River Song

River Song

King River, The Kimberley, Western Australia - 9944

Winding its way through some of the most dramatic and remote landscapes in Western Australia, the King River is more than a watercourse — it is a living thread of stories, stone, and survival.

Rising between the craggy shoulders of the Durack Range and the Saw Range, the river carves its path south before curling northward, finally releasing its waters into the West Arm of Cambridge Gulf, just south of Wyndham. But long before explorers named it, the river was — and still is — Goolime, a place deeply rooted in the lifeways and law of the Ngarinjin people, traditional custodians of its upper reaches.

The journey of the King River is a microcosm of the Kimberley itself — ancient, powerful, and still largely untouched. Along its course, sandstone escarpments, paperbark-lined banks, and sprawling floodplains reflect the region’s timeless interplay of wet and dry. In the wet season, the river surges with monsoonal rain, swelling into a force that shapes the land; in the dry, it retreats into waterholes that sustain life across the parched landscape.

This is a place where history is not confined to books but etched into rock and sung through generations. Goolime remains a site of cultural significance, carrying Dreaming stories and marking the spiritual map of Country for those who have walked these lands for tens of thousands of years.