The sun was burning high and bright on a pellucid morning off Australia‘s Kimberley Coast when I stepped onto Ngula, more commonly known as Jar Island. The dull yellow of sand and sandstone contrasted with the vivid blue of the Timor Sea all around me. At my back was a rocky outcropping where millennia ago the island’s traditional land owners, the Wunambal Gaambera people, lay their dead. Before me, a cluster of billion-year-old boulders contained clues about how they lived.
As I passed through these monoliths, I saw that they bore traces of serpents and individuals in headdresses. At more than 30,000 years old, these paintings are considered the oldest figurative rock art in the world, though their age and significance are still debated. “The thing about the Kimberley,” said Greg Fitzgerald, a guide on Seabourn Pursuit, the expedition ship on which I’d come to the region, “is that it will leave you with more questions than answers.”
The Kimberley is one of the world’s last great wildernesses. Humans have inhabited this territory for 70,000 years, yet it remains stubbornly untamed. Its vast, arid interior, which is three times the size of England, has never been successfully charted. Its 1.8-billion-year-old cliff faces, gargantuan waterfalls, and dry, cracked expanses—where you may come across a dinosaur footprint—feel suspended in eternal stillness, undisturbed by human history. The place’s meditative calm is an antidote to the frenetic distractions of modernity—and a major motivation for traveling to one of the most remote and isolated parts of the planet.
Accessing “quiet places” like the Kimberley is one of the biggest trends in expedition cruising, which offers a means for travelers to comfortably access hard-to-reach destinations that have minimal tourism infrastructure. Seabourn Pursuit is the most recent expedition vessel to have obtained the necessary permits to sail along this wild knuckle of northwestern Australia between the city of Darwin and the town of Broome. One of Seabourn‘s primary points of difference is its engagement with Aboriginal communities from First Nations Australian Country—as the lands and waters to which these groups have ties are called—throughout the Kimberley. “We want to make sure the custodians of these lands are honored and we have good relationships with them,” said Shaun Powell, an affable Texan who is Seabourn’s director of expedition operations, over drinks in the ship’s Expedition Lounge. As part of the partnership, Seabourn provides funding to the Wunambal Gaambera to help them build year-round residences in their Country. Seabourn is also one of the only cruise lines in the region that employs First Nations Australian guides to bring the stories of these lands to life.
I didn’t have a First Nations Australian guide on my trip, but the expedition leaders I met illuminated my experiences in unexpected ways. Back on the ship, Fitzgerald, a former Qantas pilot, proudly told us that after a year of teaching in a small, rural community in Arnhem Land, in Australia’s wild Northern Territory, his daughter had been invited to refer to an elder as “aunty,” a rare offer that demonstrates respect for an outsider. He explained that in certain parts of the Kimberley, nearly all flat surfaces are adorned with some kind of First Nations Australian art. Deeper inland, rock art has been found depicting European sailing ships that predate the arrival of Europeans in the region, which has some experts rethinking accepted history.
No matter how good the storytelling on board Seabourn Pursuit is, however, you itch to get off, to plunge into the enigmatic ancient landscape. While the ship was anchored, the Kimberley’s cliff faces, its shades of blasted burgundy, coral, and plum, seemed to be calling me to shore. My favorite part of the day on the ship came before sunrise, when I would have a pot of coffee on the sixth deck. I’d watch a thin electric wire of dawn burn between the epic darkness of the sea and sky, slowly growing into the fullness of the morning and revealing the new landscape we had reached the previous night.