Pearls, Camels, and Cable Beach at the Edge of the Kimberley
At the gateway to the Kimberley, Broome combines 22 kilometres of white sand and turquoise water at Cable Beach with a multicultural pearling history that brought Japanese, Malay, and Aboriginal Bardi Jawi communities together on this remote Indian Ocean coast. Camel rides at sunset, the Staircase to the Moon lunar-reflection phenomenon from Town Beach, and the pearl showrooms of Chinatown make Broome one of Australia's most distinctive and seductive tropical towns.
Broome's pearling industry began in the 1880s, attracting a cosmopolitan workforce of Japanese, Malay, and Aboriginal divers who free-dived for Pinctada maxima — the world's largest pearl oyster. Chinatown's corrugated-iron shophouses survive from that era, and the Japanese Cemetery on the town's edge holds over 900 graves of divers lost at sea, many to cyclones or the bends. Cable Beach takes its name from the 1889 undersea telegraph cable to Singapore, making Broome a critical communications hub for colonial Australia.