Surfers, Perth & Paradise

By Jason Cochrane

It's always been a mystery to me how a chunk of land that's so enormous (five times the size of Texas) could have such a low profile throughout most of the world. Even when important things happen in Western Australia (which, admittedly, isn't often), few people seem to notice. For example, how many Americans were aware that as a young man, one of our presidents, Herbert Hoover, spent a years in Western Australia as a miner?

Even among Australians, Western Australia has toiled in anonymity, despite a terrain that means business. But its undiscovered quality, perhaps, is its most attractive feature. No one likes fighting other tourists for the good stuff.

Perth , a swaggering, skyscrapered city of sailboats and new money, is the most distant city from New York, being situated nearly exactly on the opposite point on the globe. The rest of Western Australia's considerable vastness, though, is pretty much untouched. Although 1.4 million people live in Perth, just half a million live throughout the rest of this empty state.

The implacable craggy cliffs above the southwestern coast, which attract seasonal whales and plenty of surfers with insatiable wavelust, are barely developed beyond a few holiday homes and mid-century wood-frame resorts. Just inland, the Margaret River wine region is gradually becoming favored as a driving-tour getaway, and its galleries, bakeries, and farm-food restaurants have created a pocket industry out of the visitors who come to sample the fruits of home-grown labor.

Between Margaret River and the former whaling colony at Albany, are the karri trees around Pemberton. Magnificent beasts, Tolkeinesque in scale and mood, they reach seemingly without limit into the sky. You can travel for great distances in southwestern WA and still find yourself snuggled safely beneath their bowers.

The west coast of WA runs for most of the span of the continent with barely a town to break the view. Broome, the laid-back pearl-fishing town on the north coast, is the sort of anything-goes coastal idyll that Key West, Florida, and Lahaina, Hawaii, used to be. And, of course, there's all that desert—so much that some of it remains uncharted. The sumptuous waterfalls of Karijini National Park, which fall through tight, deep gorges carved into swooping layers of stone, would surely be world-famous if they didn't require hours of desert crossing to reach.

I've driven for six hours on the Great Northern Highway and seen only a single structure—a place to buy gas (well, petrol) and get a burger. Just off the highway, I've spent the night on Eighty Mile Beach which, unlike the beaches at home, hasn't been picked clean—it remains littered with sand dollars and bright shells. At the end of the road, I found the 150-mile-long, shockingly pristine Ningaloo Reef, where—I kid you not—the second I first dipped my toes in the water, a dolphin surfaced 10 feet away to check me out.

There's nothing like being in the middle of nowhere. Frankly, that's the kind of escape I go on vacation for.


Who is Jason Cochrane?
Jason Cochran has written on travel and entertainment for publications including Entertainment Weekly, Arthur Frommer's Budget Travel, Newsweek, theNew York Daily News, the Rough Guides, Travel + Leisure, the Village Voice, the New York Post, Marie Claire, Inside, New York Sidewalk, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Arena (U.K.), Who (Australia), Scanorama, and Seasons (Sweden). He also devised questions for the first American season of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire (ABC) and before that, spent nearly two years backpacking solo around the world. As a commentator, he has appeared on CNN, CNN Headline News, CNNfn, Fox TV, and MSNBC.com. He is a graduate of Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism and New York University's Graduate Music Theatre Writing Program. He lives in Manhattan.