The Yawuru lived along this coast for thousands of years, fishing the sea and creeks and naming their seasons for the changing catch. Europeans probed the shoreline from the 17th century but saw no reason to stay -- no natural harbours, no obvious resources, and a punishing distance from established settlements. That changed when the pearl shell trade took off in the 19th century. Aboriginal people had long gathered pearls from oysters in wading depth, but as demand from the growing Western middle class outstripped supply, divers were forced into deeper water. First using breath-holding, then primitive air hoses, then pumped air at depths where decompression sickness killed or paralysed with grim regularity. When local Aboriginal divers were exhausted through death and injury, Japanese and Malay workers were brought in under the indentured labour system -- multi-year contracts with low wages, dangerous conditions, and little freedom to leave. Hundreds died. Their headstones in Broome's cemeteries are the most honest monuments in town.

In 1889, a telegraph cable was laid from Cable Beach to Java, connecting Australia to mainland Asia, Europe, and North America. The beach that gave its name to this undersea link would later give Broome its second life. For most of the 20th century, the town remained a small, sweltering outpost. Pearls lost their commercial importance when polyester buttons replaced pearl shell in the 1950s, though pearl farming later revived the industry on gentler terms. Camels, imported in large numbers in the mid-19th century to haul freight through the outback, were made redundant by motor trucks in the 1920s. Many were turned loose and went feral, breeding prolifically across the arid interior. Today their descendants carry tourists along Cable Beach at sunset -- a scene that has become Broome's signature postcard image. The town's transformation into a resort began in the 1980s, when Lord Alistair McAlpine invested in the area and built the Cable Beach Club Resort.

Broome sits at about 18 degrees south latitude, on the edge of the tropical cyclone belt, 1,680 kilometres from Perth in a straight line -- closer to Bali than to the Western Australian capital. The tides here are enormous, and they reveal wonders. At Gantheaume Point, seven kilometres south of downtown, the lowest tides uncover three-toed dinosaur footprints pressed into rock 130 million years ago by therapods. Beyond Town Beach, at very low tide, the wrecks of flying boats destroyed during the Japanese air raid of 3 March 1942 emerge from Roebuck Bay -- metal skeletons in the mud that are legally protected as war graves. And on clear nights during the dry season, the rising full moon at low tide produces the staircase to the moon: beams of light reflecting off water trapped in beach ripples, creating the illusion of luminous steps ascending from the sand into the sky.

At the end of Short Street near the shore, fruit bats roost in dense colonies during the day. At dusk, thousands of them erupt into the air in noisy, chattering swarms, wheeling out over the town toward their feeding grounds -- one of Broome's great free spectacles. The town's cultural life carries traces of its multicultural past. Chinatown, the traditional retail strip along Carnarvon Street, was prettified in 2019, though it long since ceased to be a functioning Chinese quarter. The Shinju Matsuri festival in late August, loosely themed on the pearl trade, reflects the Japanese heritage. Sun Pictures, claimed to be the world's oldest operating open-air cinema, sits in the Chinatown precinct. And Cable Beach itself -- 22 kilometres of white sand facing the Indian Ocean -- remains the reason most visitors endure the long journey to reach this remote corner of Australia, a beach so vast and luminous it seems to erase everything but light, sand, and water.