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A highland area between Derby and Kununurra that's about the size of Poland, The Kimberley is commonly described as Australia's last frontier. Divided by ranges and seasonally huge rivers, it is a wilderness of marginal cattle stations and small, isolated Aboriginal communities, with a ragged, tide-swept coastline inhabited chiefly by crocodiles. The extreme seasons and harsh terrain make access slow and difficult - for those who live here, light aircraft are a necessity rather than an indulgence. With the demise of the beef industry in a region racked by floods and bushfires, many stations are opening up to adventure tourism, and there is talk of turning the whole area into a vast national park. There is little else here: even the exploitation of minerals known to exist in the northwest of the region is made barely economical by the climate and isolation, and this alone says a lot about the Kimberley's remoteness. The road between Fitzroy Crossing and Halls Creek was the last section of the circumcontinental Highway 1 to be sealed, in the mid-1980s. The region, particularly the barely accessible Drysdale River National Park , has many examples of the unusual Wandjina-style rock paintings, which depict rows of mouthless beings with owl-like heads, or the slender Bradshaw figures, thought to be much older. Tours of the Kimberley operate from Broome, Fitzroy Crossing, Halls Creek and, most conveniently, from Kununurra, along the Gibb River Road and to the popular Bungle Bungles . It would take a lifetime to get to know the whole of this immense wilderness, but that in itself is the very essence of the Kimberley's untameable appeal.
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