ELLE Australia journeys deep into the heart of Western Australia's Pilbara to discover why Karijini National Park is a landscape worth unplugging for.
WORDS BY RUBY FENELEY
I'm journeying to remote WA with Canada Goose, and our destination is Karijini National Park. But we start at Paraburdoo Airport, owned by Rio Tinto and named for the small, purpose-built mining town it belongs to. Most people here are here to work, and the rumble of several Rimowa suitcases hitting the tarmac – plus our photographer's emerald green Haider Ackermann for Canada Goose puffer, from his Snow Goose collection – has certainly captured the attention of the locals. Despite its reputation for UFO sightings, we're not headed to Paraburdoo itself but ninety minutes north-east, to one of the most remote and striking places in WA: Karijini National Park.
Officially, we're here on a Canada Goose Local Expedition, part of a series of trips the brand is running this year under a new platform called Natural Intelligence, the idea that nature worked out most of its best systems long before we did.
Karijini sits on Banjima, Guruma and Yinhawangka country. Geologically and politically complex, the park – more than two-billion-year-old rock formations, a network of deep gorges, crystal-clear night skies, death adders and dingoes – has a bedfellow in Australia's iron ore industry, a tension our guide tells us is in constant negotiation. But there's no sign of any of that on the drive in. Instead, twisting, spectral ghost gums, stark and bleached, sprout everywhere across the dusty red plains amongst spinifex grass. Astonishingly resilient, they are often hollowed out by fire, their cavernous trunks yawning wide, giving the landscape a chiaroscuro quality.
As we approach our destination, Karijini Eco Retreat, an enormous gibbous moon hangs low and ghostly in a bright blue four o'clock sky.
Three Days Off The Grid With Canada Goose
Day 1
Karijini Eco Retreat sits on the edge of Joffre Gorge, known to the Banjima people as Jijingunha. It is one hundred per cent First Nations-owned and run through Gumala Enterprises and Development, the business arm of the Gumala Aboriginal Corporation, which represents the Banjima, Yinhawangka and Nyiyaparli people of the Pilbara. Profits from the retreat go back to the community - education programs, cultural preservation, infrastructure. The eco tents are non-permanent structures and considerably more chic than that description suggests. This is good news for me, because I have not camped in a tent since an ill-fated Easter long weekend family trip in 2001. Part wooden structure, part tent, the eco tents have electric lights and an en suite complete with a bathroom countertop large enough for my makeup and skincare - approximately half a Mecca store. Upon arrival, we're given a list of the area's potential risks. From dingoes, whose haunting cries we'll hear at 4am every morning, to a healthy variety of venomous snakes, to spinifex grass – an innocuous-looking shrub whose blade-like fronds are tipped with silica and will cause nagging irritation for hours, reasons to stay on the beaten track are plentiful.
In late July, temperatures in Karijini are extreme, ranging from 25 degrees during the day to lows of five to ten overnight. I can confirm it felt colder, and I'm staying snug in the Beaumont Jacket – a sell-out style for the brand with a cropped barn jacket cut, corduroy collar, and deep pockets. I'm grateful for the cover as we go on a nighttime stroll to Joffre Gorge, the first of the deep channels we'll view during our time at Karijini. The darkness this far from the city is inky; the moon rises like a floodlight, turning the red rocks silver and giving the bottom of the gorge a glass-like shine in the dark. For now, we catch small glimpses of the Alpha Capricornid meteors - one of the few in the Southern Hemisphere bright enough to be seen against the glow of the near-full moon. Early in the morning, one member of our party leaves his tent to record the dingoes howling, and instead catches a flaming green meteor crossing the sky.
Canada Goose is timing this year's Local Expeditions to what it's calling its Natural Calendar, nature's own diary rather than the fashion one: a solstice ritual in Tuscany, a trip to Haida Gwaii built around how the landscape stores information, and this one, scheduled for the Pilbara's high season for taking in the Milky Way and less leisurely pursuits like hiking, which is next on the agenda.
Our first day of hiking does not start slowly; Knox Gorge is on the menu. I'd assumed that any hiking would suit my exercise routine, which consists of yoga and moderately athletic speed walks to Pilates studios and small bars for happy hour orange wine. This proves to be incorrect. For someone yet to star in an adventure thriller, the descent involves a lot of scrambling over shale on my back, rock-hopping, scaling on hands and knees (the survival of my acrylic nails is a testament to the ladies at La Rose Nails, Enmore) and shuffling along rock walls. I've been told that the only way out of the gorge is the way we came, or via emergency helicopter, so suppressing humiliating visions of an airlift, I persevere with caution. On the way down, someone asks if we can take home one of the many intriguing rock fragments trying to trip us up. Our guide says brightly that we're welcome to, but that visitors who do often end up posting them back to the park after a run of bad luck. We move on sans souvenirs.
The bottom of Knox Gorge is worth the effort. It's not in full flow when we visit – small pools of bright, vivid aquamarine water dot our path. The dryness of the gorge is reassuring; our guides have explained that even light rainfall can produce flash floods within minutes: three-metre walls of water tearing through the gorge like a freight train. But today, the scene is as peaceful and picturesque as it comes. The 100-metre rockface that reads as a wash of ochre from a distance is striated with iron bands up close: iron oxide in red, silver and black, alternating with glittering chert and jasper. The rock formed between two and 2.5 billion years ago when the ground we were standing on was seafloor.
The gorges themselves are much younger, formed over millions of years as the Hamersley Plateau lifted and water found its way through the continent's hardest rock. Having just been confronted with my own mortality during my unathletic clamber, I am now slightly awestruck by the feeling of standing in living history as our guide explains that this is where life on Earth formed. Before oxygen was in the air, there was iron in the sea, dissolved into water from volcanic vents and weathered rocks. Microscopic organisms began photosynthesising and the oxygen they released met iron, turning it into rust. The iron soaked up new oxygen until it could take no more and the excess rose into the atmosphere. Eventually, the result was complex life on Earth. Those complex life forms are now trying to catch golden hour.
We are also here to shoot Canada Goose's range, and the gorge provides a perfect backdrop. The brand became famous for extreme weather parkas, built on a design archive that runs back through jackets made for and gear-tested by scientists in the remote Arctic – a lineage memorialised on the disc logo on the sleeve, which takes its cue from the United States Antarctic Program, whose personnel have long been issued Canada Goose parkas. None of that is best suited to a 25-degree WA sun, though, so for today's intrepid journey we're wearing some of the brand's newer, lighter options.
The Axis Jacket has a nineties windbreaker feel – windproof, water-repellent, and light enough to fold down to nothing - while the Vault, an archival design rendered in very modern Yves Klein Blue, is custom-designed for transitional weather. Both are arguably as adaptable as the flora and fauna who reside in the Pilbara gorges.
After a nearly vertical climb back up, we emerge victorious, just in time to move on to Hancock Gorge – Bilungunha – a far gentler descent, where we take in the undulating patterns worn into the rock walls and floor. Hancock is famous for "Kermits Pond" which can be discovered navigating the gorge's narrow chambers. The deep emerald green pool is surrounded by a circular "amphitheatre"– style rock face that feels like being in a natural cathedral. In the brief window before dinner, I shower as golden hour filters through the walls of my tent, which have heated considerably since morning. The moon rises gold, like a second sun, and the sense of exhaustion and peace is total. I may be a hiking convert.
Day 2
Day three is a gentler journey, and my acrylic nails get a reprieve. The descent into Dales Gorge is eased by very modern, very solid steel stairs. That said, we do pass a few older travellers taking a break, who tell us to do this kind of thing while we're young rather than waiting to holiday in Europe. We'll have all the time in the world to sip Aperol Spritzes on the beach later.
Dales Gorge is by far the prettiest and most serene of the three gorges we visit. It's home to Fortescue Falls - Jubula - a spring-fed, permanent waterfall that rises from underground and cascades over twenty metres of tiered red rock into a series of pools. It's less Raiders of the Lost Ark, and more a peaceful oasis. With paperbarks, lush ferns, and glittering fresh water, it feels like stumbling on a refuge hidden beneath the dusty surface of some of Australia's driest country. It's also sacred.
The highlight of Dales Gorge is Fern Pool – Jubura – a sacred swimming hole and deeply spiritual site for the Banjima people, which tourists are permitted to visit. In the Dreamtime tradition, this is where a giant sea serpent, Barrimirndi the Warlu, came to rest, and Banjima people consider it his home to this day. We're encouraged to stay quiet and avoid leaping in, as a mark of respect. Floating in the cool, tranquil water instils a deep sense of calm. But it's a calm that, in the Pilbara, has always sat in delicate balance.
Following the visit to Fern Pool, we head to the cultural centre to learn more about the area's First Nations history. Here we meet Johnnell Parker, Vice Chair of the Banjima Native Title Aboriginal Corporation. She shows us Yurlu/Country, an award-winning documentary directed by Yaara Bou Melhem that follows Banjima Elder Maitland Parker, her uncle, in his final year of life, and explores the region's harder history – the legacy of mining.
Blue asbestos mining began at Wittenoom Gorge in the 1930s and while asbestos’ potential toxicity was established that decade, the Wittenoom mine didn’t close until 1966, leaving behind an estimated 3 million tonnes of blue asbestos left in heaps of deadly steel grey powder that rise like mountains from the red earth.
The town of Wittenoom has since been struck from the map along with 46,000 surrounding hectares of Banjima native title land. It is now known as the site of Australia's worst occupational health disaster, with more than 2,000 former workers, residents and family members dead of asbestos-related disease to date. It also has the unhappy distinction of being the largest and most deadly asbestos-contaminated site in the Southern Hemisphere.
Maitland Parker was one of the 2000. He never worked the mines - he was a ranger in the national park next door - but in his final years was affected by mesothelioma, an aggressive cancer caused almost exclusively by asbestos exposure. His family and community remember him by lodging a $1.5 billion suit against the WA government, and a campaign to Clean Up Wittenoom which has gone all the way to the United Nations, where Johnnell Parker spoke earlier this year.
Karijini itself sits on some of the richest iron ore country on the planet, and the negotiations between the mining industry and the national park are ongoing – it is tempting to look at rock formations that have survived two billion years and assume they can withstand anything. But the legacy of Wittenoom is a reminder that this landscape is highly vulnerable to human intervention. For its traditional owners, who remain deeply involved in caring for the land, advocating for it and passing on both its knowledge and its harder histories, it stands as an important site for cultural and national knowledge and protecting Karijini isn't about preserving a picturesque backdrop so city-dwellers can occasionally go glamping and unplug. It is about defending a living, breathing archive of natural intelligence.
Day 3
Warning: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that this article contains the name of a person who has died.