Broome

Camels walk Cable Beach in silhouette, their shadows stretching impossibly long across five kilometres of flat, wet sand. The Indian Ocean is warm and orange. An hour earlier, you stood on Gantheaume Point where 130-million-year-old dinosaur footprints emerge at low tide, preserved in red rock.

Broome sits on the Kimberley coast of Western Australia, a town built on pearling, red pindan earth, and a monsoon climate that divides life into wet and dry seasons. Cable Beach — named for the telegraph cable laid to Singapore in 1889 — runs five kilometres of uninterrupted sand along the Indian Ocean. Gantheaume Point holds theropod dinosaur trackways from the Early Cretaceous, visible at low spring tides. The Staircase to the Moon — a natural optical illusion where a rising full moon reflects off tidal mudflats — occurs three nights per month between March and October. Broome's Chinatown precinct, despite its name, reflects a multicultural pearling history involving Japanese, Malay, Chinese, Aboriginal, and European divers.