The Kimberley - Australia's Last Outback Frontier

Few regions of the world can offer an authentic outback experience like Western Australia's Kimberley. The Kimberley has it all ... vast, remote and unspoilt natural landscapes, spectacular coastlines, living indigenous Aboriginal cultures, and true outback towns with rich and colourful histories.

The Kimberley region is located in northern Western Australia, and stretches from Broome in the west to Kununurra in the east. To the west it is bordered by the Indian Ocean, to the north by the Timor Sea, to the east by the Northern Territory, and to the south by the Great Sandy Desert. The Kimberley covers a huge area of over 420,000 square kilometres, making it larger than Japan, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and the Australian state of Victoria.

The Kimberley is a remote outback region with a total population of around 25,000 inhabitants. It has only three towns with a population greater than 2,000: Broome, Derby and Kununurra. European settlement in the Kimberley is quite recent, and dates from around 1885 when the MacDonalds and the Duracks arrived to establish cattle stations there. When gold was discovered at Halls Creek, many other Europeans soon arrived. The gold rush was short lived, but some miners stayed on to establish the town of Halls Creek.

The Kimberley today is diverse, from the laid back cosmopolitan ambience of Broome, to the living indigenous culture of the Dampier Archipelago and the outback adventure of Kununurra. Apart from mining, other important industries in the Kimberley have included pearling (particularly in Broome until the 1940s), mining (the Argyle Diamond mine today produces 1/3 of the world's diamonds), agriculture (in the Ord River Irrigation Area near Lake Argyle) and of course tourism.

Broome is located on the shores of Roebuck Bay, and is the southern gateway to the Kimberley's spectacular wilderness regions. Established in the 1890