Purnululu (Bungle Bungle)

Although the Gija and Jaru peoples have lived in and known the region for more than 20,000 years, the Bungle Bungle massif remained all but unknown to the rest of Australia until 1983, when an aerial film crew shooting a documentary about the Kimberley caught it on camera for the first time, to national astonishment that so spectacular a landscape stood barely 100 km from the main highway. Declared a national park in 1987 and a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2003, its orange and grey striped sandstone domes — the banding produced by cyanobacteria colonising the damper layers of the rock — were laid down over 350 million years ago and have spent 20 million years eroding into their present beehive form, an example of sandstone karst reckoned unique in the world for its scale and range of shapes.