Wild things

Starting just north of Perth, Australia’s Coral Coast and Golden Outback regions boast 1100 kilometres of spectacular coastline, beautiful country towns and an enviable list of attractions and discoveries. 

Photos by Dan Avila

Here, the annual wildflower season is a transformative time that attracts visitors from around the world. 

Photographer Dan Avila recently drove through wildflower country up the coast and back via the inland, taking in some of the best scenery Western Australia has to offer. That included Geraldton’s Chapman River Regional Park, which features more than 300 species of native plants – some found nowhere else in the world.  

“Driving up the coast to Kalbarri, Hutt Lagoon’s Pink Lake looks utterly surreal,” Dan says. Salt-trapped bacteria create the colour. Another of his favourite sights is the cliffs of Kalbarri. “The well-signed cliff walks provide an edge-of-world view of this harsh yet stunning landscape that somehow hosts an array of thriving wildflowers in a windswept environment,” Dan says. 

Travelling from Mount Augustus in the north to Esperance on the South Coast, taking in the Wheatbelt and Goldfields in between, he found paddocks carpeted with great swathes of everlastings. Dan rose at dawn at Mount Magnet to find “a bracing chill in the air with perfect blue skies”greeting him at The Granites, an escarpment about 15 metres high, formed by the erosion of the soft white granite from beneath a hard red-brown iron-cemented capping. “It’s a gorgeous and majestic place to explore,” Dan says.  

During wildflower season, the homesteads and stations along the way are well worth a visit, including historic Oakabella Homestead, just north of Geraldton, with its famous wattleseed scones.