Luxury in the Kimberleys with Melissa Hoyer
The Kimberley: where the earth reminds you who’s boss
Melissa Hoyer heads to Western Australia’s wild and wonderful Kimberley and comes home a different person.
I’ll be honest with you. I almost didn’t pack the black-tie dress.
It felt slightly absurd, carefully folding a black tie situation into a bag already stuffed with outback-y stuff – cowboy hat, boots, SPF (factor: a lot) and insect repellent – destined for the Kimberley outback.
But I’m glad I did, because standing in Celebrity Tree Park in Kununurra on a warm May evening, wine in hand, stars overhead and Tina Arena’s voice floating across the red landscape singing Chains hadn’t been on this years bingo card.
The East Kimberley isn’t just a destination. It’s a commitment. I had flown for eight and a half hours and I am still in Australia. Thirty-plus years travelling this country for work and pleasure, and I thought I had a reasonable handle on it. The East Kimberley corrected that assumption in the most spectacular fashion imaginable.
Kununurra sits in the far north of Western Australia, and it demands a different kind of attention to the postcards I’d grown up with. Uluru gets the fridge magnet. The Kimberley is like being in another stratosphere.
From Perth to Kununurra
I’d flown into Kununurra from Perth and within a couple of hours of landing I was sitting on Country with a Miriwoong elder, against a Kimberley sunset, eating the most beautiful bush tucker-infused food I’d tasted in years.
Any serious Kimberley adventure should start with the ‘Cultural Culinary Experience’ hosted by Waringarri Aboriginal Arts – the oldest and a captivating art centre in WA and a Gold Medal winner at the 2024 WA Tourism Awards. You’re driven to a secret location, welcomed to Country by Miriwoong elders, treated to timeless storytelling and a sunset didgeridoo performance while we supped on bush tucker – kangaroo, crocodile, wattleseed, saltbush, barramundi.
It’s a warm, generous and soulful experience and set the tone for everything that follows.
The Bungle Bungle Range
Nothing – and I mean nothing – prepared me for the Bungle Bungle Range seen from the air. An Aviair scenic flight over the 300-metre beehive-striped domes of Purnululu National Park – a UNESCO World Heritage site, no less – is the kind of experience that makes you recalibrate your entire frame of reference for the word “extraordinary.” These formations took 360 million years to create. Non-Indigenous Australians only discovered them in the 1980s. Sit with that for a moment.
Lake Argyle
About 70 kilometres from Kununurra, Lake Argyle quietly holds the title of the largest man-made freshwater lake in the Southern Hemisphere. Think Sydney Harbour multiplied by twenty. When it was dammed in the 1970s, entire mountain ranges disappeared underwater, leaving dozens of wild, uninhabited islands in their wake. You can kayak past freshwater crocodiles (harmless, I was reliably told – I chose to believe this), spot any of 240 bird species, or simply recline in the most staggeringly beautiful infinity pool in Western Australia at Lake Argyle Resort, staring out at what feels like the edge of the world.
El Questro elegance
El Questro is a 700,000-acre wilderness property roughly 90 minutes from Kununurra – four-wheel drive essential, adventure mindset mandatory.
I stayed in brilliant safari-style structured tents at Emma Gorge Resort where you can swim in a swimming hole that belongs in a dream sequence or soak in the palm-fringed thermal pools at Zebedee Springs. But the deeper experience came from spending a day with the Ngarinyin people through Injiid Cultural Experiences, run by the local O’Reeri family.
On their Munbula River Cruise, we floated down the Chamberlain River – no phones, no cameras – while the family shared their history, dreamtime stories, traditional healing knowledge and their profound connection to this country. Around 40 per cent of the Kimberley’s population is Aboriginal, making this one of the most powerful places on earth to encounter the world’s oldest living culture. It really does shifts something in you.
Dinner under the Milky Way
When night falls in the Kimberley, the trick is to look up. The sky does things here that make you feel as though you’ve never actually seen stars before. We dined at the Gourmet Camp Over Experience – a fully off-grid, 100% sustainable secret dinner under a chandelier-strung long table set amongst ancient red rock faces and boab trees. Four courses, indigenous knowledge shared around a fire, the Milky Way blazing overhead.
It has, quite rightly, been voted the best tourism restaurant experience in Australia.
The Hoochery Distillery in WA
There was the Hoochery Distillery – WA’s oldest – where I learned that rum philosophy can be both deeply simple and deeply correct. There was dinner at the PumpHouse Restaurant beside Lake Kununurra with a surprise appearance from Buster, the three meter crocodile.
Originally built as a pump station as part of the Ord River Irrigation Scheme, The PumpHouse was converted into a restaurant in 2008 and it remains one of the most popular dining experiences in the East Kimberley.
Perched on the shores of Lake Kununurra, you dine among the original pumps of the Ord Pump Station – all industrial bones – with the menu built on relationships with local producers, changing with the seasons. Or you can come for the sundowner. As the sun disappears below the horizon, your day kind of dissolves. And in the Kimberley, that’s saying something.
When to go to the Kimberley
Aim for April through October – the dry season – when temperatures are kinder and the waterfalls are still running. If you can time it for May, the Ord Valley Muster is ten days of music, culture, community and corroboree set against the most spectacular natural backdrop in the country. This year marked its 25th anniversary, culminating in an open-air black-tie dinner under those impossibly clear stars, with Tina Arena, Boy & Bear and Budjerah performing. Sensational doesn’t begin to cover it.
That ‘black tie’ moment
On Saturday morning, before the black-tie festivities, some of our small group were up before sunrise for Yoga Afloat – I have to admit, I opted for a sleep in – a yoga class on the water on Lake Kununurra that drifted out toward Packsaddle Lagoon as the birds woke our yogis right up.
Then, somewhere around 9.30pm on the Saturday night of the Muster felt like the perfect distillation of what makes the Kimberley a real dicotemy.
It is, simultaneously, one of the most wild and elemental place I’ve been in Australia, and also a destination that knows exactly how to make you feel looked after.
I flew home to Sydney (after a night at the brand new and cool Hyde Perth) at an hour that should be illegal – from a Perth airport that was still dark and quiet but full of high-viz wearing fi-fo workers.
On the plane I pulled out notes I’d been filing all week and tried to make sense of what I’d seen and felt.
The Kimberley is the kind of place that makes the rest of Australia look like it’s still finding itself. It knows exactly what it is. Ancient, generous, staggeringly beautiful, and genuinely life-expanding. The always curious Kimberley has a way of making everywhere else feel slightly ordinary.
Go. Just do it.
Melissa Hoyer travelled as a guest of Tourism Western Australia.
