Underrated things to do in Western Australia beyond Perth and the beaches

Everyone who visits Western Australia sees the same shortlist: Rottnest Island, Cottesloe Beach, maybe a quick trip to Margaret River if there is time. It is a great shortlist, and I am not going to talk you out of any of it. But WA is nearly two and a half million square kilometres, and if you stop at the well-photographed highlights, you are missing most of what makes this state genuinely special.

I have spent years chasing the parts of WA that do not show up on the front page of every travel blog, and some of them have ended up being the best days of any Australian trip I have taken. This guide is for travellers who have already done the obvious stuff, or who simply want to skip straight to the good, less-crowded parts.

None of what follows requires a expedition-grade 4WD or a survival course. It just requires knowing where to point the car.

📋 TL;DR — the quick version

• 🕳️ Walk through the Pinnacles at sunrise, not sunset: you will have the desert almost entirely to yourself and avoid the tour bus crowds.
• 🐋 Swim with whale sharks near Exmouth instead of just diving the Great Barrier Reef — Ningaloo’s shore access is unmatched.
• 🎨 Visit Fremantle Prison and the Fremantle Markets for a side of WA history most tourists skip entirely.
• 🌊 Chase the Gnaraloo and Red Bluff coastline for wild, empty beaches without a single high-rise in sight.
• 🏞️ Explore Karijini National Park’s gorges for swimming holes that rival anything on the East Coast.
• 🍷 Skip the famous cellar doors and find a small Great Southern winery for a quieter, more personal tasting experience.
• 🦘 Drive to Lucky Bay in Esperance to see kangaroos actually lounging on white sand — it is real, not a gimmick.

🕳️ Walk the pinnacles desert before the crowds arrive

Most visitors do the Pinnacles as a rushed afternoon stop on a day tour from Perth, which means arriving at exactly the same time as every other bus. Stay the night in nearby Cervantes instead and walk in at sunrise. The limestone spires cast long shadows across the orange sand, the light is extraordinary for photos, and for a solid hour you might not see another person.

It is a strange, slightly eerie landscape — thousands of jagged limestone pillars rising out of the desert like a forgotten city. Bring a torch if you are walking in before dawn, since the car park is unlit and the path is uneven in places.

🐋 Get in the water with a whale shark at Ningaloo

I will say this plainly: Ningaloo Reef does not get anywhere near the international recognition it deserves, largely because it sits a long way from anywhere. That distance is exactly why it stays this good. Between March and July, whale sharks — the largest fish on the planet, and completely harmless — pass close enough to shore that boats can reach them in twenty minutes rather than two hours.

Outside whale shark season, Turquoise Bay offers some of the best drift snorkelling in the country, and you barely need to leave the sand to reach the coral.

👉 Book a Whale Shark Swim Tour in Ningaloo on GetYourGuide →

🎨 Spend a proper day in Fremantle, not just an afternoon

Fremantle gets treated as a Perth day-trip add-on, which sells it badly short. The old Fremantle Prison, a UNESCO World Heritage site, runs a torchlight tour after dark that is genuinely unsettling in the best way — far more atmospheric than most convict-history attractions on the East Coast.

• 🏛️ Fremantle Prison torchlight tour: guided after-dark tours through the cell blocks that lean into the building’s genuinely dark history rather than sanitising it.
• 🛍️ Fremantle Markets: a Victorian-era market building full of local produce, art, and buskers that has stayed authentic despite the tourist attention.
• 🍺 Little Creatures Brewery: a working brewery on the waterfront with views across the harbour, worth an hour even if you are not much of a beer drinker.

🌊 Find the coastline nobody photographs

North of Carnarvon, the Gnaraloo and Red Bluff coastline is about as close as mainland Australia gets to feeling untouched. There is no town, no resort strip, just red cliffs dropping into turquoise water and a handful of surf campers who have made the long drive on purpose.

It is not a place to rush. Bring supplies, because there is nowhere to buy them once you arrive, and give yourself at least two nights to properly appreciate how empty and beautiful it is.

🏕️ Practical notes for visiting

1. Fuel up in Carnarvon. It is the last reliable fuel stop before the turn-off, and running short out here is a genuine problem, not an inconvenience.
2. Book camping sites ahead in peak season. Gnaraloo Station manages bookings directly, and sites fill fast during the winter surf season.
3. Pack reef shoes. The rock platforms are sharp in places, and reef shoes make exploring the tide pools far more comfortable.

🏞️ Swim in the gorges of Karijini National Park

Karijini, deep in the Pilbara, has some of the most striking landscapes in Australia and a fraction of the visitors of the more famous national parks. Deep red gorges cut through ancient rock, with cold, clear swimming holes at the bottom of several of them.

Hancock Gorge and Hamersley Gorge are the two most accessible for casual visitors, while Weano Gorge’s Handrail Pool rewards a slightly more adventurous scramble with one of the best swimming spots in the state. The heat out here is intense, so aim to hike in the early morning and save the afternoon for floating in the shade.

👉 Book a Karijini National Park Multi-Day Tour on GetYourGuide →

🍷 Taste wine in the Great Southern instead of Margaret River

Margaret River deserves its reputation, but it also means crowded cellar doors and booked-out restaurants in peak season. The Great Southern region, further south-east around Mount Barker and Denmark, produces excellent Riesling and Shiraz with none of the queues.

Winemakers here tend to pour the tastings themselves, which means genuinely useful conversations about the vintage rather than a scripted spiel. Combine a tasting day with a walk through the Valley of the Giants tree-top walk near Walpole for one of the most underrated day combinations in the entire state.

🦘 Meet the kangaroos of lucky bay

Near Esperance, on the state’s remote south coast, Lucky Bay regularly tops lists of Australia’s whitest sand — and yes, the kangaroos really do laze around on the beach beside sunbathers. It looks staged in photos. It is not.

Cape Le Grand National Park, which contains Lucky Bay, also has excellent short walking trails and several other beaches worth exploring if you have more than a day to spend in the area. Esperance itself is a genuinely charming small town, worth an overnight stay rather than a rushed drive-through.

🗺️ Planning your route

Trying to link all of these into one trip will burn through weeks and thousands of kilometres, so pick a region rather than attempting the whole state. The south-west loop (Margaret River, Great Southern, Esperance) suits a one to two week trip from Perth, while the north-west run (Pinnacles, Ningaloo, Karijini) needs closer to two weeks given the driving distances involved.

Whichever you choose, build in more slack time than feels necessary. WA has a habit of rewarding travellers who linger an extra day at a lookout rather than rushing to the next item on the list.

🍽️ Eat where the locals actually eat

WA’s food scene rarely gets mentioned in the same breath as Melbourne’s or Sydney’s, which is a shame, because some of the best regional produce in the country comes out of this state. Marron (a freshwater crayfish unique to the south-west) shows up on menus around Margaret River and Pemberton, and it is worth seeking out specifically rather than settling for the usual seafood platter.

• 🦞 Marron at a Pemberton farm-gate restaurant: sweeter and more delicate than lobster, and rarely available outside WA, so treat it as a genuine once-in-a-trip dish.
• 🍄 Truffle hunting near Manjimup: winter truffle season (June–August) brings guided dog-led hunts followed by a tasting lunch, and it is far less touristy than it sounds.
• 🐟 Geraldton crayfish straight off the boat: buy directly from the co-op wharf rather than a restaurant markup, and cook it yourself back at your accommodation.

🌅 Sunset spots that outshine the famous ones

Cottesloe gets all the sunset attention, understandably, but a few quieter spots deliver just as much without the crowds jostling for the same photo.

• 🌇 City Beach: a few kilometres north of Cottesloe, with the same ocean views and a fraction of the visitors.
• 🏝️ Point Peron near Rockingham: limestone cliffs and turquoise water that catch the evening light beautifully, especially from the lookout above Mangles Bay.
• 🌾 Wave Rock at dusk, near Hyden: the famous rock formation takes on a deep orange glow in the late afternoon light that is genuinely worth the inland detour.

None of these require any special access or booking — just a willingness to drive fifteen minutes further than the obvious option, which in Western Australia is usually all it takes to have a view entirely to yourself.

🏛️ Dig into aboriginal culture the right way

Western Australia holds some of the oldest continuous Aboriginal culture on the planet, and there are far better ways to engage with it than a rushed gift-shop stop. Seek out Aboriginal-owned and guided experiences specifically — the difference in depth and authenticity compared to a generic commercial tour is enormous.

1. Kooljaman at Cape Leveque. An Aboriginal-owned wilderness camp on the tip of the Dampier Peninsula, offering mud crabbing and spear-fishing tours led by traditional owners.
2. Wula Gura Nyinda Eco Cultural Adventures, Shark Bay. Guided walks and kayak tours around Monkey Mia led by a Malgana traditional owner, covering bush tucker and cultural history most visitors never hear.
3. Karijini Eco Retreat cultural tours. Short guided walks through Karijini that explain the Banjima connection to the gorges alongside the geology, adding real depth to a visit most people treat as purely scenic.

Booking ahead matters more for these experiences than for standard tourist attractions, since group sizes are intentionally kept small to preserve the quality of the interaction. It is worth the extra planning.

🚁 Splurge on one scenic flight

If there is one indulgence worth budgeting for on a WA trip, it is a scenic flight over a landscape too vast to properly appreciate from the ground. The Horizontal Falls near Broome, the Bungle Bungle Range’s beehive-shaped domes in Purnululu National Park, and Shark Bay’s heart-shaped Useless Loop salt ponds all reveal patterns and scale that are simply invisible at eye level.

These flights are not cheap, typically running from a few hundred dollars per person depending on duration and departure point. But for landscapes this remote and this dramatic, it is often the only realistic way to see them at all — some, like the Bungle Bungles’ interior gorges, are a multi-day 4WD trek without one.

👉 Book a Horizontal Falls Scenic Flight and Boat Tour on GetYourGuide →

🎒 Packing notes for the road less travelled

A few of these spots sit well outside normal mobile coverage and regular fuel stops, so it pays to prepare slightly differently than you would for a Perth city break. Carry a paper map as a backup, download offline maps before you leave coverage, and let someone know your rough route if you are heading into the Pilbara or the far south coast.

None of this is meant to sound alarming — thousands of travellers do these routes safely every year. It just rewards a bit more preparation than a standard coastal holiday, and that preparation is part of what keeps these places so wonderfully uncrowded.