Broome

Whose country this is

Broome sits on Yawuru country, and that connection is a matter of formal legal record as well as tens of thousands of years of continuous presence. In 2006, the Federal Court formally recognized Yawuru native title over Broome and the surrounding area, handing down the determination at Town Beach — a moment that followed a claim the Yawuru community had first lodged back in 1994, in the years after the Mabo decision reopened native title as a live legal question nationally. Yawuru people remain deeply involved in managing country around Broome today, including a formal role in the joint management of local conservation areas.

That history is worth carrying into everything else this page covers — the beach, the pearling story, the moonrise phenomenon — since all of it plays out on country the Yawuru have lived on, and now formally hold recognized rights to, for far longer than the pearling boom or the tourism industry that followed it. Yawuru cultural tours and guided experiences do operate around Broome, a genuine, direct way to hear more about this country's history and significance than a general guide like this one can responsibly summarize on its own.

Cable Beach and its sunset camels

Cable Beach — named for the undersea telegraph cable laid between Broome and Java back in 1889 — runs for roughly 22 kilometres of white sand backed by red pindan cliffs, and it's the single image most visitors associate with the town. The beach's famous camel rides are a genuine, long-running local tradition rather than a manufactured tourist gimmick: introduced in the early 1980s by Abdul Latif Casley, who arrived in Broome with camels from Katherine, with the now-iconic sunset timing added a few years later, in 1987, at a local hotelier's suggestion. Today a couple of operators run the rides, distinguishable mostly by the colour of their camel blankets, leading strings of camels along the sand as the sun drops into the Indian Ocean behind them.

Beyond the camels, Cable Beach is simply a very good beach by any measure — wide, calm enough for swimming through much of the dry season, and long enough that it never feels crowded even at its busiest end near the resorts. Four-wheel-drive access along parts of the sand is popular too, though as with anywhere else in the tropical north, it's worth checking current crocodile and marine-stinger advice before swimming, since conditions and warnings shift seasonally.

Watching the sunset from Cable Beach has become a genuine local ritual well beyond the camel rides themselves — a run of beachfront bars and restaurants along the dunes fill up through the dry season specifically for the sunset show, and it's entirely normal to see locals and visitors alike simply parked up facing west with a drink in hand, camels or no camels. That everyday, unhurried version of the ritual is worth building into a Broome evening even if you've already done the camel ride earlier in the week.

A pearling port built on many hands

Broome's identity is inseparable from pearling, and the industry's scale here by the early 20th century was genuinely enormous: the town grew into one of the world's largest pearling centres, supplying something in the order of 80 percent of the world's pearl shell by 1914 — destined mostly for mother-of-pearl buttons rather than gem pearls — with several hundred pearling luggers working the surrounding waters at the industry's peak.

That industry ran on a genuinely multicultural workforce, and it's worth being specific rather than vague about who actually did the work. By 1900, Broome's pearling crews were drawn overwhelmingly from Malay and Filipino divers, alongside a substantial and growing Japanese contingent — whose share of the workforce kept climbing through the 1920s and into the Second World War — with smaller numbers of Chinese and Aboriginal crew rounding out the boats. It's also worth noting honestly that this multicultural, largely voluntary labour force followed an earlier and considerably darker period of the industry, when Aboriginal people, including women, were forced into pearling labour under conditions widely documented as exploitative — a history that shouldn't be glossed over in favour of the industry's later, more celebrated multicultural chapter.

That layered history is still visible in the town today — in its long-standing Chinatown precinct, in family names that trace back to Japanese, Malay and Chinese pearling-era arrivals, and in a local culture that's genuinely more ethnically layered than most other towns in regional Western Australia, a direct legacy of a boom industry that depended on labour drawn from across Asia and the Pacific. It's visible in the architecture too: much of old Broome was built in a distinctive tropical style — corrugated iron, wide shaded verandahs and louvred timber shutters designed to cope with the wet-season heat and humidity — a look now generally referred to as "Broome style," and one of the more visually distinctive small-town streetscapes anywhere in the country.

It's worth walking Chinatown with all of that in mind rather than treating it as just a shopping strip between the pearl showrooms — the precinct's name and its buildings are a direct, physical trace of the pearling-era workforce this section covers, not a later, decorative addition to the town.

The industry's real cost

Pearl diving was dangerous work, and Broome's history doesn't shy away from that. Divers faced decompression sickness — "the bends" — as a routine occupational hazard long before it was well understood or safely managed, and cyclones periodically devastated the pearling fleet at anchor. The single worst of these came on 26 March 1935, when a cyclone destroyed around 20 luggers and damaged a further 16, killing well over a hundred men — commonly cited at somewhere around 140 — the large majority of them pearling crew caught at sea or moored offshore when the storm hit.

Broome's Japanese Cemetery, with well over 900 graves, is widely cited as the largest Japanese cemetery outside Japan itself, and it stands today as the most direct physical reminder of that cost — many of those buried here died of decompression sickness or in the pearling fleet's periodic cyclone disasters, a sobering, quietly moving site worth visiting with that context in mind rather than treating it as a passing curiosity.

From mother-of-pearl buttons to cultured pearls

The pearl-shell button trade that built Broome collapsed almost overnight in the mid-1950s, once plastic buttons became cheap and widely available, and the town's pearling industry had to reinvent itself or disappear. It reinvented itself: Nicholas Paspaley, from a Broome pearling family, pivoted toward cultured South Sea pearls — pearls grown deliberately inside oysters rather than harvested for their shell — partnering with a Japanese businessman to establish Australia's first cultured pearl farm at Kuri Bay, well north of Broome, in 1956.

That shift from shell to gem is the reason Broome's pearling industry still exists in a meaningful, ongoing way today rather than surviving only as a museum piece — cultured South Sea pearls remain a genuine, high-value local industry, and Paspaley in particular grew from that 1956 pivot into one of the best-known names in pearls worldwide. Pearl showrooms and galleries around town, several tracing their own history back to the pearling era, are a natural, non-invented way to see that continuity for yourself.

Sun Pictures, the world's oldest outdoor cinema

Sun Pictures is a genuinely remarkable survivor of Broome's early 20th-century boom years: the building itself dates to 1903, originally built as a shop, before being converted and opened as a picture garden on 9 December 1916. It's recognized as the oldest picture-garden style outdoor cinema still operating anywhere in the world, a claim formalised with Guinness World Record recognition in 2004.

Watching a film under the stars here, deckchairs on the original grass floor and a corrugated-iron structure around you, is a genuinely different cinema experience from anything most visitors will have had before — and one that connects directly back to the same boom-town era that built the pearling luggers and the Japanese Cemetery, rather than a modern add-on built for tourists.

The Staircase to the Moon

The Staircase to the Moon is one of the more genuinely unusual natural phenomena on the whole Australian coastline, and it's specific to a narrow set of conditions: when a full moon rises over Roebuck Bay's exposed tidal mudflats at exactly the right very-low tide, the moon's reflection breaks across the rippled mud in a series of steps, creating an optical effect that looks precisely like its name suggests. It only happens a handful of nights each month, roughly between March and October, when the full moon and the lowest tides line up, and it's visible from a short list of specific vantage points around town, including Town Beach and the Roebuck Bay lookout near the Mangrove Hotel.

Broome's Town Beach precinct times a regular night market to the best viewing night each month through the season, which has become one of the more popular ways locals and visitors alike take in the phenomenon together, food stalls and all, rather than standing alone on a dark beach waiting for moonrise. The same effect can occur at a handful of other locations along Western Australia's north-west coast where the geography suits it, but Broome's version, framed by Roebuck Bay, is by far the best known.

A gateway to the wider Kimberley

Broome sits at the western edge of the Kimberley, one of the most remote and sparsely populated regions in the entire country, and it's the natural starting point for two of the Kimberley's biggest drawcards — though both are genuinely separate, multi-day trips rather than something to squeeze into a Broome stopover. Purnululu National Park, home to the striped, beehive-shaped Bungle Bungle domes and UNESCO World Heritage-listed in its own right, sits several hundred kilometres inland, most commonly approached via Kununurra rather than directly from Broome, with a final stretch of unsealed track that typically requires a high-clearance or 4WD vehicle. The Gibb River Road, a roughly 660-kilometre unsealed route connecting Derby (a short drive from Broome) to Kununurra, is the Kimberley's other marquee trip — a proper 4WD expedition through some of the country's most dramatic gorge country, not a casual day drive.

Both are worth knowing about as reasons a Broome visit might extend into something considerably longer, but this page deliberately doesn't try to cover either in depth — they're substantial destinations in their own right, and treating Broome as a quick springboard into a rushed one-day Kimberley taste generally does neither the town nor the wider region justice.

The Dampier Peninsula, north of Broome along a partly unsealed road, is a gentler, shorter version of the same "go further into the Kimberley" impulse — Aboriginal-owned communities and a handful of low-key camps line the peninsula's red-and-turquoise coastline, offering a genuinely worthwhile few days for visitors who want a taste of the wider Kimberley's remoteness and colour without committing to the full Gibb River Road expedition.

Beyond the beach: crocodiles, dinosaurs and a very remote brewery

A handful of other Broome attractions round out a longer stay well beyond Cable Beach and the pearling history. Gantheaume Point, a short drive from town, is known for genuine dinosaur footprints — trackways left in rock roughly 120 to 130 million years ago, visible along stretches of this coastline at very low tide, with plaster cast replicas kept accessible near the point for visitors whose timing doesn't line up with the tide itself. The same point is a good, easy spot to see the region's signature visual contrast up close: red pindan cliffs meeting white sand and startlingly turquoise water, a combination that recurs right along this stretch of coast and out onto the Dampier Peninsula further north.

Malcolm Douglas Crocodile Park, operating since the early 1980s, gives a safe, close look at saltwater crocodiles for visitors who'd understandably rather not encounter one in the wild, while Matso's Broome Brewery — which markets itself as Australia's most remote brewery — has built a genuine local following for its tropical-fruit and spice-inflected beers, mango and chilli among them, alongside a broader, more conventional range.

Broome's pearling heritage is also collected and explained properly at a couple of small, dedicated museums and galleries around town, worth an hour or two for visitors who want the fuller version of the story this page can only summarize — pearling lugger models, historic diving suits and the personal stories of the divers themselves, alongside pearl showrooms where the modern cultured-pearl industry is on full display. Between the crocodile park, the brewery, the pearling museums and Sun Pictures, Broome has genuinely more to fill a multi-day stay than its reputation as a quick Cable Beach stopover might suggest.

Getting there, and when to go

Broome is reached from Perth by a direct flight of a little over two and a half hours, covering close to 1,700 kilometres — genuinely the practical way most visitors arrive, given how much longer and more demanding the equivalent drive is by road. Broome International Airport sits close to the town centre, and flying is comfortably the standard approach; driving remains an option for travelers already road-tripping the wider Western Australian coast, but it's a serious multi-day undertaking rather than a weekend dash.

Like the Northern Territory's Top End, Broome runs on a tropical wet-season/dry-season clock rather than four temperate seasons — a wet season, roughly November through April, bringing heat, humidity and the occasional cyclone, and a dry season, roughly May through October, that's considerably more comfortable and is when the great majority of visitors choose to come. That dry-season window also happens to line up with the Staircase to the Moon's viewing season and the more reliable months for Gantheaume Point's low-tide dinosaur footprints, which makes it the natural default answer for when to plan a Broome trip.

That said, the wet season has its own genuine appeal for visitors prepared for the heat and the occasional washed-out plan: dramatic tropical storms build over the ocean most afternoons, the surrounding country turns green in a way the dry season never shows, and prices and crowds both ease off considerably compared with the peak winter months. It's a reasonable trade for travelers who'd rather see a quieter, moodier version of Broome than the one most tourism photography shows.