broad sweep of oxblood dirt spiked with golden scrub grass, a bedrock of ancient limestone chiselled away to reveal gorges with walls sometimes so tall they obscure the sun. In the wet, from November to April, water courses through, creating impromptu oceans upon bone-dry riverbeds, carving channels into the baked earth, marooning homesteads for months at a time.
The dry, from May to October, reveals a landscape from which almost every last drop of water has been squeezed dry. The Gibb River Road runs like a rough pencil mark through it, about 660km of mostly dirt route strung out between Derby in the west and Wyndham-Kununurra junction in the east.
It’s a comparatively busy road for one so remote from metropolitan regions. Four-wheel drives rattle along its corrugations, kicking up suffocating clouds of dust. But it can be hours before we encounter another vehicle, and it’s then that the utter vastness of Australia’s outback settles upon us. We are but an inconsequential speck traversing a land as old as time.
The journey begins in Broome, gateway to the Kimberley. It’s a frontier town filled with people who came to visit and never left, a place characterised by intense heat and saturated colour. Every Broome day concludes with a sunset that stripes the horizon scarlet and gold.
But the western edge of the Gibb River Road is still a two-hour drive east, near Derby. Here the sunset outshines even Broome’s, gilding the long jetty at the Derby wharf and erupting in a lavish swirl of colour above the salt flats on the outskirts of town.
Next morning, we set off along the old cattle route that is today the fabled Gibb River Road. It manifests in fits and starts, tar blending into dirt and crumpling into hard ridges. The rough smooths out briefly where slabs of bitumen have been laid to seal floodways and crests.
Yellow plains are dotted with termite mounds, red and spiked at first, then ochre-hued and bulbous. Fire has swept through here; the blackened trees have constricted and feathered in their futile bid to escape the flames.
The termite mounds are replicated, inversely, in the stalactites that hang from the ceilings of the caves at Tunnel Creek, our first stop. To reach this network of tunnels — used as a hideout by the Aboriginal leader Jandamarra in the late 1800s — we must take a rattling detour off the main road, past Windjana Gorge National Park. We don’t have time to stop here and this will become a frequent lament as we struggle to fit the route’s many sites into our time-constrained schedule.
A narrow cave entrance conceals 750m of labyrinthine corridors — ceilings vaulted here, collapsed there — that cut through the Napier Range before emerging into daylight on the other side. The water that surges through in the wet has condensed to icy pools across which we must wade, sometimes thigh-deep. By torchlight we pick out tiny fishes and, in a warm pool beneath a waterfall of frozen calcite, the glowing eyes of a freshwater crocodile.
Back on the Gibb River Road, we rumble eastwards through splintered limestone buttes and past kapok trees with yellow blooms that herald the laying of finches’ eggs. It’s late afternoon when we reach Bell Gorge Wilderness Lodge, a scattering of luxury tents tucked into the golden grasslands of the King Leopold Range. Guests are already gathering around the fire-pit and indeed, though the nights were hot in Broome and Derby, the day’s warmth swiftly evaporates inland. After dinner we sit by the fire, necks craned towards stars piercing the cold night air. Back in our tents, we wrap ourselves in the extra blankets that have been knowingly placed there.
But the sun is back to its old tricks again next morning as we detour to Bell Gorge, a canyon cut from rocky ledges. It’s already so hot some of our party take a dip in the pool at the base of the gorge’s scalloped waterfall. But the road is calling us and its jerks and judders become meditative as we journey past Imintji, with its small shop and Aboriginal art gallery (closed today, a Sunday), to Mt Barnett Roadhouse, crowded with bus-trippers licking ice-creams, and down a 30km side road flanked with eucalyptus groves.
We spot a pair of bustards tiptoeing through the bush, a dingo poking out its head from the camouflaging grass, and kangaroos grazing nearby Mt Elizabeth Station, our home for the night. This is a working cattle station, and while the accommodation is basic, the communal dinner is superb. We swap stories with our fellow travellers and, when morning comes, scatter off into the emptiness.
Rumours have abounded along the way about the scones at Ellenbrae Station, and they materialise hot and delicious upon our arrival. We pick at fallen crumbs and lick jam and cream from our fingers beneath the trees in the homestead’s improbably lush garden. Double-barred finches flutter about hanging bird feeders. Who is keeping the eggs warm?
Freshwater crocodiles inhabit the creek that runs past Ellenbrae, but we see none as we sink into the ice-cold water. It’s deliciously refreshing and soporific all at once — water stinging our skin; swaying pandanus leaves reflecting off the creek’s dark surface; insects droning melodically in the heat. We’ve been warned about the perilous state of the road from Ellenbrae eastwards — those German backpackers shredded three tyres, after all — but although the road is rutted and bone-jarring, we arrive at Home Valley Station intact.
On a hill overlooking Cockburn Range near the eastern edge of the road, guide Alfie Wapau surveys the boundless stretch of land that surrounds us.
This pastoral lease was bought by the Indigenous Land Corporation on behalf of the Balanggarra people of the East Kimberley, and Alfie is one of many young indigenous people trained and mentored as part of an enterprise by Home Valley Station and Voyages Indigenous Tourism Australia.
He points north towards the mighty Pentecost River, which we will cross tomorrow on our way to El Questro Wilderness Park’s Emma Gorge. Alfie jokes that the level is low enough now to stop, reverse, look around, then drive on through without getting stuck. We’d never be game enough to test our luck.
To the south are the ribbons of Pentecost sandstone on the range, turning gold and purple with the setting sun. In the sweep of land that separates us we can see the silvery leaves of elephant ear wattles flopping about their stems, dust particles thrown up by cars down on the Gibb River Road, and spinifex carpeting the earth in pin-cushion tufts all the way to the horizon. It’s a gift, delivered in spangled wrapping at the end of an epic journey.
CHECKLIST
A four-wheel drive is essential for the Gibb River Road and can be hired from Broome Broome Car Rentals.
More: broomebroome.com.au.
Camping is available along the way on a first-come basis.
More: derbytourism.com.au.
Other accommodation should be booked well in advance:
Bell Gorge Wilderness Lodge (kimberleywilderness.com.au);
Ellenbrae Station (ellenbraestation.com.au);
Home Valley Station (hvstation.com.au);
Mt Elizabeth Station can be booked through Derby Tourism or Visit Kununurra:
Tourism Australia has developed a six-day Gibb River Road itinerary.
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