Exmouth

Aboriginal people have lived on the North West Cape for tens of thousands of years, and excavations in the gorges of Cape Range have found evidence of coastal life reaching back tens of thousands of years. Dutch ships charted this coast in the seventeenth century, and the British navigator Phillip Parker King named Exmouth Gulf in 1818 after Viscount Exmouth. Pastoral leases spread across the cape from the late nineteenth century, whalers worked the waters beyond the reef, and wrecks on its outer edge led to the building of the Vlamingh Head lighthouse in 1912.

The Second World War brought the first large works. American submarines used a refuelling base on Exmouth Gulf, an operation code-named Potshot, and an airfield was built at Learmonth to the south. The town itself is barely sixty years old. In 1963 Australia and the United States agreed to build a very low frequency radio station at the tip of the cape to signal submarines at sea, and Exmouth was laid out from nothing in 1964 to house the families who ran it. The ring of masts has dominated the horizon ever since.

American numbers fell away in the 1990s and the station passed into Australian hands, while tourism grew around the reef, protected as a marine park in 1987 and listed as World Heritage in 2011. In March 1999 Cyclone Vance crossed the town and wrecked much of it. Exmouth was rebuilt, and in April 2023 a total solar eclipse passed over the cape and more than 20,000 people watched it from a town of a few thousand.

Exmouth is a company town that became a tourist town, and both histories show. Street names and the base at the cape's tip recall the American and Australian navies, while the working year now follows the reef. Crews and skippers arrive for the whale shark season, spotter pilots fly the coast looking for shadows in the water, and much of the workforce is seasonal, thinning out when the heat and the cyclone season come.

Fishing is close to a local religion. Boats sit on trailers in front yards, the gulf and the outer reef are fished for mackerel, emperor and billfish, and an annual game-fishing tournament is one of the fixed points of the calendar. Diving clubs, turtle-monitoring volunteers and reef conservation groups take up much of the rest of the social life, and a strong environmental streak runs through local politics, with proposals for industry in Exmouth Gulf regularly opposed.

Manners are informal even by Australian standards, down to bare feet in the supermarket and the habit of lifting a finger from the steering wheel to passing drivers on the empty roads. The cape lies in the country of the Baiyungu and Yinigudura peoples, and Aboriginal heritage in the range and along the coast is protected by law; visitors are asked to leave rock shelters, shell middens and any artefacts exactly as they find them.

About 2,500 people live in Exmouth, which makes it one of the larger settlements on a very empty stretch of coast and still small enough for most residents to know one another. The population swells to around 6,000 at the height of the tourist season with visitors, tour crews and caravanners, and contracts again in the summer heat.

Three things pay the bills. Charter boats, dive shops, caravan parks and motels employ a large share of the town; the communication station and its contractors provide steady work; and prawn trawlers and rock lobster boats fish out of the harbour. Services are those of a remote town — a district high school, a small hospital, a supermarket, a police station and an airport half an hour to the south — and specialist appointments usually mean a flight or a long drive.

Life is shaped by distance and weather. Freight comes up the highway from Perth, so groceries and fuel cost more than in the south; water is drawn from bores beneath the range; and from November households check cyclone plans, clear their yards and keep supplies in the cupboard. Days start early to beat the heat, the pub and the boat ramps are the social centres, and the reef is a short drive rather than a holiday. Housing for seasonal workers is a persistent problem, as is the pressure that growing visitor numbers put on the reef and the park.

Exmouth eats what it catches. Prawns from the gulf, trawled by the local fleet, are the town's signature, along with western rock lobster and reef fish such as red emperor, coral trout and spangled emperor. Spanish mackerel taken off the cape turns up grilled, smoked and in fish and chips, and many visitors cook their own catch at the barbecues in the caravan parks.

The choice of places to eat is small, as it is in any town this far from anywhere. The central strip holds a bakery, cafés, takeaway and pizza shops and the hotel's dining room, a few more cafés and bars sit at the boat harbour, and food vans appear for the season and go when it ends. Coffee is taken as seriously here as it is in Perth.

Almost everything that is not seafood arrives by road from Perth, which is why groceries cost more and why fresh produce depends on the truck. Self-catering is the standard arrangement, since nearly all accommodation has a kitchen, and campers in the national park have to bring food, water and ice with them, because nothing is sold beyond the gate. Wine comes from the state's southern regions, more than a thousand kilometres away, and beer from breweries in Perth and Fremantle.