Western Australia for the Food Is the Next Great Food Lover’s Destination

“The tyranny of distance” is a phrase Australians use half-seriously to express the peculiarity of their global position. Popularized by a book by historian Geoffrey Blainey, it describes a point of view held by British colonialists of the 1800s, who believed the center of the universe to be Buckingham Palace. From that perspective, residents of the Crown’s outposts Down Under were brutally distant, somehow even more than half a world away. It’s still a terribly long flight from Australia to London, or most any other place.

But what of the majesty of distance? That thought occurred to me as my flight touched down in Perth and a cheerful voice acknowledged the Whadjuk Noongar people as traditional owners of the land under our still-rolling wheels. (The ceremonial Acknowledgement of Country recognizes the ancestral claims of displaced Aboriginal people for whom, it hardly needs to be said, Buckingham Palace was not the center of the universe.) My head rushed, not so much from jet lag as jet wonder. A majestic distance: any farther and we’d be on our way home again. 

A similar rush hit me a few days later, during a walk near Yallingup, in the Margaret River region south of Perth. I was accompanying a springy-legged naturalist named Hamish Gibson on a short stretch of the Cape-to-Cape Track, a 76-mile trail that runs between Cape Naturaliste in the north and the southerly Cape Leeuwin, where the Indian and Southern Oceans meet. Gibson’s corkscrew hair bounced as he walked, and every few steps he stopped to recite another extraordinary fact about the area’s unique biodiversity, unique ocean currents, unique geology.

“This is a chunk of India,” Gibson said, gesturing to the ground beneath us with a sweep of his arm. Some 3 billion years ago, he explained, the granite on which we stood was the proto-continent Gondwana. Across unfathomable spans of time the landmass moved north and west to become India, shifting at about the same speed as a human fingernail grows. A fragment split off — at this point, Gibson drew an arrow in the sand with a stick — and moved east until, like a sequin shed from the subcontinent’s sari, it stuck to Australia’s flank. The force of the collision pushed up mountains three miles high; millions of years of tempests wore them down. Now we stood among wildflowers and boulders as round as ripe peaches while surfers rode aquamarine waves toward a sugar beach. My head swam to contemplate this glimpse into the deep past — another majestic distance.

The Margaret River plays on the imagination like other land’s-end enclaves: Malibu and Big Sur often came to mind. A popular destination for wine-country R&R, Margs, as locals call it, was my jumping-off point for a road trip along Australia’s lower left-hand corner, the South West Edge. What I found, beyond the vineyards and surf breaks, was green mountains tumbling down to tidal pools, old-growth forests, cool-climate wines, and the surprise of a queer-friendly French-Vietnamese bistro in the Victorian-era port town of Albany. Farther along empty highways, I stopped in Bremer Bay for an orca-spotting cruise to the watery edge of the continental shelf, before finally reaching Cape Le Grand National Park, where white sharks patrolled the waters off kangaroo-haunted beaches. 

The people I met along the way were chipper and keen, and everywhere the golden West Coast light cast a hue of nostalgia. But for what? It occurred to me, toward the end of the trip, that I was reminded of the United States from my earliest childhood, when the country felt optimistic, sunny, and sociable, even if a hint of repression simmered beneath the smiles. 

The South West Edge is not an obvious itinerary for first-timers to Oz. But for Australians, the vineyards, giant jarrah trees, and white-sand beaches are as iconic as the outback. In Bremer Bay, I happened to cross paths with a top executive from the Australian tourism industry. She and her husband were driving the exact route I was following. Finding them there was like uncovering a secret: the South West Edge is Australia for connoisseurs.

To my American eye, the Margaret River looked like two familiar wine regions rolled into one. At first glance it resembled Napa: a scenic enclave of fine-dining restaurants and powerhouse vineyards. The spare-no-expense standard was set along Caves Road, the main north-south route. At Cherubino Wine’s restaurant, I lunched on seafood served by a Lady Gaga doppelgänger in a crisp white shirt. Half a mile farther south, a tasting-room attendant at Vasse Felix, the region’s oldest winery, poured chest-thumping Cabernets as she talked up a new visitor complex being built to showcase the house bubbly, Idée Fixe. Elsewhere on Caves Road, I previewed Cape Lodge 2.0, an esteemed Luxury Lodges of Australia property bought in 2021 by mining magnate Andrew Forrest, who plans to upgrade to meet the expectations of high-net-worth visitors from Sydney, Singapore, and London.

The second face of the Margaret River looked more like Sonoma — offbeat, quirky, a bit wayward. “I don’t see myself as part of the wine industry,” said Sam Vinciullo as we sat at a folding table surrounded by vineyards and clucking hens. “I’m more of a chicken farmer.” Be that as it may, Vinciullo’s delicious natural wines have been profiled in the New York Times. 

A few miles inland, in the hamlet of Wallcliffe, I had sundowners with Iwo Jakimowicz and Sarah Morris, the husband-and-wife team behind Si Vintners, who began tinkering with organic wines nearly 15 years ago. “At the start we couldn’t sell a single bottle of wine in Western Australia,” Morris said. They still do things no commercial winemaker would dream of, like making rosé from a witch’s brew of Sauvignon Blanc and Cabernet Sauvignon. “It was a dare,” Jakimowicz said, laughing. 

Iconoclasts like Vinciullo, Morris, and Jakimowicz found common cause with a new generation of Margaret River chefs, the ones whose genre-fluid restaurants pair chill vibes with culinary chops. In Yallingup I met Ben Jacob, who was trained in London and Perth but found his way to a bluff overlooking a sweet point break to open his first restaurant, Lagoon Yallingup. “It’s one of the iconic spots,” said Jacob, who doesn’t even surf. “The view never gets old.”

In the restaurant’s upstairs dining room, Jacob offers an unstuffy version of elevated coastal cuisine for dinner, while downstairs he serves casual lunch. Breakfast is at a walk-up kiosk outside. One morning he handed me a chilli-crab omelette through the takeout window: a fistful of crab meat wrapped in a golden-egg envelope, showered with foraged greens and minced herbs, and lubricated with a fire-engine-red sauce. I carried it to a bench with a view, where an envious seagull watched me eat. The first bite was perfect in the way that few things are after a certain point in life. The food, the setting, the weather — there was nothing else to wish for. 

Before leaving Margs, I drove south to see the terminus of the Cape-to-Cape Track at Cape Leeuwin Lighthouse, which was manned by resident keepers until 1992. The guide on duty that day was a storm-weathered veteran named Bruce Murphy. As he led a tour of the 128-foot stone tower, Murphy said he knew of two ghosts on the premises. The first was a lighthouse keeper who can’t quit the place. “You smell old man and tobacco, with no rhyme or reason,” he said. The other appears in one of the former keeper’s cottages, where many years ago a woman was cleaning the drapes when she fell from a stool, went into labor prematurely, and died two agonizing days later. Keepers used to gather there for lunch, and once a new man prattled on about how he didn’t believe in ghosts. “Every door opened and closed at the same time,” the guide said. “He left a believer.”

The road southeast toward Albany ran through sheep-grazed paddocks and old-growth forests. The roster of giant eucalyptus trees in the Great Southern Forest included tall and skinny karri, stout jarrah, and tingle, with its buttressed roots. I stayed the night near Pemberton, which used to be a logging town, and set out early the next morning to visit a cathedral grove of karri trees in Gloucester National Park. 

At that hour I didn’t expect to see anyone, but as I approached I saw Andrea Brick, a retiree from Cairns, in eastern Australia, climbing down from a living tower known as the Gloucester Tree. Between 1947 and 1952, fire spotters spent shifts in the canopy of this giant karri tree, on a platform 174 feet above ground. Although no longer used as a fire lookout, it is open to anyone who dares climb the ladder — unsupervised, unregulated, and unhindered by a safety harness. The Gloucester Tree stands as a libertarian test of bravery, and I knew it was not for me.

Then Brick told me about her ascent. “This is the reason we came to Western Australia — or, that I came to Western Australia,” she said as she caught her breath, correcting herself in deference to her husband, who captured video from the ground. Ashamed of my timidity, I screwed up my courage and climbed 153 rungs, my eyes quite wide the whole time.

Later in the day I found a less daredevil route into the treetops at Valley of the Giants, where a narrow steel walkway zigzagged 130 feet above the ground. As I looked down into the tingle trees, vertigo made me understand the aptness of their name. They were among the few primordial giants left in the Southern Forest; the rest were felled more than a century ago in the name of empire. Lumber shipped out from Busselton jetty built the Indian railway system and the London Underground. 

As logging declined, wine cultivation spread. Tourism is still catching up, and for now the hotel gap along the South West Edge is filled by what Australians term “self-catering cottages.” Near the town of Denmark I spent a peaceful night at Upland Farm, in a modern cabin with a wood-burning stove. Another night, at Ampersand Estates, outside Pemberton, my farmhouse was provisioned with a hamper fit for a king’s picnic. I walked over to the tasting room to find someone to thank and found an attendant with one guest, a local with a glass of Pinot Noir. When I told them I’d been in the Margaret River region, they exchanged looks. The attendant said Margs was “too commercialized” for her taste, as if it were a strip-mall suburb of Perth. 

“I wanted the smallest town I could possibly find,” she said. “The fact that there is nothing here is the reason to come. You come for the silence.”

Grapes were planted on nearby Mount Barker by an English settler in 1859, but the Great Southern appellation was established only in 2007. Today, it is the largest in the whole country. At Brave New Wine, I found wife-and-husband winemakers Yoko Luscher-Mostert and Andries Mostert among the fermentation tanks. It was getting to be the golden hour, and they popped the corks of several pétillants naturelles, or naturally sparkling wines. The hipster winemakers are anything but reverent. (Tasting notes for Nat Daddy, a cuvée: “Absolutely gagging to be smashed.”) Both said they love the Great Southern because it represents freedom from stress and convention. 

“Perth is the most remote city in the world,” Luscher-Mostert explained. “Margaret River is where people from Perth escape to. Denmark is where people from Margaret River escape to. And Bremer Bay is where people from Denmark escape to.” 

The next morning I set out for Bremer Bay, with a lunch stop in Albany at Liberté, a historic working man’s pub turned French-Vietnamese bistro offering garlic-crab noodles, natural wines by the glass, and safe-space inclusivity. The caption of a photo of Christopher Walken taped in the front window described the reservation policy: “We accept Walkens.” 

Afterward I strolled up York Street, to the Kurrah Mia gallery of Indigenous art. Vernice Gillies, a Menang elder and the gallery’s owner, welcomed me in and asked if I’d seen Mokare. I hadn’t — and, who was he? Mokare was a Noongar man, Gillies explained, who in 1831 served settlers as a guide, translator, and advocate for peaceful relations with Indigenous landowners. In 1997, he was commemorated with a statue near the library, making him the first Black man portrayed by a public statue. “We’re so proud of him,” Gillies said. 

As I backtracked to pay my respects, I noticed the prosperity evoked by the fine Victorian buildings on either side of the street. Its source, for 178 years, was commercial whaling. According to Albany’s whaling museum, the last hunt occurred on November 21, 1978, when a lone sperm whale was sighted; the crew let it live. In the decades since the 1982 international moratorium on whaling, leviathans have returned in numbers to the Southern Ocean. My mind swimming, I drove on to Bremer Bay to look for them.

It’s called the Patch, and it’s a bit of open water 19 nautical miles off Bremer Bay. Whale watchers and biologists go to observe a cetacean oxymoron: a resident population of offshore orcas, or killer whales. Offshore, in this sense, describes a distinctive “ecotype,” or taxonomic subgroup, that typically inhabits the unknowable expanses of mid-ocean. This unique population never leaves the coastal zone from Cape Leeuwin to Esperance. Between January and March, they surface daily at the Patch, said Gemma Sharp, whose family runs Whale Watch Western Australia. 

The Patch also draws prey species such as baleen whales, and the action can be dramatic. Sharp was with passengers several years ago as they witnessed multiple orca families, maybe 75 individuals, join forces to kill a blue whale. “Hunts are exciting,” Sharp said, “but a bad day for the creature on the other end.”

Within minutes of our boat’s arrival at the Patch, Sharp spotted a sperm whale lolling at the surface, its skin the color of tarnished silver. You could have taken a stroll on its 50-foot flank. We floated for a while, a cork in a punch bowl, then orcas surfaced and for the next four hours stayed within our sight. 

Sharp knew them by name. The pod was led by matriarch Queenie, the “grand-orca” who kept her daughters and granddaughters close. Another family appeared, as well as several stray males — about 30 creatures in all. Sharp’s hushed but taut narration played out in real time, like an announcer calling a tennis game. Her ability to read the ocean’s surface turned our glimpses into a complex, multigenerational drama. “Every day is a bit of a storyline,” she said back onshore later, “and by the end everything makes sense.” 

The landscape became dry and flat on the way to Esperance, the farthest point on my itinerary. It looked like Oklahoma, with grain fields and rangeland, except for the flocks of galahs, the large pink cockatoos that gathered to peck at wheat spilled from passing trucks. Grain exports are shipped out of Esperance, a major commercial port. The other main cargo, iron ore, arrives in sealed carriers to prevent red dust from staining local beaches, which are said to be Australia’s whitest. Had I continued past Esperance and crossed the desiccated Nullarbor Plain, I wouldn’t have seen a town of equal size until I reached Port Lincoln, 1,100 miles away — the distance from Manhattan to Cape Canaveral.

At the Esperance tourist office, I met a real sparkler, Denise Louise Hargreaves, who described herself as “a fifth-generation Californian living in Australia.” Hargreaves sent me to catch the sunset on Great Ocean Drive, west of town. The views were ripping. Also at her instruction, the next morning I drove east to Cape Le Grand National Park — land traditionally owned by Wudjari people — to look for kangaroos at Lucky Bay. Australia’s pioneering navigator Matthew Flinders bestowed the name in 1802 after sheltering from a storm on his exploration of the treacherous southern coast, but I wasn’t lucky enough to see the ’roos. 

My last day was a sprint back toward the Swan Valley, just outside Perth. I wanted to talk about the Acknowledgement of Country — especially a line I’d remembered about respecting Aboriginal elders “past, present, and emerging” — with Noongar elder Dale Tilbrook. She describes herself as a Wardandi Bibbulmun woman whose traditional Aboriginal country was near Busselton; today she runs the Maalinup Aboriginal Gallery, on the grounds of Mandoon Estate vineyard.

We met in a thick-walled historic house built by John Septimus Roe, who arrived from England in 1829 as Surveyor-General of Western Australia and was given land along the Swan River by the Crown as a reward for his service. Roe cleared out the resident Whadjuk Noongar people to graze cattle and plant grapes, naming the property Sandalford after his estate in England.

Tilbrook spoke the Queen’s English with scalpel precision and embodied an inheritance of cultural knowledge dating back 45,000 years or more. One moment she would be describing the six seasons of the Noongar calendar and rattling off names of the edible and medicinal plants of the bush in multiple languages. The next she would lay out, with a barrister’s cool factuality, the colonial-era strategy of disproportionate justice: for every white person killed in territorial disputes, multiple Aboriginal people would be killed in revenge.

“They were teaching us a lesson we wouldn’t forget,” Tilbrook said, adding dryly, “and we haven’t.”

John Septimus Roe participated in one such retaliatory attack, at Pinjarra, where in 1834 as many as 40 Aboriginal men, women, and children were killed in an ambush. Textbooks from Tilbrook’s childhood legitimized the bloody day as “the Battle of Pinjarra”; conflicts that resulted in settler casualties at the hands of Aboriginal combatants were invariably described as “massacres.” 

I asked Tilbrook if the Acknowledgement of Country had meaning for her, or if it sounded hollow. Reconciliation requires truth, she said. Truth is the difference between calling something a battle and calling it a massacre. Truth also reveals the contradictions of our present day. For example, we were meeting in the historic Roe house at Mandoon winery in Western Australia, but we were also meeting on a riverbank on Whadjuk Noongar land, where for many thousands of years people gathered to dig native yams. It was during those harvest feasts, Tilbrook explained, that elders would catch up with old friends, and youngsters would sometimes discover first love. 

“John Septimus Roe must be turning in his grave,” Tilbrook mused as she poured lemon-myrtle tea made with wild plants gathered on the property, “to know the blackfellas have shown up and taken over.” She sipped from her cup and let out an unabashed laugh. 

How to Visit

It’s a doozy of a flight to Perth, but long-haul specialist Qantas connects U.S. fliers via Sydney and, in the other direction, offers an epic nonstop from London. A car is essential to explore the South West Edge. Roads are excellent, but the abundance of wildlife makes driving between dusk and dawn risky.

Perth

Perth’s creative enclave is Fremantle — Freo to locals. Situated at the mouth of the Swan River, the once-derelict historic district is now packed with restaurants and bars. The Warders Hotel was built in 1851 to house prison guards; it has undergone industrial-chic renovation and has a busy Asian restaurant, Emily Taylor. Upriver at Mandoon Estate winery, a “bush tucker” tasting with Wardandi Bibbulmun elder Dale Tilbrook is a fascinating education in ethnobotany, historical truths, and the path to reconciliation.

Margaret River

Cape Lodge is a bucolic Luxury Lodges of Australia property near wineries, beaches, and restaurants. Lagoon Yallingup serves a superb all-seafood menu at lunch and dinner, plus surfers’ breakfasts at the takeout kiosk. A duo of Noma alums at Alberta’s, in Busselton, offers ticketed dinners, classes, and pop-ups via their Instagram account. Eighty percent of the hearty three-course farm lunch at Glenarty Road is grown on the property. Sam Vinciullo and Si Vintners are making some of Australia’s most interesting natural wines; the region’s first vineyard, Vasse Felix, pours collectible Cabernets, textbook Rieslings, and local bubbles. 

Great Southern

This geographically vast wine region defies summary, but Settlers’ Cottage, at Ampersand Estates winery, near Pemberton’s tall tree country, is a standout two-bedroom farmhouse with a wraparound porch, chef’s kitchen, and views of the vines. The gorgeous Modernist cabins at Upland Farm, in Denmark, the region’s heart, feature deep soaking tubs and farm-country serenity. Denmark Farmhouse Cheese sells provisions for a killer cheese-and-charcuterie board. Albany’s Liberté presents Parisian décor, natural wines, and garlic-chilli-crab noodles.

The beautiful small-batch wines at La Violetta feel almost intellectual, while Brave New Wine specializes in easy-to-love party juice.

Bremer Bay and Esperance

Whale Watch Western Australia leads orca-spotting trips out of remote Bremer Bay. Esperance Chalet Village is a stylish gathering of A-frames and beachy cabins in a residential neighborhood three miles from town center. The funky takeaway counter Fish Face serves superb seafood — available grilled, fried, or broiled. Lucky Bay Brewing offers beer by the pint and a booze-friendly menu. A flying pub crawl by Fly Esperance — a fun, scenic flight between wheat-belt beer halls — fortunately comes with a designated flier.

A version of this story first appeared in the December 2024 / January 2025 issue of Travel + Leisure under the headline “Shore Leave.”