Finding Connection in Australia's Isolated Kimberly Region
All products featured on Condé Nast Traveler are independently selected by Condé Nast Traveler editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, Condé Nast may earn an affiliate commission.
Elise Hassey
The sun was burning high and bright on a pellucid morning off Australia's Kimberley Coast when I stepped onto Ngula, more commonly known as Jar Island. The dull yellow of sand and sandstone contrasted with the vivid blue of the Timor Sea all around me. At my back was a rocky outcropping where millennia ago the island's traditional land owners, the Wunambal Gaambera people, lay their dead. Before me, a cluster of billion-year-old boulders contained clues about how they lived.
As I passed through these monoliths, I saw that they bore traces of serpents and individuals in headdresses. At more than 30,000 years old, these paintings are considered the oldest figurative rock art in the world, though their age and significance are still debated. “The thing about the Kimberley,” said Greg Fitzgerald, a guide on Seabourn Pursuit, the expedition ship on which I'd come to the region, “is that it will leave you with more questions than answers.”
The Kimberley is one of the world's last great wildernesses. Humans have inhabited this territory for 70,000 years, yet it remains stubbornly untamed. Its vast, arid interior, which is three times the size of England, has never been successfully charted. Its 1.8-billion-year-old cliff faces, gargantuan waterfalls, and dry, cracked expanses—where you may come across a dinosaur footprint—feel suspended in eternal stillness, undisturbed by human history. The place's meditative calm is an antidote to the frenetic distractions of modernity—and a major motivation for traveling to one of the most remote and isolated parts of the planet.
Accessing “quiet places” like the Kimberley is one of the biggest trends in expedition cruising, which offers a means for travelers to comfortably access hard-to-reach destinations that have minimal tourism infrastructure. Seabourn Pursuit is the most recent expedition vessel to have obtained the necessary permits to sail along this wild knuckle of northwestern Australia between the city of Darwin and the town of Broome. One of Seabourn's primary points of difference is its engagement with Aboriginal communities from First Nations Australian Country—as the lands and waters to which these groups have ties are called—throughout the Kimberley. “We want to make sure the custodians of these lands are honored and we have good relationships with them,” said Shaun Powell, an affable Texan who is Seabourn's director of expedition operations, over drinks in the ship's Expedition Lounge. As part of the partnership, Seabourn provides funding to the Wunambal Gaambera to help them build year-round residences in their Country. Seabourn is also one of the only cruise lines in the region that employs First Nations Australian guides to bring the stories of these lands to life.
I didn't have a First Nations Australian guide on my trip, but the expedition leaders I met illuminated my experiences in unexpected ways. Back on the ship, Fitzgerald, a former Qantas pilot, proudly told us that after a year of teaching in a small, rural community in Arnhem Land, in Australia's wild Northern Territory, his daughter had been invited to refer to an elder as “aunty,” a rare offer that demonstrates respect for an outsider. He explained that in certain parts of the Kimberley, nearly all flat surfaces are adorned with some kind of First Nations Australian art. Deeper inland, rock art has been found depicting European sailing ships that predate the arrival of Europeans in the region, which has some experts rethinking accepted history.
No matter how good the storytelling on board Seabourn Pursuit is, however, you itch to get off, to plunge into the enigmatic ancient landscape. While the ship was anchored, the Kimberley's cliff faces, its shades of blasted burgundy, coral, and plum, seemed to be calling me to shore. My favorite part of the day on the ship came before sunrise, when I would have a pot of coffee on the sixth deck. I'd watch a thin electric wire of dawn burn between the epic darkness of the sea and sky, slowly growing into the fullness of the morning and revealing the new landscape we had reached the previous night.
“There are things in the Kimberley that shouldn't exist,” Powell told me one night over sushi on the ninth deck at The Club. Guests in silk blouses and slacks sipped scotch while the piano man tinkled the keys. Powell was talking about Montgomery Reef—a sandstone and dolomite shoal 12 miles from shore that the changing tide reveals and conceals each day—which David Attenborough has called one of the greatest natural wonders in the world. The reason Monty Reef does exist is the region's enormous tidal range, the third largest on earth, which causes the water level here to fluctuate by 30 feet each day. The speed and scope of the change makes these waters especially tricky to navigate and gives Seabourn only a narrow window to make a Zodiac trip out to the reef.
As we rushed across the open sea, a slim, craggy rock face began to appear in the distance. The tide's enormous pull quickly revealed the reef, which is completely underwater during high tide. Water cascaded at great speeds down the sides of the reef, creating the illusion of a waterfall in the middle of the ocean. Pools formed on the jagged surfaces, trapping fish, turtles, and other marine animals. Gulls and boobies darted down to gorge on the hapless creatures.
An Aboriginal community called the Yawijibaya were known to paddle out to the reef to capture the trapped sea turtles and fish. Its members were said to have grown to enormous heights, averaging seven feet tall, due to the abundance of protein in their diet. The Yawijibaya entirely vanished in the 1930s—another of the mysteries of the Kimberley. Months after I returned home, I kept seeing mental images of these giants paddling out on wooden rafts across shark-and-croc-infested waters, miles from any visible landmass, synced to the tidal pull.
In 1987 an American model named Ginger was eaten by a crocodile in the Kimberley, news that the tabloids blasted gleefully to Australians nationwide. The tale itself—beauty queen meets a gory end—was salacious enough, but what made it especially irresistible was the fact that Ginger had come to pursue an Outback fantasy after catching Crocodile Dundee fever the year before. I must have heard the story a dozen times from various Aussies on board. Each had a slightly different version, which didn't really matter because, sadly for Ginger, the ending was always the same. For the passengers of the Seabourn Pursuit, Ginger was our cautionary tale. Under no circumstances should you ever enter the water. The oceans, rivers, and creeks are teeming with crocs. But it is worth viewing the creatures more as preservationists than as predators. Without them, runaway development here would be almost a certainty. We did spy a few crocs from a distance on the muddy banks of Porosus Creek during a water safari, which also brought sightings of Indo-Pacific dolphins and mangrove robins. Later we spotted others lazing among the reeds in the tributaries of the King George River.
We got a closer view at Freshwater Cove when a renegade croc posted himself on shore, preventing a group from boarding its Zodiac. We had arrived in the pinkish glow of dawn, the waters shimmering silver in our wake. Members of the Wunambal Gaambera open up this corner of their ancestral lands to visitors between May and October, the region's dry season. Community members painted our faces to symbolize a connection to the land, then welcomed us onto the beach with traditional stories. Neil Peters, a local guide and member of the Dambimangari people who lives on the Freshwater Cove peninsula during the season, steered us up a rocky incline. In the distance a haze of smoke hung over the hills. We were told that this was a controlled burn, a tactic long used by Indigenous groups to maintain a healthy ecosystem.
During World War II this corner of Australia was the heaviest-bombed corridor of the Pacific after Pearl Harbor, which resulted in the deaths of many civilians and obliterating parts of Darwin. As we walked, a passenger from Melbourne brought up the Australian government's forcible removal of much of the First Nations Australian population during this time, fearing that they would aid the Japanese should the enemy reach shore. “We were forced off this land,” Peters said. It was seven decades before his family was able to return. “Being allowed to tell our stories can be emotional.”
After leading us into a cave where a swirl of Wandjina rock art adorned the ceiling, he stood beside the floating face, painted white over the blush of the rock, of a young boy who had been sent to this cave as punishment for disobeying his family and venturing on an expedition for food at sea. “This is also where the men would run away from their wives,” Peters joked. I stopped to consider a fury of loops and lines depicting a cyclone. I felt moved by the fact that, tens of thousands of years ago, the painter must have stood in the same spot where I was standing now—and that, despite the passing of millennia, almost nothing had changed in here.
This realization gained dimension on my last full day. While visiting the pearl farms in Kuri Bay, I paused, transfixed by the gnarled, plump, almost cartoonish trunk of a boab tree, which cluster in places where Aboriginal communities once lived. Because of their medicinal properties and their seeds that can be made into bread, they are considered sacrosanct and appear often in Aboriginal art. A life-giving organism in an inhospitable land.
Though younger, the boab shares the same genus as the baobab, East Africa's Tree of Life. Theories abound, but scientists have yet to determine how the boab washed up on these distant shores. But the idea that this single tree, which protected and gave life to the ancient peoples of Africa, could then sustain a separate group of ancient peoples thousands of miles across a vast and violent ocean, is proof of the astonishing power of nature.
We seek out places like the Kimberley for their isolation, and yet their isolation highlights how connected we all are. The Kimberley is a truly wild place, where human history is merely a whisper over millennia. But it also shows us that our world isn't really so big after all.
Before you go
Onboard Seabourn Pursuit's sailings in the Kimberley, you have to be flexible. The area is known for its rapidly changing conditions, so even though the cruise line has permits to visit attractions like Paspaley Pearl Farm, home to the rarest and most expensive pearls on earth, and the King George Falls, whose serpent-like cascades appear in First Nations Australian mythology, visits are not guaranteed. On my trip we had to forgo snorkeling at Ashmore Reef, a marine park between Indonesia and Australia. But the ship has plenty of lectures and activities to keep guests engaged during sea days, both planned and unplanned. There's also a ton of outdoor space, with heated pools, bars, and terraces that have incredible views. Each room, too, has its own terrace where passengers can enjoy Seabourn's 24-hour room service and have breakfast in the sea air, looking out at the cliff faces.
This article appeared in the December 2024 issue of Condé Nast Traveler. Subscribe to the magazine here.
Originally Appeared on Condé Nast Traveler
