Western Australia

The south-west is Noongar country, with the Whadjuk people around Perth; the Pilbara, the Kimberley and the desert are home to dozens of other nations. Rock shelters at Juukan Gorge in the Pilbara showed occupation over some 46,000 years; the Murujuga (Burrup Peninsula) petroglyphs, World Heritage-listed since 2025, form the world's largest collection of ancient rock art, and the Kimberley holds the Gwion Gwion paintings.

Europeans arrived early: the Dutch captain Dirk Hartog reached the coast at Shark Bay in 1616, and the Dutch ship Batavia was wrecked on the Houtman Abrolhos in 1629. Britain founded a post at King George Sound (Albany) in 1826 and the Swan River Colony, with Perth and Fremantle, in 1829. Noongar resistance was met with force, including the killings at Pinjarra in 1834, and Rottnest Island was used as a prison for Aboriginal people from 1838 to 1931. Short of labour, the colony took convicts from 1850 to 1868, after transportation to the east had ended. In the Kimberley, the Bunuba warrior Jandamarra led an armed resistance in the 1890s.

Gold at Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie in the 1890s transformed the colony, which joined federation in 1901. Resentment of the eastern states ran deep: in 1933 a majority voted to secede, but efforts to implement the result failed. From the 1960s the Pilbara iron-ore boom made the state rich. In 2020 the mining company Rio Tinto destroyed the Juukan Gorge rock shelters, provoking national outrage and changes to heritage protection.

Western Australians are proud of their distance from the rest of the country: Perth is one of the most isolated large cities in the world, closer to Jakarta than to Sydney, and runs on its own time zone. A streak of resentment towards "the eastern states" and Canberra runs through local politics, and many residents are nicknamed "sandgropers".

Australian rules football dominates, and the local derby between the West Coast Eagles and the Fremantle Dockers divides the city. Life leans towards the beach and the river, and the long daylight of summer is spent at Cottesloe, on boats and around barbecues. The fly-in fly-out lifestyle, in which mine workers commute by air to remote sites for weeks at a time, shapes family life in Perth and the regional towns.

Noongar language and culture are increasingly visible in Perth, where many places carry dual names and Welcome to Country ceremonies open public events. Broome has a distinctive multicultural heritage from its pearling days, when Japanese, Malay, Chinese and Filipino divers worked the luggers alongside Aboriginal people, and celebrates it in the Shinju Matsuri festival. The Perth Festival and the Fringe World festival fill the summer calendar.

Western Australia has about 3 million people, and some four in five of them live in Greater Perth, a long, low-density city stretching along the coast from Two Rocks to Mandurah. Beyond it, towns are small: Bunbury, Geraldton, Kalgoorlie-Boulder, Albany and Broome each have tens of thousands of residents at most, and much of the state has almost nobody.

Mining drives the economy. The Pilbara supplies much of the world's iron ore, the North West Shelf and offshore fields export liquefied natural gas, and the Goldfields around Kalgoorlie still produce gold, with lithium and nickel increasingly important. The Wheatbelt grows grain, and rock lobster, prawns and pearls come from the coast. Mining wealth keeps wages high but makes the state sensitive to commodity prices.

Recent debates have included Aboriginal heritage protection after Juukan Gorge, housing pressure in Perth, the costs and social strain of fly-in fly-out work, and the future of the Kimberley's remote communities.

Western Australia's signature seafood is the western rock lobster, caught along the coast from Geraldton and the Abrolhos Islands; locals often call it crayfish. Shark Bay and Exmouth prawns, dhufish, a prized reef fish, and marron, a large freshwater crayfish farmed in the south-west, are other local specialities, and fish and chips at Fremantle's fishing boat harbour is a local ritual.

Margaret River is the state's best-known wine region, known for cabernet sauvignon, chardonnay and blends of semillon and sauvignon blanc; the Swan Valley near Perth is the state's oldest wine region, and the Great Southern around Mount Barker and Albany makes cool-climate riesling and shiraz. Manjimup is a major producer of black truffles, harvested in winter, and the south-west's orchards grow apples, including the Cripps Pink, developed in Western Australia and sold as Pink Lady.

Fremantle has brewpubs such as Little Creatures in its old harbour buildings, and its Italian heritage shows in the al fresco cafés of its "Cappuccino Strip". In the north, Broome's Asian heritage shows in its food, and native bush foods such as the Kakadu plum and the boab are used by Kimberley producers.

Perth's Kings Park overlooks the Swan River and the city skyline, with its botanic garden of Western Australian flora; Cottesloe and Scarborough are the city beaches. Fremantle has the World Heritage-listed Fremantle Prison, the Round House, the Maritime Museum and its markets, and ferries cross to Rottnest Island, or Wadjemup, with its quokkas, bays and bicycles. North of Perth, the Pinnacles rise from the sand of Nambung National Park near Cervantes, and further north lie the gorges of Kalbarri.

The south-west offers Margaret River's wineries and surf breaks, caves such as Lake Cave and Mammoth Cave, Cape Leeuwin, Busselton's long wooden jetty and the tall karri and tingle forests around Pemberton and Walpole, where the Valley of the Giants treetop walk climbs through the canopy. Albany, Esperance's white beaches at Lucky Bay and Wave Rock near Hyden complete the south.

Shark Bay, a World Heritage Site, has the dolphins of Monkey Mia and the stromatolites of Hamelin Pool. Ningaloo Reef, also World Heritage-listed, is reached from Exmouth and Coral Bay for snorkelling with whale sharks and manta rays, and Karijini's red gorges lie inland in the Pilbara. Broome offers camel rides on Cable Beach and the Staircase to the Moon over Roebuck Bay. The Kimberley has the Gibb River Road, the Horizontal Falls, Mitchell Falls, Lake Argyle near Kununurra, and the Bungle Bungle Range in Purnululu National Park, another World Heritage Site.