Australian Trip
Copyright© 2026 by Oz Ozzie
Chapter 9: Manning Gorge
The Gibb River Road is our favourite.
Specifically, Manning Gorge, on the Gibb River Road, is our favourite. But let me back up, because you need the road first.
“The Gibb” is a famous road in the far north of Western Australia — six hundred and sixty kilometres of dirt running through the Kimberley, a stock route, built to service the cattle stations scattered out in that enormous emptiness. We came at it from Broome, having driven the highway straight there first — and I have to stop and tell you about Broome, because Broome is a crazy town. Its population is about fifteen thousand in the wet season and swells past seventy-five thousand in the dry, when the whole country comes north to escape its own winter. Cable Beach, which is one of the most famous beaches in Australia and entirely deserves it. Also still firmly in crocodile territory — but it’s Broome, in the dry, and no one cares at all. You swim.
We put the caravan into storage in Broome and ran the Gibb west to east, light, on the swag.
The western end is, honestly, a fairly well-kept dirt road — the stock trucks use it, so it gets graded, and they’ve even sealed sections of it because it’s become so popular. The sealing is fiercely resisted — not by the people who live out there, but by the people who don’t, the purists who come for the difficulty and do not want their Gibb ruined, thank you very much. The difficulty is the whole romance, and the romance belongs mostly to the visitors. But it’s still high-clearance four-wheel-drive country. There are river crossings — the deepest we took was close to a metre. That’s snorkel depth: deep enough that the water’s up around your engine’s air intake, which is why nobody runs the Gibb without a snorkel fitted to their four-wheel-drive. And the side tracks out to the stations are rougher again, and the eastern end is rougher than all of it.
And the whole thing is corrugated. Every dirt road in Australia is corrugated — ridged, like a sheet of corrugated iron laid down for hundreds of kilometres — and there’s a trick to it: if you can hold eighty kilometres an hour, you skim across the tops of the ridges and it smooths out, more or less. Anything slower and it’s bone-jarring, teeth-rattling, fittings-loosening misery. So you want to do eighty. Except at eighty you also have to be absolutely wide awake for the holes, the sudden dips, the fords that appear out of nowhere — because eighty into one of those is a very bad day. And you cannot do eighty towing anything. Which was the other reason we’d left the van in Broome.
So we didn’t miss the caravan. My wife was less enthusiastic about renewing her relationship with the swag — and the nights up there were unexpectedly cold, though at least the swag is warm once you’re sealed into it.
The Gibb is a greatest-hits album. Windjana Gorge. Tunnel Creek. Gorge after gorge, station after station, all the way to El Questro at the eastern end. And the formula is the Territory’s formula exactly: park somewhere, walk a bit, swim in an astonishing place.
And the most astonishing place — the best place to swim in all of Australia — is Manning Gorge.
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