Kununurra

Kununurra is the East Kimberley in one town — a pocket of mango orchards, boab trees and red ranges on the edge of Lake Kununurra, with the Ord River pouring out the back of it and Lake Argyle, Australia's largest artificial lake, sitting 70 kilometres south. It's where you base yourself for Purnululu National Park (the Bungle Bungle Range), Mitchell Falls scenic flights, the eastern end of the Gibb River Road and the cruises across the Argyle inland sea. The town itself is small — about 6,000 people — but it punches well above its weight on what you can do in a 100 km radius.

Our writer Sam spent ten days here in late June mapping this guide, sleeping in a caravan park on the lake and driving the loop from Kelly's Knob at sunrise to the Hoochery Distillery at four in the afternoon when the rum tastings finally start. The Kimberley dry season is the reason most people come, and Sam reckons the light between May and September is the best he's photographed anywhere in Australia — high blue sky, no humidity, ranges glowing terracotta at golden hour, and not a drop of rain for five months running.

Why Kununurra is the East Kimberley's natural base

The town was built from scratch in 1961 as the service centre for the Ord River Irrigation Scheme — the project that dammed the Ord twice to create both Lake Kununurra (the town's foreshore) and Lake Argyle (the storage dam, 70 km south, eighteen times the volume of Sydney Harbour at full supply). Sixty-odd years on, the irrigation farms are still here — sandalwood, chia, sugar, melons and the famous purple mangoes — but tourism has quietly become the second pillar of the economy. The combination is unusual: you can spend the morning on a boat with freshwater crocodiles and the afternoon driving past green farm rows that look like the Riverina dropped into the Kimberley.

What makes Kununurra the right base, rather than Broome or Halls Creek, is geography. Purnululu's Bellburn airstrip is a 35-minute scenic flight away. The Mitchell Plateau is an hour by air. Lake Argyle is an easy day trip. The Gibb River Road's eastern entry at El Questro Station is 100 kilometres west on bitumen. And the Northern Territory border is 40 kilometres east, which means if you're driving the Savannah Way, Kununurra is the last serious resupply stop before Katherine, 510 km on. You can fly in from Perth, Darwin or Broome (Airnorth, Virgin and Qantas all service the airport in dry season) and pick up a 4WD without having to factor in two days of driving from the nearest capital.

Lake Argyle and the Ord River — the headline experience

If you do one thing from Kununurra, do the Lake Argyle sunset cruise. The lake is so big that from the water it looks like an inland sea — 1,000 square kilometres at normal capacity, expanding to over 2,000 in big wet seasons. Lake Argyle Cruises runs a sunset trip that motors past the rock-wallaby colonies on the limestone islands, drops you for a swim mid-lake (yes, with freshwater crocodiles — they're shy, the locals do it every weekend), then turns the boat broadside to the sun for the actual sundown. Sam did it on a Tuesday in late June and there were maybe 40 people on the boat, all silent for the last fifteen minutes because the colour was that good.

The other half of the headline product is the Ord River itself. The 55-kilometre stretch from the Argyle dam wall down to Lake Kununurra is technically a national park — one of the most water-rich stretches in northern Australia — and several operators run full-day boat trips that cover it end to end. You'll pass freshwater crocs sunning on logs, johnstone's pythons curled in the paperbarks, jabirus, brolgas, and the eastern wall of the Carr Boyd Range. Most cruises include a stop for billy tea and damper on a sandbar, which sounds twee until you're actually sitting on warm sand with a tin mug at 11am and nothing else around for fifty kilometres.

Town walks — Kelly's Knob and the Mirima “mini Bungles”

Kununurra has two short walks that everyone should do on the first morning, before the day heats up. Kelly's Knob is the rocky outcrop on the northern edge of town — ten-minute walk up, 360-degree views across the irrigation flats, Lake Kununurra and the Carr Boyd Range, and the only spot in town where the dawn light hits the ranges before it hits the streets. Take a torch if you're doing sunrise — the path is rough.

Mirima National Park sits right on the eastern edge of town — you can walk to it from some accommodation. The locals call it the “mini Bungles” because the eroded sandstone domes look like a scaled-down Purnululu, with the same orange-and-grey banding from layers of silica and lichen. There are three short walks: Demboong Banan (a 400-metre climb to a lookout), Derdbe-gerring Banan and Looking at Plants Walk. The whole park is shaded by mid-morning, and Parks WA maintains the trails to a high standard. Sam reckons Mirima at first light, before tour groups, is one of the most underrated walks in the state.

Purnululu and the Bungle Bungle Range

The Bungle Bungle Range — the orange-and-black striped beehive domes inside Purnululu National Park — is the East Kimberley's UNESCO-listed showpiece, and it's a 35-minute scenic flight from Kununurra airport. You can also drive in (the access track from the Great Northern Highway is 53 km of high-clearance 4WD-only dirt, two-and-a-half hours each way in good conditions), but for most travellers the flight option makes more sense: you see the entire range from above, get dropped at Bellburn airstrip, walk into Cathedral Gorge and Piccaninny Creek, and fly back the same afternoon.

The domes themselves are 350 million years old, eroded over the last 20 million into the shapes you've seen on postcards. The black bands are cyanobacteria, the orange is iron-stained silica, and you're not allowed to climb on them — they're structurally fragile and culturally significant to the Kija and Jaru traditional owners. Cathedral Gorge, a natural amphitheatre at the end of a short walk in, has acoustics that make the guides demonstrate by clapping once at the back — it bounces for nearly ten seconds.

The Gibb River Road, El Questro and Emma Gorge

The Gibb River Road — the legendary 660-km dirt track between Kununurra and Derby — starts (or ends, depending on direction) 100 km west of town, and the first stretch into El Questro Wilderness Park is bitumen as far as the station turnoff. El Questro is a million-acre former cattle station turned tourist operation, with Emma Gorge (the famous palm-fringed swimming hole with a drip waterfall at the far end), Zebedee Springs (a thermal pool open mornings only) and El Questro Gorge all reachable on day trips from Kununurra if you've got a 4WD or join a tour.

Even if you're not driving the whole Gibb, doing the El Questro day loop — Emma Gorge in the morning, Zebedee Springs late morning, lunch at the Station, an arvo at El Questro Gorge — gives you a real taste of why people plan year-round to do this drive. Note that the property charges a Wilderness Park permit per vehicle on top of accommodation/activity fees, and the river crossings into the gorges are seasonal — check conditions at the station gate before committing to a track.

Hoochery, sandalwood and the food side of Kununurra

The food story in Kununurra is genuinely interesting. The Hoochery Distillery is the oldest legal still in Western Australia, started in 1995 by Spike Dessert (yes, that's his real name), producing rum from Ord Valley molasses. The tastings happen most afternoons in dry season — the Ord River Rum has won national medals, and the cafe attached does a half-decent pulled-pork roll if you're starving by 3pm.

The Sandalwood Factory, a few kilometres out of town, runs farm tours that take you through the plantation, the distillation process and the gift shop — Indian sandalwood oil is the highest-value crop in the Ord, and the export market into India and the Middle East is what keeps the lights on for some of the bigger farms. And the produce stalls along Weaber Plain Road through dry season are worth a slow loop: chia bags, mango chutney, dried bush limes, sometimes fresh barramundi from the lake fisheries. The purple mangoes (R2E2 variety) are usually ready November through January, which is also wet-season, so unless you're brave you'll be eating them dried.

Wet vs dry — when to come (and when not to)

The Kimberley splits its year into two seasons, full stop. The dry — May through September — is when you come. Cool nights (down to 12°C in July), warm dry days in the high 20s to low 30s, almost no rain, and every road and gorge in the region open. Lake Argyle's at peak level after the wet, the Ord is running clear, and the tours all run full schedules. Book accommodation well ahead — the town effectively triples in population, and the better caravan sites and lodges sell out months in advance for July and August.

The wet — November through April — is a different proposition. Daytime temperatures hit the high 30s, humidity is brutal, and the unsealed roads (most of them) close for weeks at a time when the monsoon trough sits over the East Kimberley. Some operators close completely. The upside, for the right traveller, is dramatic green landscapes, full waterfalls, electrical storms over Lake Argyle, and prices that drop by 30 per cent or more. The shoulder weeks — late April, early May, late September, October — can be magic if you time them right, but the wet hangs on harder some years than others, so check road status with the Shire of Wyndham-East Kimberley before committing.

Where Kununurra fits in a wider Kimberley trip

If you've got a fortnight in the dry, the classic route is fly into Broome, drive the Gibb River Road over five to seven days, finish at Kununurra, fly out from there (or vice versa). If you're driving the Savannah Way from Cairns, Kununurra is the obvious overnight stop between Katherine and Halls Creek — treat it as three to five nights minimum, not an overnight. And if you're combining the East Kimberley with elsewhere in WA, check our guides to Broome, Karijini and Exmouth and Ningaloo — the three together give you a fair sweep of what makes the WA north so different from anywhere else in the country.

Sam's last word on the place, from the notebook: “Kununurra is small enough that you'll see the same faces at the bakery every morning, but the country around it is big enough that you'll never run out of one more thing to do.” Plan four nights if you can spare them, five if Purnululu is on the list, seven if you want a real go at Lake Argyle and El Questro both. We reckon it's the best small-town base in WA, and the photos you'll bring home will be the ones you actually print and put on the wall.