The Bungle Bungle Range

Situated in Purnululu National Park, The Bungle Bungle Range is one of the most interesting geological sites in Western Australia. Erosion over the last 20 million years have helped form the black and orange striped dome features. 

From the air, the Bungle Bungle Range is an impressive sight and the beehive-like mounds are covered in orange and black stripes and sheathed in a skin of silica and algae. As you fly further over the range,  gorges and pools loom out of the landscape, with fan palms clinging perilously on  to the ledges and crevices in the rocks. 

Most of the range is approximately 578 metres above sea level with 200 to 300 below being woodland and grassy plain.

The Bungle Bungle Range was not really known to many Europeans until as late as the mid 1980’s although it was extensively used by Aboriginal people.  This remote wilderness is rich in Aboriginal art and there are also many Aboriginal burial sites.

If you wish to camp in the Bungle Bungles there are  facilities at  Kurrajong Camp or Walardi,  both sites have good facilities. Supplies and  petrol are obtainable from nearby Turkey Creek.

 

 

Karijini National Park is arguably one of the most spectacular in Australia.

Unforgettable scenery with  its rough beauty, and unrivalled for those looking for adventure, Karijina National Park is famed for its sheer gorges, waterfalls and lovely swimming holes.

 

Karijini National Park is Australia's second-largest national park and covers 100,000 square kilometers of area protecting lots of different wildlife habitats, landscapes, plants and animals of the Pilbara.

 
Wildflowers change depending on the seasons and during the cooler months the land is carpeted with yellow-flowering cassias and wattles, northern bluebells and purple mulla-mullas.

 
Karijini is also home to a wide selection of birds, red kangaroos, rock-wallabies, echidnas and a few bat species. Geckos, goannas, dragons, legless lizards, pythons and other snakes are abundant. Huge termite mounds dot  the landscape and the rock piles belonging to the rare pebble-mound mouse may be found.

 
In the northern area of Karijini National Park, tiny creeks which hide in the  hillsides which are dried up for most of the year, swiftly plunge into sheer-sided chasms which can be up to 100 metres deep. These are the Karijini’s celebrated gorges. They are impressive but can be very dangerous.

  Downstream, the gorges broaden and their sides alter from sheer cliffs to steep slopes of slack rock.
The park is the ancestoral home of the Banyjima, Kurrama and Innawonga Aboriginal people. The Banyjima name for the Hamersley Range is Karijini. There is evidence to suggest they have been occupied for more than 20,000 years and that during that time, Aboriginal land management practices such as 'fire stick farming' have  resulted in  diverse vegetation types and have helped decide the nature of the plants and animals which can be found in Karijini today.

Try a four-wheel drive tour of Karijini National Park as this is the best way to access the areas beauty spots.  There are numerous tour operators offering this service in the surrounding area.

 

If you wish to see the park by air you can fly to Exmouth, Karratha or Broome and join a tour there,  or hire a vehicle and drive yourself.

 

There are excellent well marked walking trails suitable for the beginner or the more adventurous and which will lead the visitor into deep subterranean gorges and under waterfalls where you can swim in crystal clear rock pools.

 

Within the Karinjini  National Park there are good picnic sites as well as camping spots and a visitor centre for information and interactive exhibitions about the natural and cultural heritage.

 

This park lies 16 miles to the west of Pemberton and is home to the giant karri, the Gloucester Tree.  The tree is 200 feet high and is used as  fire lookout tree, and is thought to be one of the highest in the world.

 

Warren National Park has great swimming holes and fishing spots as well as spectacular cascades of water.

 

Great for walking and has good well marked trails.

 

This is probably the biggest and most important forest of tuart trees left in the world and is located some 12 miles to the north of Busselton.

 

Millstream-Chichester

Millstream-Chichester National Park is a semi-arid National Park located in the Pilbara area of Western Australia. The Millstream Homestead provides interesting information about the Millstream Chichester National Park and the local Yinjinarndi Aboriginal culture.

 

Millstream-Chichester National Park also features quite a few freshwater pools, including the beautiful Chinderwarriner Pool, Crossing Pool, Deep Reach Pool and the Python Pool. Both Crossing Pool and Deep Reach Pool have essential camping facilities.

 

The Millstream Chichester National Park offers wonderful bushwalking and some picturesque drives around the park. These include Cliff Lookout Drive, Chichester Range Camel Track and the Murlunmunyjurna Trail.

The Gibson Desert is surrounded to the north by the Great Sandy Desert and to the south by the Great Victoria Desert. To the west is Lake Disappointment, which is a big salt lake that is certainly no disappointment for  many waterbirds that assemble there to seek sanctuary in an inhospitably dry environment. The feature gravel rising off the Gibson Desert provoked one early explorer to call it a "great undulating desert of gravel."

 

In 1874, the explorer Ernest Giles  explored the Gibson Desert and eventually crossed it in 1876. The desert was named after Alfred Gibson, who was part of Giles’s expedition team who was lost while looking for water.

The endangered greater bilby, which is a small, rabbit-like animal with big ears and a subtle, pointy snout, comes out from its den at night to look for food.

The bush stone curlew is more active at night as well, when its sad, unnatural cry can be heard out over the desert.

Red kangaroos can be seen during the day, traveling in small  groups led by a dominant male.

Large, flightless emus pursue  grains and insects, and the tiny striated grasswren hops about the Triodia grass. The emu was once a major source of meat for Aborigines who lived in these dry areas.

 

Dampier
Dampier is situated about  20 kilometres from Karratha, and is a coastal area which lends itself  for boating, sailing, fishing, diving, windsurfing and swimming.

 
Dampier gets its name from the Dampier Archipelago, a collection of 42 islands that embrace the nearby central Pilbara coast. These rocky islets are well known for their desolate beauty and sparkling clear waters and were named after the English buccaneer William Dampier who  sailed around the coast.

The archipelago was shaped 6,000 to 8,000 years ago, when melting ice caps made the sea levels to rise. They differ in size from rocks less than one hectare to Enderby Island, which is the largest, at 3,900 hectares. Dolphin Island rises highest, at 120 metres above sea level. 

 
Visitors can take boat trips around them and be left to explore, although many of the islands are protected seabird and turtle nesting sites and are not open the public.

 

Game fishing is extremely well-liked, and the yearly Dampier Classic competition is held in August. Some other things to do in the area are scuba diving to the local wrecks and sailing the sea in search of dolphins.

 

Signs of old Aboriginal campsites can be seen all over the region as well as large shell middens which are piles of oyster shells which have been thrown away after thousands of meals. For Aboriginal rock engravings, The Burrup Peninsula, which is a few kilometres from the middle of Dampier, is the place to visit.

Desolate granite headlands and rocky barren cliffs and formations such as Canal Rocks and Sugarloaf Rock dominate the coastline of Leeuwin-Naturaliste National Park, as it stretches out from Bunker Bay in the north to Augusta in the south.

 
At the right time of year you can see humpback and southern right whales from various vantage points along the coastline  and bushwalking attracts visitors right into the centre of the park.

 

At Canal Rocks, in the Leeuwin-Naturaliste National Park, the gigantic rocks which stick out into the sea are separated by a sequence of canals that have been hollowed out by the water.

 

Between Cowaramup Bay and Karridale, the Leeuwin-Naturaliste National Park has some of its most rocky and remote coastline. Looking out to the west, the cliffs and rocky shoreline endure giant ocean swells whipped up across thousands of miles of sea by the prevailing westerly and south-westerly winds. Dotted along the coastline are scenic lookouts from which to wonder at the ocean's splendor and power.

 

Surfing is popular at many renowned places on the western coast, such as Smiths Beach and Yallingup. Coastal walking paths and steps down sand dunes have been provided in lots of locations to try to prevent coastal erosion.

Tuart Forest

The Tuart Forest joins Capel and Busselton and forms the exclusive Tuart Forest National Park, which protects the biggest remaining regions of tuart forest, left in the world.

 

The Tuart Forest National Park has no camp sites and is strictly for day visitors but has quite a few of lovely scenic drives. Tuart forest is fairly open with not much undergrowth thus making it great for picnicking and walking.

 

Australia’s tuart forests in the South West were affected quite a lot by European settlement but there are a few protected areas remaining. Because tuart forest is set on open landscapes most of the trees were felled for the building of coastal towns and grazing land.

 

Wood from the tuarts was exported during the 1800’s and exported from Busselton’s renowned jetty. In 1920 a saw mill was opened near Wonnerup Beach and a little quayside built to transport the timber. The mill lasted around 10 years but in 1955 another mill started  in Ludlow which worked on and off until 1974. The national park wasn’t declared until 1987.

 

The Tuart Forest National Park is home to very diverse range birds that feed and breed in the nearby wetlands.  Endangered ring tail possums also make their home in the forest together with the brush tailed possum, kangaroos, bush rats, the southern brown bandicoot and various species of birds of prey.
 

On the south coast of Western Australia is one of the worlds most diverse botanical regions in the world  Fitzgerald River Park sits on the inlets of the Gairdner, Hamersley and Fitzgerald rivers between Hopetoun and Bremer Bay.

 

There are around 1800 stunning and strange different types of flowering plants, as well as a countless mosses, lichens, and fungi, have been catalogued in Fitzgerald River National Park.

 

Almost 20 per cent of the total number of plant varieties in Western Australia are located in the park in only a small fraction of the total area of the state. Sixty-two of the plant types are found only in Fitzgerald River National Park, with a another 48 types more or less limited to the park.

 
There are so many extraordinary and diverse flowers with unusual petal and leaf shapes, color and size making a brilliant display during the main flowering time during August to November.
Honeyeaters and possums have a constant source of food in the park from alternating plants which flower intermittently throughout the year.

 

The marvelous assortment of plants ensures there is a haven for indigenous animals and birds. There are a least 19 mammals varieties including the dibbler which is a small animal with characteristic white eye-rings, which until 1967 was believed to be extinct.

 

Other unusual animals found in the park are the heath rat, the tammar woylie  and the wallaby. The rare ground parrot, which makes its nest on the ground, spends a lot of its time walking around quietly, looking for seeds and fruits.

 

As well as being the home of an abundant variety of rare plants and animals, Fitzgerald National Park is one of the last great wilderness regions. Situated some 80 kilometres to the north-east of Albany and west of Esperance traveling time takes about two and a half to three hours from either place.

The William Bay National Park is a mixture of  little sheltered bays, forest terrain, cliffs and unusual plants.  The forest edge runs down to the coastline meeting the sea and its inlets.

 

Within the park are peppermint trees, areas of open woodland with eucalypts and sheoak and little patches of karri forest.

Although the William Bay beach is quite narrow there are large sand dunes at the back which in some areas have been populated by thick scrub and trees.

There is a extensive variety of plants within William Bay National Park’s amazing scenery. In just a tiny area a huge range of plants can be identified such as karri trees with a thick scrub containing plants like the karri hazel, sedges and chorilaena.

 

One of the most stunning beauty spots in the park is Greens Pool from where you can see the dark green strips of peppermints that live in the swales of the sand hills.

Not far from Greens Pool is Elephant Rocks, exposed rocks which jut out at a number of different angles and resemble a herd of elephants. This well known extraordinary landmark is well worth a visit whilst in the park.

 

William Bay National Parks, like many others on the south east coast has a huge variety of wildflowers so there is color in the park all year round although flowering is best in the spring. 
Facilities in the park include toilets and picnic tables.
 

Mount Frankland National Park, is near Walpole, and consists of 30,830 hectares of land and is home to a large variety of  birds and also has abundant karri and marri trees.

 

Robins, eagles and fairy wrens are all common inside the park and one of the best times for bird watching is in the spring and early summer seasons when the birds are most lively.

 

There are over 50 species living in the Mt Frankland Park including the red-capped parrot, red-tailed black-cockatoo, western rosella, and purple-crowned lorikeet.

 

The brown goshawk and the smaller sparrow hawk which are birds of prey can be seen in the park and are a spectacular sight and if you are really lucky you may spot a wedge-tailed eagle flying above the mountain.

 

There are some stunning walking trails in the Mt Frankland National Park which is ideal for getting to more remote places for bird watching. There is also a camping area witch has barbeques, toilets, drinking water and  information.