Bungle Bungle Range

The Bungle Bungle Range sits inside Purnululu National Park in the remote east Kimberley region of Western Australia, around 300 kilometres south of Kununurra. The name 'Bungle Bungle' is a local corruption of an Aboriginal word, while Purnululu is the Kija name for the sandstone, meaning 'sandstone'. The range covers around 450 square kilometres and is made up of hundreds of beehive-shaped domes, some of them more than 200 metres tall.

The orange-and-black stripes that give the domes their distinctive appearance are the result of two different conditions acting on the same sandstone. The orange layers are rich in iron oxide and dry out quickly, while the black stripes are made up of a layer of cyanobacteria that only survive where moisture is retained long enough for them to grow. The result is a striped pattern that repeats through the entire range and is visible from low-flying aircraft as a kind of natural artwork.

The Kija, Jaru and Malngin peoples are the traditional owners of Purnululu and have continuous cultural links to the country going back tens of thousands of years. Several sites within the range are sacred and restricted. The park is co-managed with traditional owners through the Purnululu Aboriginal Corporation, and much of the visitor interpretation draws on local knowledge of the landscape, ecology and creation stories.

Remarkably, the range was almost completely unknown outside local Aboriginal communities until 1983, when a film crew making a documentary on a cattle station happened to fly over the domes and photograph them for the first time. The images caused immediate interest, the area was gazetted as a national park in 1987, and the UNESCO World Heritage listing followed in 2003. Very few major natural features on earth were still 'undiscovered' by the mainstream world as recently as the 1980s.

The park contains two main visitor circuits, both accessed from Three Ways Junction inside the park. The southern circuit includes Cathedral Gorge, a vast natural amphitheatre with a freshwater pool and extraordinary acoustics, plus the short Piccaninny Creek Lookout walk and the longer Piccaninny Gorge overnight hike. The northern circuit runs to Echidna Chasm, a narrow slot canyon barely wider than a person at its narrowest point, which is best visited at midday when the sun lights the red rock walls from directly overhead.

Access to the park is via a 53 kilometre four-wheel-drive track that takes around two and a half hours each way. The track is unsealed, crosses several creek beds, and is closed during the wet season (roughly November to March). Most visitors come on organised day or overnight tours from Kununurra by four-wheel-drive or, more popular, by light aircraft from Kununurra's airport. The aerial tour is spectacular, as the domes are visually most impressive from directly overhead.

The park is open to visitors only during the dry season, April to October. The best conditions are typically June and July, when daytime temperatures are mild and the mornings are cold enough to clear any atmospheric haze. The park has two main campgrounds at Walardi and Kurrajong, plus the luxury Bungle Bungle Wilderness Lodge for visitors wanting full-service accommodation inside the park.