Margaret River

This is Wardandi Noongar country — the name is usually translated as the ocean people — and the limestone caves along the ridge hold some of the oldest evidence of human life in the south-west, with occupation at Devil's Lair near Witchcliffe dated to more than 40,000 years ago. Noongar families moved between the coast, the river and the forest with the seasons, and the caves and springs remain significant places.

Europeans came south from the Swan River Colony in the 1830s. The Bussell family settled the Vasse and Blackwood districts, built homesteads at Ellensbrook and Wallcliffe near the river mouth, and gave their name to the highway; the river itself was named in 1831, and is thought to commemorate Margaret Whicher, a cousin of John Garrett Bussell. For a century the district lived on cattle, dairying and timber, cutting jarrah and karri for railway sleepers and piles, and a railway reached the town in the 1920s.

The Group Settlement Scheme of the same decade placed hundreds of inexperienced British families on small blocks of cleared forest around Margaret River. Many walked off within a few years, and the abandoned blocks later became vineyards. In the 1960s the agronomist John Gladstones identified the district as well suited to wine grapes, the first commercial vines went in at Vasse Felix, founded at Wilyabrup by Tom Cullity in 1967, and within twenty years the town had changed completely. Surfers had found the reef breaks at the river mouth by the 1960s, and professional contests have been held there since.

Two cultures share the town, and they overlap more than outsiders expect. One is the surf culture of the coast, centred on the reefs at the river mouth and along the cliffs towards Gracetown, where the breaks are powerful, the water is cold and the line-up has its own hierarchy and etiquette. The other is the wine and food culture of the valleys inland, built by a small number of families since the 1960s and now an industry of cellar doors, restaurants, breweries and producers.

Around both has grown a large community of artists, potters, woodworkers and musicians, many of them originally from Perth. The Saturday farmers market is the week's social fixture, and the calendar runs on the surfing contest in autumn, a concert on a winery lawn in February and a run of long lunches through the winter.

Manners are rural and casual: a wave from the driver of an oncoming ute on a back road, gates left as they were found, bare feet in the bakery. Wardandi Noongar heritage is increasingly explained on its own terms, with Aboriginal-guided walks in the caves and along the coast and dual names on signs. The region takes its fire seasons, its whale seasons and its vintage dates as the real calendar.

Some 14,000 people live in the surrounding shire, about half of them in the towns of Margaret River and Augusta and the rest spread between the coastal settlements and a scatter of small inland villages. The population swells several times over in the summer and Easter holidays, and a large share of the housing is holiday accommodation, which keeps rents high and long-term rentals scarce.

Wine, tourism and agriculture are the economy. More than two hundred wineries operate in the region, alongside beef and dairy farms, avocado and olive groves, marron ponds and what is left of the timber industry. Vintage, from about February to April, brings in seasonal pickers and cellar hands, many of them travellers on working holidays, and hospitality employs a large part of the town year-round.

Daily life is that of a small country town with an unusually good restaurant list. Children travel to the local schools by bus, the hospital handles routine care while anything serious goes to Bunbury or Perth, and the three-hour drive to the city is a familiar chore. Summer brings fire preparation — cleared firebreaks, packed evacuation bags, days of watching the wind — and the recurring public arguments concern housing, water, clearing for vineyards and how many visitors the coast can take.

The wine comes first. The region grows a few per cent of Australia's crop but a large share of its premium bottles, and it is known above all for cabernet sauvignon, for chardonnay, and for the crisp blends of semillon and sauvignon blanc that locals drink on a hot afternoon. The region has no official subregions, but the six proposed by John Gladstones run from Yallingup in the north to Karridale in the south, with the oldest estates in the gravelly valleys of Wilyabrup.

The food follows the farms. Margaret River beef and free-range pork, dairy from the old dairying flats turned into cheese and yoghurt, marron from freshwater ponds, venison, avocados, berries, olive oil and honey all appear at the Saturday market and on menus within a few kilometres of where they were grown. From the sea come western rock lobster, dhufish and abalone, and the roadside signs for fresh crayfish in season are worth following.

Producers have made a tourist attraction of themselves along Caves Road, where a chocolate factory, cheese rooms, a brewery or two, distilleries making gin from local botanicals and a bakery are spaced between the vineyards. In town, the bakeries and pie shops on Bussell Highway feed surfers at dawn, and the restaurants stay open later than the size of the place would suggest.