10 interesting facts you never knew about the Kimberley

The Kimberley places host to some of Australia’s most stunning landscapes, but aside from the waterfalls, the rivers and the breathtaking rainforests, there’s much that this complex ecosystem that many people don’t know about. Here are 10 interesting facts about the Kimberley region that you never knew about and will be surprised by once you do.

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1. The entire area of the Kimberley comes to more than 420,000 square kilometres:

2. That makes the area roughly three times the size of England:

3. The Kimberley is also one of the earliest settled places in Australia. People first arrived in the area around 40,000 years ago from islands in the north that are now known as Indonesia:

4. There are only two seasons in the Kimberley, the wet and the dry seasons. During the wet season, much of the area is inaccessible due to flooding:

5. The main industries in the Kimberley are tourism, mining, agriculture, indigenous art and pearling:

6. Europeans and Chinese migrated to the area during the 1886 gold rush. This is also when the pearl fishing industry boomed, too:

7. Approximately half of the Kimberley population are of indigenous descent

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8. The average age of the Kimberley population is 28 years old. The average age in the rest of Western Australia is approximately 34 years.

9. The population in the Kimberly is only 40,000. That means there are less people per kilometre here than almost anywhere else on earth.

10. There are more than hundreds of thousands of rock art paintings and drawings in the Kimberley region to discover.

Have you been to the Kimberley? Let us know what you got up to while you were there in the comments section below.