Broome and the Kimberley, Western Australia travel guide: Tourism boom for remote destination

A candle is burning on the mudflats, and its flame is the moon. This conflagration burns a hole in the black velvet sky, drawing me instinctively to it. If I were to stand up from where I am, seated behind the railings at the Mangrove Hotel, I might descend into the scrub below, cross a dirt track, pick my way through the mangroves secreting in their tangled roots mudskippers and pipis, and walk out into the waterless bay. Somewhere near the horizon I would reach those golden steps, cast in bars of gold upon the wet sand, and climb them one by one until I reached the moon.

But the pathway, when full moon and low tide conspire to imprint a gilded staircase on the exposed mudflats of Roebuck Bay, is all an illusion. In a few hours' time the mighty tide will surge back into the bay, washing away every last trace of moonshine.

How swiftly the spell is broken. Chatter strikes up again; the band begins to play; patrons return to their tables and order drinks with which to toast their good fortune. And indeed, these travellers who have made it all the way to this languid frontier town – one of Australia's remotest outposts – are initiates of a most charmed and exclusive fraternity. For a journey to Australia's Kimberley isn't a spontaneous affair; it requires time, money, planning – and an abiding spirit of discovery.

But the rewards for such effort are immeasurable, for this is the place where the Australia of our collective imagination is made manifest. It is a collision of reddest earth and bluest sea, explosive sunsets and blazing moonrises. It is a primordial kingdom in which Indigenous culture is embedded rather than implied, where dirt roads stretch on forever, where danger feels imminent. It is a country that will stain your clothes (literally) and your psyche (indelibly). Can anyone say they've seen Australia if they haven't yet laid eyes on the Kimberley?

THE BOOM IN BROOME

Happily, the fraternity's membership is growing, thanks largely to the pandemic; unwittingly, it has helped establish this mythic destination as a feature of the mainstream tourist map. Out on the cloudy turquoise swirl of Roebuck Bay – irreconcilable with last night's waterless wasteland – a pair of honeymooners from Perth blink against the sun and smile at this unforeseen providence as we glide towards a pod of rare snubfin dolphins. They had little inkling, they say, of the heavenly honeymoon awaiting them after their wedding last week; if not for COVID, they would have celebrated their nuptials in New Zealand or America instead.

"It's forced us to explore Australia," the bride says.

We're cruising deep into Yawuru Nagulagun Roebuck Bay Marine Park, where sediment-dense waters conceal an abundance of rare and delightful creatures: dugongs, turtles, manta rays, sea snakes and those "snubbies", declared a separate species from their close cousin, the Irrawaddy dolphin, in 2005. Soon migrating humpback whales will arrive for their annual sojourn; and as the year draws to a close, immense flocks of migratory seabirds will clog the east-Asian Australasian flyway in their haste to escape the coming winter in Siberia, Northern China and the Arctic Sea. Alighting in Broome, they will feast for months on the bay's nourishing benthic mudflats.