Western Australia
 Western Australia (WA) covers a third of the Australian continent; nearly the size of India, yet with less
than half a percent of that country's population. Always revelling in its isolation from the more populous eastern states, WA is, like them, primarily a suburban state: three-quarters of its 1.7 million inhabitants live within 100km of Perth and almost all the rest
live in communities strung along the coastline.
Perth itself retains the leisure-oriented vitality of a young city, while the port of Fremantle resonates with a largely European charm. South of Perth, the Margaret River Region 's wooded hills and trickling streams support the state's foremost wine-growing and
holiday-making area. To the southeast, the giant eucalypt forests around Pemberton further soften a land fed by heavy winter rains; the state's intensively farmed wheat belt stretches to the east, an interminable man-made prairie. Along the Southern Ocean's
storm-washed coastline, Albany is the primary settlement, a rejuvenated resort with the dramatic granite peaks of the Stirling Ranges just visible from its hilltop lookouts. To the east, past Esperance on the edge of the Great Australian Bight, the deserted monotony
of the Nullarbor Plain extends to South Australia, while inland the Eastern Goldfields' Kalgoorlie is the sole survivor of the century-old mineral boom on which WA's prosperity was originally built.
While the temperate southwest of WA has been relatively tamed by colonization, the north of the state is where you'll discover the raw appeal of the bush . The virtually unpopulated eastern deserts are blanketed with spinifex and sparse communities of Aborigines,
while the west coast's winds abate once you venture into the tropics north of Shark Bay , home of the amicable dolphins at Monkey Mia . From here, the mineral-rich Pilbara region fills the state's northwest shoulder with the often-overlooked gorges of the Hamersley
Ranges at its core. Visitors are also discovering the submarine spectacle of the Ningaloo Reef , lapping the North West Cape's beaches - some consider it superior to Queensland's Barrier Reef.
Northeast of the Pilbara, Broome , once the world's pearling capital, is indeed a jewel in the cyclone-swept coastline of the rugged Northwest, and an ideal preliminary to the Kimberley 's wilderness and hard-won cattle country. Generally cut off by floods in the
wet season, the Kimberley is regarded as Australia's last frontier, its convoluted and inaccessible coasts washed by enormous tides and inhabited only by isolated Aboriginal communities and crocodiles. On the way to the Northern Territory border, the surreal enigma
of the Bungle Bungle massif is one of WA's greatest natural wonders, carefully protected by minimal development. |
