Broome

Broome sits on a slender red pindan peninsula where the Great Sandy Desert finally gives up and meets the Indian Ocean, and the collision produces some of the strangest colour contrasts in Australia — ochre-red cliffs, white sand so fine it squeaks underfoot, and water that swings from turquoise to indigo depending on the tide. It is the biggest town in the Kimberley by a wide margin, but “biggest” here still means a population under fifteen thousand and a pace of life that slows visibly the moment you step off the plane. Corrugated-iron pearling sheds sit next to boutique hotels; road trains share the highway with tourists on hire-car laps of Cable Beach. Nowhere else in the state carries quite this mix of frontier grit and polish.

Our writer Bridie spent six nights in Broome in the middle of the dry season, timing the trip around a full moon to catch the Staircase to the Moon from Town Beach and still have days spare for Cable Beach, Chinatown and Gantheaume Point. She came back saying Broome is one of the few towns in the state that lives up to its own postcards — not because everything is polished, but because the two or three things it’s actually famous for are exactly as good in person as advertised, which is rarer than you’d think.

Broome and the Yawuru

The land Broome sits on is Yawuru country, and the town carries a second name — Rubibi — that predates the pearling boom by tens of thousands of years. The Yawuru people hold native title over much of the town and surrounding country, recognised by the Federal Court in 2006, and Yawuru rangers are directly involved in managing Roebuck Bay, Minyirr Park (the bushland reserve behind Cable Beach) and much of the coastal foreshore. Visitors will see Yawuru language on street signs and park interpretation boards, and it’s worth reading a few of them properly rather than walking past — the layered history here doesn’t get explained anywhere near as well in the brochures as it does on the ground.

Broome’s modern character is a genuine hybrid: it’s a Kimberley Aboriginal town, a former pearling frontier, and a tourism economy all layered on top of each other, and none of the three has managed to erase the other two. That tension is part of what makes it interesting rather than a problem to be smoothed over.

Cable Beach

Cable Beach is the reason most people first hear of Broome, and it earns the reputation. Twenty-two kilometres of hard white sand run north from the town’s western edge, wide enough at low tide to fit a small airport, backed by low dunes and the deep green of Minyirr Park. It’s named for the undersea telegraph cable that ran from here to Java in the 1880s, not for anything to do with the beach itself, which is a fact most visitors never bother to check and one worth knowing before someone asks you at dinner.

The genuine Broome icon is the sunset camel train: strings of camels plodding along the shoreline in silhouette as the sun drops into the Indian Ocean, running most evenings in the dry season with a couple of long-established operators taking bookings. It photographs exactly as well as every image you’ve seen of it, and it’s popular enough that turning up without a booking in peak season (June to August) is a real risk. The northern end allows four-wheel-drive access and is the quieter, more local stretch; the southern end near the resorts is where the crowds concentrate. Either way, check tide times before you go — a beach this flat changes character completely between low and high water, and the vehicle-access section closes when the tide is in.

A pearling town: Chinatown, the Japanese Cemetery and Pearl Luggers

Long before tourism, Broome was the centre of the world’s pearling industry, and almost everything distinctive about the town’s character traces back to it. From the 1880s, luggers worked Roebuck Bay and the surrounding coast for pearl shell — the mother-of-pearl used for buttons and inlay work worldwide — and at the industry’s peak Broome supplied most of the planet’s supply. The workforce that built it was never Anglo-Australian: Japanese divers, Chinese and Malay crew, Koepangers from Timor, Filipino and Aboriginal labour did the genuinely dangerous work of hardhat diving, often to depths and durations that killed men outright or slowly, through decompression sickness. That multicultural workforce is the reason Broome still feels different from every other Kimberley town — it was built as a working port city with people from half of Asia in it, long before “multicultural Australia” was a phrase anyone used.

Chinatown, the old commercial heart of town, still has the low corrugated-iron pearling-era buildings and laneways (Johnny Chi Lane is the one everybody photographs), and Sun Pictures — an open-air cinema that opened in 1916 and is widely said to be the oldest picture garden still operating anywhere in the world — still screens films under the stars most nights. The Japanese Cemetery on the edge of town holds close to a thousand graves, the great majority pearl divers who died young, and it’s one of the most quietly affecting sites in the north-west. The Pearl Luggers museum, built around two restored pearling vessels, is the best single stop for understanding how brutal and how commercially vital the industry actually was; go before Chinatown rather than after, because it reframes everything else you’ll see.

The Staircase to the Moon

The single most distinctive natural spectacle in Broome is one most visitors have never heard of before they arrive. On the nights around a full moon, between roughly March and October, an extreme low tide can expose the flat mudflats of Roebuck Bay at exactly the moment the moon rises. The result, viewed from the right angle, is an optical illusion: the moon’s reflection breaks across the ripples in the wet mud into a series of stepped, silvery bands that genuinely look like a staircase climbing toward the moon. It only works because of the specific combination of Broome’s enormous tidal range, the shallow slope of Roebuck Bay, and the timing of moonrise against low water — conditions that don’t line up cleanly everywhere, which is why the phenomenon is so strongly associated with this one stretch of coast.

Town Beach is the standard viewing spot, and on Staircase nights a night market sets up on the foreshore — food stalls, local stallholders, a genuinely nice community atmosphere while everyone waits for moonrise. Exact dates and times shift every month and are published well in advance by Tourism Western Australia and the local visitor centre; it is worth building a Broome trip around one of these nights rather than treating it as a lucky extra, because missing it by a day or two means missing it entirely until next month.

Gantheaume Point and the dinosaur footprints

A short drive south of Cable Beach, Gantheaume Point is a headland of deep-red pindan cliffs dropping into turquoise water, and on its own the colour contrast would justify the trip. What makes it genuinely remarkable is what’s under the rock shelf below: a trackway of dinosaur footprints, estimated at well over a hundred million years old, pressed into the exposed reef at the base of the point. The real prints are only visible at the very lowest tides of the year and are easy to miss even then, so a cast replica has been set into the concrete near the lighthouse for visitors who can’t time their trip to a spring low tide. Anastasia’s Pool, a rock pool carved into the point decades ago, is a pleasant spot to cool off at low tide and a good excuse to linger and watch the light change on the cliffs.

Broome Bird Observatory and Roebuck Bay

Roebuck Bay, the tidal bay Broome sits on, is one of the most important shorebird sites on the planet, and it’s a Ramsar-listed wetland of international significance as a direct result. Every year hundreds of thousands of migratory shorebirds — species that breed in Siberia and Arctic Russia and fly the length of the East Asian–Australasian Flyway — stop or overwinter on the bay’s vast tidal mudflats, making it one of the largest concentrations of migratory waders anywhere in the world. The Broome Bird Observatory, on the bay’s eastern shore about twenty-five kilometres from town, runs guided walks, courses and basic accommodation, and even a casual visit with binoculars from the mangrove edge at the right tide is genuinely spectacular. It’s an easy site to skip if you’re only here for the beach, and a real mistake to skip if you have any interest in birds at all.

Kimberley gateway: the Gibb River Road and Horizontal Falls

Broome’s airport is the main air gateway to the whole Kimberley, which makes the town the practical starting point for most of the region’s big-ticket experiences even though the true wilderness starts hours further east. Seaplane and boat tours to the Horizontal Falls — the tidal phenomenon in Talbot Bay where the Kimberley’s huge tides force water through narrow gorges hard enough to create a standing sea-level difference on either side — run out of Broome as often as they do out of Derby, and for many visitors a day trip to the Falls is the single most expensive and most memorable thing they do in the north-west. The Gibb River Road proper, the 660-kilometre red-dirt crossing of the Kimberley to Kununurra, starts its western end near Derby rather than Broome itself, but Broome is where most self-drive travellers hire their 4WD and get it checked before committing to the corrugations. Treat Broome as the staging point and the Gibb as the main event further on.

Crocodile safety

Both saltwater and freshwater crocodiles are present in Kimberley waterways, and Broome is no exception — Roebuck Bay’s mangrove creeks and the tidal reaches around town are known croc habitat, even if sightings in the main tourist areas are uncommon. Cable Beach itself is swum by locals and tourists alike, but signage around river mouths, creeks and mangrove-fringed water anywhere in the region should be taken seriously rather than treated as council box-ticking. The standing local advice is simple: don’t swim in creeks, estuaries or mangrove-lined water, stay back from the edge when fishing off rocks or jetties, and never assume a stretch of water is croc-free just because it looks empty. It rarely stops anyone enjoying Cable Beach, but it’s a genuinely different mental checklist to the one you’d run on a Perth beach.

Food and where to stay

Broome’s accommodation runs from resort-style hotels strung along Cable Beach, through mid-range motels closer to town, to caravan parks that fill fast in the dry-season peak between June and August — book well ahead if you’re travelling then, particularly around a Staircase to the Moon weekend. Chinatown has the best concentration of casual eating — Asian noodle houses, pearl-meat dishes on more than one menu, and a genuinely good coffee scene for a town this size. Matso’s Broome Brewery, housed in a heritage pearling-era building, is the closest thing the town has to an obligatory stop — a working brewery with a wide verandah and mango beer on tap. Cable Beach itself has resort bars built for sunset drinking, which is exactly what most people use them for.

Getting there and when to visit

Broome International Airport has direct flights from Perth year-round and seasonal direct services from other capitals during the dry season, and for most visitors flying is the only realistic option. Driving is a genuine undertaking: from Perth it’s around 2,200 kilometres up the North West Coastal Highway and Great Northern Highway, typically five to seven days with stops through Exmouth and Ningaloo, Karratha and Port Hedland; from Darwin it’s roughly 1,900 kilometres via Kununurra, Halls Creek, Fitzroy Crossing and Derby, usually four to six days.

The dry season, May to October, is when Broome works as most visitors expect it to: warm days, low humidity, reliable roads, and the Staircase to the Moon nights running through most of that window. The wet season, November to April, is a genuinely different place — monsoonal storms, oppressive humidity, and a real cyclone risk that the Bureau of Meteorology tracks closely from December onward. Several tour operators close entirely over the wet and the town empties of visitors almost completely. There’s a case for a wet-season visit if you want Broome without the crowds, but go in eyes open rather than expecting a dry-season experience with fewer people in it.

Why we keep coming back

Bridie’s last night in Broome landed on the Staircase to the Moon, and the thing that stuck with her wasn’t the moonlight on the mud — genuinely as good as advertised — but the crowd on Town Beach: families with eskies and folding chairs who’d clearly done this a dozen times before, tourists seeing it for the first time, everyone facing the same direction waiting for the same thing to happen. That’s Broome in one scene: a town that could have flogged its two or three famous attractions into something soulless and glossy, and somehow hasn’t. Cable Beach at sunset, the Japanese Cemetery in the quiet of the morning, the staircase of light across Roebuck Bay — they’re all still worth the very long way you have to travel to see them.