2017 Western Australia 14 - Coral Bay

General

The fourteenth day was Christmas Day, and it was spent at Coral Bay. The settlement does the festival in the manner of a small Australian town: the fire and rescue truck, decorated and driven slowly along the road past the tropical greenery, a Christmas tree in the shade of the caravan park, and the whole day given over to the beach. The temperature was in the thirties by midday and the water in the lagoon was warm enough to stay in for as long as anyone wanted.

By the middle of the morning the beach was full. Families had set up under shade shelters in the lee of the dunes, a boat lay anchored in the shallows offshore, children were in the water and out again all morning, and the smell of a barbecue drifted across from the caravan park. The scene had nothing in common with the northern European Christmas of the postcards, and everything in common with the way the season is actually spent on this coast.

The afternoon was deliberately slow. Lunch was seafood and salad, eaten in the shade with the water a few metres away, and the rest of the day went on swimming, sleeping and watching the beach. In the evening the light went down behind the water again, the fishermen took their positions at the north end of the bay, and the day finished the way the whole week had: quietly, in warm air, with the sound of the sea on the sand.

The morning was spent on the beach before the heat arrived properly, and the water was at its clearest. Swimming on Christmas morning in water that is thirty degrees warm, with the reef visible below and the beach filling up behind, is one of those experiences that makes the distance travelled seem worth it. The children on the beach had been given snorkelling gear as presents and were using it within an hour of opening them, which is a very Australian state of affairs.

History

Christmas in Australia is a summer festival, and the traditions that arrived with European settlers were adapted to a climate that has nothing to do with them. The tree, the carols, the presents and the pudding all came across from Britain and northern Europe, and all of them sit slightly oddly in a season that brings heat, bushfires and school holidays rather than snow. In the coastal towns the answer has been to move the festival outdoors: the meal becomes a barbecue or a cold lunch of seafood, the carols are sung on a beach or in a park, and the afternoon is spent in the water.

The fire truck that drove through the settlement is not only decoration. The volunteer fire services of the small towns along this coast are the first line of defence in the bushfire season, which runs through the summer, and the same vehicles that carry the Christmas lights to the caravan park are the ones that turn out when a fire starts inland. The decorated truck is a reminder of the other side of the season, and small towns in Australia are generally conscious of the connection: the fire brigade, the ambulance and the sea rescue squad are the social infrastructure of a place like Coral Bay.

The town at the southern end of the coast has a longer festival history, and the pattern of the modern holiday here is not much older than the road that carries the visitors. In the 1960s and 1970s the coast was reached on unsealed roads, the camping was uncontrolled and the reef was a local secret; the sealing of the highway and the growth of wildlife tourism in the 1990s turned the settlement into a destination that has to be booked months in advance. Christmas in the middle of that boom is a mixture of the old fishing village and the new visitor economy: the prawns come off local boats, the boats that take tourists out in the morning were fishing boats in the grandfathers’ time, and the families at the barbecue have been coming here for three generations.

The independence of the place has a cost that the residents are candid about. There is no doctor in the settlement, the nearest hospital is in Carnarvon, the power comes from a small grid and the water from bores, and everything that is not caught or grown locally arrives on a truck. A week of celebrating in this condition requires the kind of organisation that a city dweller never has to think about, and the people who live here regard a Christmas with no emergencies as a good Christmas.

The visitor numbers that make a Christmas Day on this beach busy are a recent phenomenon, and the coast’s own accounts of its growth read as a list of road improvements. The highway was sealed in stages through the 1980s and 1990s, the airstrip at Learmonth took larger aircraft, and the whale shark tours that began in the early 1990s gave the region a season that did not depend on fishing. The settlement that had been a handful of shacks became a place with a shop, a caravan park and a booking system, and the festival that used to be spent quietly became the busiest week of the year.

Geology

The water in the lagoon at Christmas is at its warmest of the year, which is the reason the reef can be swum in without a wetsuit and the reason the coral grows as well as it does. The sea surface temperature on this coast peaks in the late summer, and the reefs of the north west are the most heat-adapted in the country: they live close to the limit of what coral can tolerate, and the species present here are the ones that survive the warmest water in Australia.

That tolerance is tested in the years when marine heatwaves arrive. The bleaching events that have affected the coast were caused by water that stayed several degrees above the seasonal average for weeks, and the damage varied with depth, exposure and species. The corals that grow fastest, the branching staghorn and the plating species, are generally the first to bleach and the first to recover, while the massive boulder corals grow more slowly and suffer less but take far longer to come back. A visitor swimming over a reef that looks healthy is looking at a community that is recovering from, or waiting for, the next warm summer.

The physical setting of the lagoon changes with the tide on a scale that is easy to see. The tides on this part of the coast are modest compared with those of the north west Kimberley or the east coast of Queensland, but they are enough to empty the reef flat twice a day, exposing the coral and the rock to the air, and to refill the channels between the coral heads with clear, warm water. The fish move with the tide, the larger predators come in on the flood, and the whole system breathes twice a day.

The reef is also a structure that protects the coast, and that function is worth keeping in mind when looking at maps of the shoreline. The reef crest breaks the swell before it reaches the beach, the lagoon absorbs what is left, and the sand that has accumulated behind the reef is the reason the beaches and the dunes exist at all. If the reef were to die, the coast would begin to erode within a few years, and the sand on which the settlement is built would be the first thing to go. The health of the coral and the future of the town are the same question.

The rock under the lagoon is the record of sea levels that were higher and lower than they are today. During the ice ages the sea was more than a hundred metres below its present level and the coast lay far to the west, and the reef that exists now has grown on the drowned edge of a much older shoreline. The limestone of the cape, the sand of the beaches and the corals of the lagoon are three different ages of the same process, and the order in which a swimmer passes over them, rock, then sand, then coral, is the order in which they formed.

Things to See

A Christmas Day at Coral Bay is best planned around the water rather than against it. Swim in the morning while the light is clear and the wind is light, put the food out in the shade in the middle of the day, and go back to the beach in the late afternoon when the tide has filled the lagoon again. The bay is shallow enough for small children to be safe in the shallows and deep enough for swimmers to reach the coral without a boat, and the sandbars that appear at low tide give the day its natural timetable.

The boat anchored offshore belongs to someone who has done this before. There is a boat ramp at the settlement, and the water in the bay is calm enough for a small vessel, which is why so many of them appear in views of the coast: a white hull in turquoise water with the beach behind it. Fishing from a boat in the open water outside the sanctuary zones is permitted subject to the usual limits, and the catch is usually eaten the same day.

The northern end of the bay is where the locals go in the evening. It is quieter than the main beach, it faces the sunset, and the reef flat at the point is one of the better places to snorkel when the tide is right and the wind is down. The walk there takes ten minutes along the sand from the caravan park, and it passes the small war memorial and the boat ramp where the day’s catch is cleaned.

The reef itself is the day’s real attraction, whatever the date on the calendar. The best of it is within swimming distance of the beach, the fish are abundant and unafraid, and the corals include species that visitors from older reef systems recognise but do not often see in such shallow and accessible water. The rules are the same as everywhere on the coast: nothing is taken, nothing is stood on, and the animals are watched rather than touched. A day spent that way, with a break for lunch and a swim at sunset, is a very good way to spend a Christmas.

The reef on Christmas Day is the same reef as on any other day, and the best way to see it is to go early. The water is calmest in the morning, the tide is usually high around the middle of the day, and the fish are active before the heat builds. A mask, a snorkel and a pair of fins are the only equipment needed, and the nearest dive shop rents them within walking distance of the beach. Swimming over coral in shallow water requires care with the fins: a single kick can break a colony that took years to grow.

Anyone who wants an alternative to the beach for part of the day is well served by the country behind the settlement. The track inland leads across a plain of spinifex and red sand to the edge of the dune field, where the same view is available without the crowds, and the birdlife in the scrub is worth an hour with binoculars. Emus, bustards and a long list of smaller species live in that country, and the early morning is the time to see them. It is a landscape that looks empty and is not, which is one of the lessons of the whole journey.

References

1. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Coral Bay, Western Australia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coral%20Bay%2C%20Western%20Australia
2. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Ningaloo Coast. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ningaloo%20Coast
3. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Ningaloo Reef. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ningaloo%20Reef
4. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Ningaloo. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ningaloo
5. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Ningaloo Marine Park (Commonwealth waters). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ningaloo%20Marine%20Park%20%28Commonwealth%20waters%29
6. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Cape Range National Park. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape%20Range%20National%20Park
7. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Exmouth, Western Australia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exmouth%2C%20Western%20Australia
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12. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Exmouth Gulf. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exmouth%20Gulf
13. Ceh J., Van Keulen M., Bourne D.G. (2010) Coral-associated bacterial communities on Ningaloo Reef, Western Australia. FEMS Microbiology Ecology. 75. 134-144. doi.org/10.1111/j.1574-6941.2010.00986.x
14. Taylor G. (1989) Whale Sharks of Ningaloo Reef Western Australia: A preliminary Study. The Western Australian Naturalist. 18. 7-12. doi.org/10.5962/p.310640