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It was late afternoon when it finally hit me: I couldn’t hear a thing. The air was still and all the animals, including us, were lured into a gentle siesta by the luxurious heat which lay heavy on our skins like a velvet cloak. It warmed the waters of the plunge pool, fed from an underground spring, and we slipped in lazily, saying nothing, just looking out over the virgin north Australian coastal scrub to the Timor Sea, which spilled all the way to the horizon.

Somewhere past that line, after the water changes from tropical aqua into the deepest blue of the Indian Ocean, are the islands of Timor and Indonesia, once connected to the rocky headland millennia ago when the land was young and infinitely wilder. Australia’s tiger, the thylacine, roamed alongside flesh-eating mega-roos, giant wombats and the Old People – the earliest Aboriginal settlers.

Faraway Bay is aptly named. Perched on the northern tip of Western Australia’s Kimberley coast, the nearest town is Kalumburu, a gathering of just a few hundred souls. The flight to Darwin crosses the Cambridge Gulf and the stupendously large delta of the Victoria River, whose tributaries and estuaries creep over the land in a pattern as intricate as veins on a leaf. The few signs of human habitation are rare - long, low homesteads on properties that tote up their acreage in the millions. The only things moving are grazing cattle and buffaloes, an occasional flock of emus or a mob of kangaroos startled out of their sun-driven stupor.

Suddenly, we see the eight small thatch huts and one large communal shelter that comprise Faraway Bay. The plane taxis onto a red dirt strip, our pilot Sam leaves the keys in the ignition and guide Steve McIntosh, lanky and laconic, a former pro fisherman with a shark’s tooth at his neck and plaited leather on his bicep, throws us and our gear into a battered Land Rover. He submits with good humour to an interrogation:
Where are you from? Southern Queensland.
How long have you lived here? Seven years.
Why? Liked the place. Learned the Aboriginal ways of hunting.
Married? No.
What’s your social life like, then? Pretty quiet, he says with a bashful grin. No surprises there, then.

Incredibly, this strip of coastline near Cape Londonderry, the northernmost point of Western Australia, has never been officially surveyed. All of the place-names are whatever the locals call them. The bush camp generates its own electricity, takes its water from a freshwater spring and catches its own fish - it goes without saying that there is no mobile phone reception. The region’s history is a blur of Dreamtime records in the hidden caverns and remote rock faces throughout the land, spotted with the occasional reference to modern life like the lonely plaque commemorating the bombing of a boatload of evacuees by Japanese aircraft in World War Two.

Faraway Bay’s location was discovered by owner Bruce Ellison, who’d been working with exploration companies all around this coast in the early ‘80s. Remote, but with fresh water and a place for a landing strip, he told his wife Robyn in 1989, “’I think we’ll put the building here.’”
“I thought, ‘You and who’s army?’” she shoots back with a laugh, as we chat over sundowners beside the pool, tiled with local stone, which wallabies sip from in the hot months. Aside from the stone, everything else has been brought in, including the massive kauri pine beams that hold up the main building. In a former lifetime these were in the old Wyndham wharf, lying unused and earmarked for the bonfire till Bruce claimed them.

What Faraway Bay does have is plenty of fish and plenty of wildlife, including turtles, euros, dugongs, irrawaddies (a type of dolphin) and the Resident Croc, which lives in the waters behind us. Bruce hazards a guess that it’s at longer than 16 feet.
“That’s the good thing about falling in the water here,” adds Steve. “You’ll never drown; something will always eat you first.”

Throwing a line out the back of our boat, we motor slowly up the King George River. The newly-fanatical fishermen on board hook saltwater salmon, blue mullet, an archer fish, long toms and a diamondscale mullet. I’ve never heard of most of them.

The rushing river ends at two curves of sheer vertical waterfalls, maybe 60 or 70 meters toward the baby blue sky. Their ochre rock faces are lined with frissons, ledges and large expanses polished by the wind and the rain, but no-one’s ever named them, so they won’t have been measured. I lean back to capture the rich sandstone colours with my camera, promptly losing my new sunglasses to the deep. Fruitlessly, we try to skim them with a hat, but no-one’s going to challenge a croc for the sake of my sunnies. As we scramble to the top of the falls, the river above is fresh, cool and safe for swimming in - bliss after the hot climb. When we walk back down to the boat, the reward is a cold esky with snacks and a welcome beer.

The only other sign of human life on the river is a large white catamaran, ‘Dog on Cat’, owned by river rats Ray and Barbara. “We used to have a dog,” explains Ray of the name. Steve slings them the weekend papers and a bag of fresh chillies, shares a few words then we part ways again.

After a hard day’s fishing and boating, dinner is fresh golden snapper with broccoli, almonds and jasmine rice, dished up by Mason, a ring-in chef from Kununurra who’s stepped in for the week while the property tries to find a new chef in a region where the crocs outnumber humans. We’re all gathered around the long, trestle table with a chilled white wine going down smoothly, as everyone starts to talk about Faraway Bay. There’s irony in its isolation; those who’ve chosen to work here are always surrounded by people, like us, wanting to touch that remoteness.

There’s talk about the serenity, the lack of pressure, the friendliness of other folk out here and there’s a lot of talk about sacred places and magic. Looking out into the clear, starry night and listening to the lonesome wail of a dingo, calling for a mate, that magic is absolutely tangible.

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