Broome is one of those places that seem made up: a tropical town in the far north of Western Australia where camels stroll along an endless beach at sunset, where the sea at Cable Beach turns red as the sun sinks into the Indian Ocean, and where the full moon creates the illusion of a silver staircase over the mudflats of the bay. It's the capital of the Kimberley, one of the last great wild frontiers on the planet, and a town with a history as rich as its landscape.
That history is the story of pearls. In the early 20th century Broome was the world's largest pearling port, with hundreds of boats (luggers) combing the seabed for the prized mother-of-pearl. Japanese divers and Malay, Filipino, Chinese, Timorese and Aboriginal workers lived and died side by side in a multicultural, tough and fascinating town, whose legacy can still be seen today in Chinatown, the Japanese Cemetery and the luxury pearl showrooms. Broome is also Rubibi, the land of the Yawuru people, and it holds dinosaur footprints that are 130 million years old.
This guide takes a practical look at Broome: Cable Beach and its sunset by camel, Gantheaume Point and its dinosaur footprints, Chinatown and the world's oldest open-air cinema, the crocodile park, the Staircase to the Moon, how to get there from Perth and how to get around. And it honours the town's vast and unique history: that of a multicultural pearling port on ancestral Yawuru land.
Broome is Rubibi, the traditional country of the Yawuru people, who have lived on this coast for thousands of years and whose use of mother-of-pearl (riji) almost certainly drew attention to the area's pearls. The town was officially founded and surveyed in 1883 and named after the Governor of WA, Sir Frederick Napier Broome. In 1889 the undersea telegraph cable linking Australia with Java came ashore at Cable Beach (hence the beach's name). In the early 20th century Broome became the world's largest pearling port, with around 400 luggers and a multicultural workforce: Japanese divers (who came to make up almost half the workers), Malays, Filipinos, Chinese, Timorese and Aboriginal people, many of the latter forced or tricked into diving in extremely harsh conditions. The dangers of diving left hundreds dead, remembered in the Japanese Cemetery. The industry declined in the mid-20th century with the arrival of cultured pearls and the Second World War (Broome was bombed by Japan in 1942). Today the town lives on tourism and still produces luxury cultured pearls. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓Australia's largest state, covering almost a third of the continent: the ancestral land of the Noongar people and dozens of desert nations, colonised from the Swan River Colony in 1829, transformed by Kalgoorlie gold and today a global iron ore powerhouse. Its capital, Perth, is the most isolated major city on the planet.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Before the pearls, before the luggers and Chinatown, this coast of mangroves and mudflats on Roebuck Bay already had owners and a name: it was Rubibi, the Country of the Yawuru people. The Yawuru lived in this part of the Kimberley for thousands of years, with a deep knowledge of the sea, the tides, the mangroves and the seasons, and a social and spiritual organisation tied to their Country. Roebuck Bay was an important meeting place, where gifts were exchanged, marriages were arranged and disputes between groups were settled.
The Yawuru lived off the riches of the sea and the land, and, crucially for what came later, they used pearl shell in their culture. Mother-of-pearl shells were carved and polished into ornaments, among them riji, pieces of shell worn as coverings or adornments that had ceremonial and trade value and were exchanged over huge distances across the continent. This ancient use of pearl shell was almost certainly what first drew Europeans' attention to how many pearl oysters lived in these waters.
So the pearling history of Broome, usually told as an adventure of settlers, Japanese divers and tycoons, actually has its roots in Yawuru knowledge and culture. Today, after years of struggle, the Yawuru people are recognised as the Traditional Owners of Broome (Rubibi), with a Native Title determination over much of the region, and their voice and language are once again central to the town's identity.
A permanent European presence took hold in the area in the late 19th century, driven by pearls. By the 1880s the shores of Roebuck Bay held little more than a handful of white settlers and pearling camps scattered among the mangroves, until the settlement was surveyed and officially declared a town on 27 November 1883. It was named Broome after Sir Frederick Napier Broome, Governor of Western Australia at the time.
A few years later came an event that would shape the town's symbolic geography. In 1889 a submarine telegraph cable came ashore on the beach we now call Cable Beach, linking Broome with Java (in the Dutch East Indies) and, through that network, with the rest of the world. That cable, which gave "Cable Beach" its name, ended Broome's isolation and connected it to global markets and communications, something vital for a town about to become an economic centre of world importance.
Broome was born, then, as a frontier town serving a very specific and very lucrative industry: not the pearl itself (an occasional prize), but mother-of-pearl, the nacre of the shells, a hugely sought-after raw material in the pre-plastic era for making buttons, handles, buckles and inlays. In the warm, murky waters of north-western Australia lived the Pinctada maxima oyster, the largest in the world, with the most valuable mother-of-pearl shells. Everything else would be built on that resource.
By the early 20th century Broome had become the largest pearling port in the world. At its peak, some 400 boats (luggers, small and nimble sailing vessels) combed the seabed for the precious mother-of-pearl shell, and the town supplied most of the planet's pearl shell. It was an enormously profitable industry, but also a brutally dangerous one.
The hardest and deadliest work was diving. In the early days Aboriginal divers were widely used, many of them forced or tricked into working far from their Country and diving without equipment. With the arrival of standard diving dress (heavy suits with copper helmets and lead boots that allowed divers to go deeper), recruiters turned mainly to Japanese divers, who became famous for their skill and courage. By 1900 they made up 18% of the WA pearling workforce; by 1920, a third; and by the Second World War, almost half. Alongside them worked Malays, Filipinos, Chinese, Timorese (from Koepang) and people from all over Southeast Asia, on deck and in the workshops.
Helmet diving killed: decompression sickness ("the bends"), drownings and cyclones that caught the fleets at sea left hundreds dead. Broome's Japanese Cemetery, with nearly a thousand graves, is a moving testament to that human cost. Broome thus became one of the most multicultural towns in Australia at the height of the racist "White Australia" policy, precisely because the pearling industry could not function without those Asian workers, for whom exceptions to the immigration laws were made.
The heart of that bustling, multicultural Broome was Chinatown, the town's commercial and entertainment district. By day its streets held the businesses of the pearling masters, the workshops and the stores; by night it was a much rougher place, the town's red-light district, with brothels, gambling houses and opium dens where lugger crews spent their pay when they came ashore after weeks at sea. Chinese, Japanese, Malays, Filipinos, Europeans and Aboriginal people lived side by side within a few blocks, each community with its own life, tensions and stories. One survivor from that era is Sun Pictures, the world's oldest operating open-air cinema, opened in 1916, which in the days of segregation had separate sections for different groups.
The golden age of natural pearling began to fade on several fronts. The invention of the plastic button cut demand for mother-of-pearl. The world wars hit hard: during the First, markets were cut off; and during the Second, in 1942, Broome was attacked by Japanese aircraft in a raid that destroyed planes and flying boats full of refugees in the bay and killed dozens of people, one of the deadliest air raids on Australian soil. The Japanese community, the backbone of the diving trade, was interned or deported. The natural pearl industry was never the same again.
What saved Broome from disappearing was reinvention: the cultured pearl. From the mid-20th century, using cultivation techniques, the region began producing cultured South Sea pearls, among the largest and finest in the world, on pearl farms along the Kimberley coast. Pearls remained, and still remain, part of Broome's identity and economy, just in a different way.
Broome today lives mainly from tourism and from its role as the capital of and gateway to the Kimberley, one of the planet's last great wilderness areas. In the dry season (May to October) the town fills with travellers who come to watch the sunsets at Cable Beach, ride a camel along the sand, see the Staircase to the Moon over Roebuck Bay, explore Chinatown and use Broome as a base for trips into the Kimberley: Cape Leveque, the Gibb River Road, expedition cruises along the coast.
That tourism sits alongside the legacy of the three great layers of Broome's history: the ancient Yawuru culture, the multicultural pearling saga, and the 130-million-year-old dinosaur footprints preserved in the red rocks of Gantheaume Point, among the most remarkable palaeontological sites in the world. Within just a few kilometres, Broome is a unique crossroads of eras and cultures.
In recent decades recognition of the Yawuru people has gained momentum. The Native Title determination gave the Yawuru legal recognition of their connection to Rubibi, and today they take part in managing the land and in the town's cultural life, with names, language and knowledge returning to public spaces. More and more, Broome is told not just as the old pearling port but as Rubibi: Yawuru land on which pearls, the wider world and time itself have been layered, with all their light and shade. Visiting means glimpsing all those stories at once, against the backdrop of Australia's most famous sunset.
