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Heavens aboveWhy there’s so much more to WA

than mining magnates

EDITED BY FRANCES HIBBARD

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Buccaneer Archipelago, Western Australia, seen from Paspaley’s 1940s-era Mallard seaplane.

LIKE HOMEThe remote northern tip of Western Australia hides some of our most beautiful vistas and a handful of exclusive new escapes, writes FRANCES HIBBARD

crocodile, all 2.5 Jurassic metres of him, lolls on the floating pontoon.

Mobile phone service? You’re kidding, right? Wi-Fi? Um, no. The original phone booth at the foot of the rickety jetty houses an old-school home phone. Tap in your pre-paid phone card details and contact with the outside world is yours, should you want it.

An excursion to nearby Sheep Island, reached by taking one of the camp’s high-

powered cruise boats out across Camden Sound, is a chilling insight into what was one of Australia’s first, and certainly most ill-fated, subdivisions. An advance party had visited the area during wet season, meaning pasture was plentiful and the heat bearable.

And so, in 1864, a group of 120 men, women and children shifted from Perth with several flocks of sheep and high hopes to start new lives in what they believed was excellent farming country. The result was disastrous — violent clashes with na-tives, starvation, heatstroke, babies dying

recent times the only regular visitors to this place have been the Paspaley pearl farmers and the 21,000 humpback whales who use Camden Sound, the huge harbour billow-ing out from Kuri Bay, as a giant birthing suite between July and October?

Verandah 1, as it’s called, sits high above the jetty off which Paspaley’s Amphibious Cessna Caravan seaplane lands to bring in staff, supplies and guests. It was originally built to house company execs and their VIP guests, brought out to Kuri after already spending a tidy $250,000 on the brand’s Pinctada maxima beauties, to see the pearl divers in action and perhaps choose the centrepiece of their next investment.

In truth, the Verandah is a long, narrow building with wide polished timber decks, whirring ceiling fans and a communal lounge from which you can sit and watch the last rays of sun illuminate the bulbous boab tree that stands guard out front.

Time, already a fluid concept here (Kuri Bay might be in WA but they synchronise watches with Darwin, where Paspaley is headquartered), appears to stand still.

Gauze-screened doors swing open and slam, causing timber floors to shudder delightfully. The sprinkler sustaining the thatch of grass outside clicks through its circular motion as the song of a cicada matches its rhythm. The sun beats down as guests dangle their feet in the above-ground pool and the resident saltwater

“A beach supper on one of the nearby islands is the most natural fit as a Kuri Bay dinner party.”

of teething — but gives a sense, however tragic, of our innate optimism.

Now, the exposed rocky island is home to just one family — a pair of ospreys, busily feeding their newborn chick supper plucked straight from the sea. The sight of humans sends the huge seabirds into a panic, their frenzied calls ringing out across the harbour.

Visitors’ own mealtimes, by Kuri’s inti-mate nature, are slightly more subdued. Dinner is on the deck of the mess hall, a substantial space once crammed with pearl-farm staffers but now a slightly spar-tan reminder of a time when the cultured pearls pulled from these waters supplied 60 per cent of the world’s markets.

A beach supper on one of the nearby islands is the most natural fit as a Kuri Bay dinner party. Irish chef Pearse McLaughlin and his partner, Andrea Toner, tend a huge makeshift barbecue, roasting prawns and ribeyes, served with salads on the sands. The rocks make a perfect dining table, and the short skip back across the harbour, beneath a sky ablaze with colour, is a spectacular prelude to dessert back at the Pearlers’ Bar, where one of the heavy copper helmets somehow worn by divers has been appropriately reborn as a light fitting, and a blazing firepit keeps away the chill of a Kimberley evening.

The night sky is endless, as are the stories ... and Australia’s boundless ingenuity.

Kuri Bay, 1300 790 561; kuribay.com.au.

masculinity, if you like, that speaks to that chapter of our evolution from colonial cut-outs to maverick entrepreneurs.

It takes almost two hours on a seaplane to reach Kuri Bay from Broome, travers-ing what is officially dubbed the Aerial Highway — a network of barely there bush airstrips or aquatic runways link-ing 14 Kimberley must-sees, including the ant-hill-like Bungle Bungle mountain range, the gargantuan Lake Argyle (and the equally enormous nearby Argyle Diamond Mine), and the astounding Mitchell Falls.

The highway itself is a road trip like no other: the spectacular Buccaneer Archipelago spreads beneath you in a patchwork of

The original, reimaginedKURI BAY, Buccaneer Archipelago, via Broome, Western Australia

ineteen-seventies Australia: an era defined by pub rock and Puberty Blues, World Series Cricket, I-spy in the back of the Fairlane and no

shopping on a Sunday. The Australia of then — youthful, energetic and self-deprecating — had a certain freedom to it. The world felt enormous; the possibilities endless.

The joy found in the simple pleasures of that time loom large during a visit to Kuri Bay, the site of Paspaley’s original Australian South Sea pearl farm, at the very northern tip of the Kimberley in Western Australia. It might technically date from 1956, but there’s something about this place, its pioneering spirit, its

There’s no place

pockmarked ancient ironstone, endless tur-quoise tones and tufts of fairy-floss clouds.

Kuri Bay was still operating as a pearl farm until December last year, when the decision was made to consolidate resources.

Enter Wild Bush Luxury — the team behind the raw beauty of Bamurru Plains safari lodge on the edge of Kakadu National Park; the deconstructed luxury of Sal Salis tented camp at WA’s Ningaloo Reef; and the majestic beauty of Arkaba Station, a re-stored 1850s homestead in South Australia’s Flinders Ranges — who wanted to share the chequered history and natural wonders of this remote frontier with a fortunate few.

It is not, as Charles Carlow, the Australian-born Englishman behind Wild Bush Luxury, stresses, a luxurious camp per se. Indeed, with three bathrooms shared by its five guest rooms, you either need to be well-acquainted with fellow travel-lers or easygoing by nature.

But what could be more luxurious than isolation this utter? The knowledge that in

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A cruise boat carrying visitors across Kuri Bay.

Below: simple rooms belie the luxury of the experience.

The retreat’s resident croc.

The boab tree: an ancient

Kimberley icon.

Camden Sound, where thousands of

humpback whales give birth each year.

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ou can’t help but be a little capti-vated by the boabs. Their strange bottle-shaped bodies and a stout and often solitary presence make

them a defining feature of any visit to the Kimberley region in Western Australia.

Aboriginal culture ascribes spiritual significance and healing powers to these trees. And there’s certainly something compelling about their presence.

An uprooted old boab is also credited with saving El Questro Homestead when last year’s fierce wet season caused the Chamberlain River to rise by more than 20 metres. Staff looked on in wonder as the giant floating bottle tree wedged itself beneath the support-ing cantilevers of the Chamberlain Suite, the homestead’s “penthouse”, forming a road-block of sorts for the potentially damaging detritus the river had collected in its wake.

Quite the watershed moment, if you like.And the flow of things has been changing

ever since at El Questro Homestead. Three new cliff-side retreats — stunning stan-dalone villas set away from the main home-stead on a slice of red-rock escarpment — are the first new addition to the homestead since it was built by visionary young British couple Will and Celia Burrell back in 1992.

The Burrells have since departed but El Questro endures as an oasis of restrained glamour in the middle of a 405,000-hec-tare wilderness park, where ancient sandstone gorges house mineral springs, endless wildlife and, the best bit, very few people: the jewel in the Kimberley’s crown as Australia’s untamed last frontier.

To get here, you’ve got to know where you’re going. You’re already two hours from Kununurra when you cross the Pentecost

River and make your way past the El Questro Station, the business hub of the wilderness park, with its general store, bungalows made from Kimberley stone, campsites for those who prefer to keep it low-key, and an airstrip for high-flyers. From there, it’s a discreet unmarked turn off the road towards Chamberlain Gorge, where daily sunset cruises make the most of a naturally occurring lightshow, the result of fading rays bouncing off the ironstone.

General manager Lori Litwack has pre-sided over the homestead for eight years now and runs an immaculately tight ship.

Housekeeping staff put most Australian city hotels to shame with their military pre-cision and perfect nightly turndowns. Chef Alan Groom also runs rings around many of his resort-land peers, his accomplished, unforced dishes singing with local produce

(the nearby Ord River catchment area is a surprisingly abundant food bowl) and an appropriately Asian leaning.

And then there are the retreats themselves, whose thoughtfulness make exploring the endlessly fascinating Kimberley sometimes feel, well, just a bit of a chore. Just a bit.

Yes, the Zebedee Springs thermal pools, hidden in a romantic glade of livistona palms and pandanus and closed for the ex-clusive use of Homestead guests each after-noon, are stunning, and bobbing about in their warmth, glass of Roederer in hand, is hardly punishment. (Nicole Kidman cred-ited the Kununurra waterholes with helping her fall pregnant with her first biological child, Sunday Rose, after filming Australia in the area.) But I want to get back to the egg-shaped bath on my veranda, with its glimps-es of the circling crocodiles and turtles in the

muddy waters of the Chamberlain below.And a horseback ramble to Saddleback

Ridge on one of the homestead’s trusty steeds sets a peaceful pace for the day, but so too would coffee on the day bed, with the sun glinting off the retreat’s spotted gum timber floors and flooding through the glass louvres that fill the indoors with the colours and sounds of the Kimberley. Or a gentle

amble down to the homestead’s front lawn, where the pool’s sun loungers beckon after a breakfast of fresh papaya with sheeps’ milk yoghurt as the bowerbirds make off with sugar cubes when staffers turn their heads.

There’s something inherently meditative about the El Questro experience, due in no small part to knowing you’ve found your-self in the middle of a landscape older than any human existence. The Kimberley, at a sprightly 1.8 billion years of age, is the second oldest exposed rock formation in the world (the first is believed to be the Isua Greenstone Belt in Greenland).

Is it any wonder that faced with some-thing that has the secret to eternal youth — an endlessly fascinating, ever-beautiful rare beauty — that all you want to do is look?

El Questro Homestead, 1300 863 248; elquestro.com.au/homestead.

Y “A horseback ramble to

Saddleback Ridge sets a peaceful

pace for the day.”

The glamourpussThe Homestead, EL QUESTRO Wilderness Park, via Kununurra, Western Australia

The Kununurra waters are said to have a magical quality.

A bedroom in one of the three new cliff-side retreats (right).

An alfresco bathtub at El Questro.

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It might seem a slightly unlikely spot for a bit of yoga escapism, but Eco Beach — an hour and a half outside Broome — has found a market for health-minded holidays in Australia’s far north-west.

Eco’s story is an interesting one: an ex-isting eco resort, all but flattened by the devastating cyclones that tore through the area in 2000, rebuilds itself according to strict ecologically sustainable princi-ples. The new Eco Beach opened in 2009, with a mix of tents and self-contained villas, all dotted along an arc of incred-

ible coastline and protected by one of the area’s typically oversized sand dunes.

It’s a naturally healthy place — daily yoga, a substantial massage menu for a retreat so remote and menus that emphasise fresh simplicity — bolstered by regular yoga pro-grams conducted by visiting teachers from across Australia. It might be some iyengar in isolation you’re after; or hatha as the Kim-berley humpback migration takes place. Eco Beach promises immersion in the ancient practice, with a wonderful view to boot.

ecobeach.com.au.

The healthy choiceECO BEACH, via Broome, Western Australia

New kid on the blockTHE BERKELEY RIVER LODGE, Berkeley River, via Wyndham, Western Australia

That you’re an outdoorsy type is a given if you head up to the Kimberley.

And Berkeley River Lodge, which just opened on a coastal dune on the north-east Kimberley coast, is all about unspoilt air, big vistas and a fresh spin on the beach break.

But getting here won’t involve family squabbles in the back seat: like so much of the area, your highway is of the aerial vari-ety, with the rough and ready township of Kununurra your jumping-off point.

The brand-spanking new lodge comprises 20 beach “chalets” with coastal outlooks, all with outdoor baths, big decks and plenty of privacy. The feel is contemporary simplic-ity: strong architectural lines, bold shows of colour and enough luxury to make it feel a million miles from a camp-type experience.

The new lodge’s emphasis, however, is on the isolation and deeply personal experienc-es, with the endless beaches shared only with dolphins, manta rays and turtles; crocodiles in the swimming holes mean it’s perhaps wise to take to the water via what is arguably Australia’s most beautifully located lap pool.

Whether you hit the trails and head off in search of Mount Casuarina, jump onboard a speed boat for a swift trip up to Barra Falls or laze on your chalet’s day bed is your call; the call of the wilderness.

berkeleyriver.com.au.

Poolside lounges beckon after morning yoga at Eco Beach.

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Breathtaking: The Berkeley River Lodge (and left).

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