Great Northern Highway

The Great Northern Highway crosses Western Australia from Perth in the south to Wyndham on the north coast. It's a sealed all-weather road stretching 3200 km.

Understand

400 km done, 2800 km to go

Early Europeans in the north of Australia only had short stretches of dirt road linking their farms and towns to harbours, where steamers would call for goods and passengers. This was a barrier to trade, and to wartime defence when the north coast came under Japanese attack, so from 1944 two highways were built from Perth towards Darwin. One was the coastal Highway 1; the other, described here, was the Great Northern Highway (GNH) cutting inland. The two routes met at Port Hedland and thereafter ran concurrently until the GNH turned off to the port at Wyndham. Not until 1989 was GNH sealed throughout its length, and upgrading continues to this day. The latest major upgrade was in 2020, when the Tonkin Highway bypassed the Swan Valley towns near Perth.

Trade remains the main purpose of the GNH, with trucks (including thunderous road trains) pounding its length at all hours. It crosses pastoral, wheat-growing, iron-mining and stock-rearing regions, plus a whole lot of desert. But it's also become a tourist route, not one to be lightly undertaken, but one which you'll never forget.

Prepare

See main article Driving in Australia

Allow a week for the full route, and that's with a minimum of sight-seeing stop-offs. The buses can do it in three days but they run through the night with fresh drivers at regular intervals. At any hour, driver drowsiness is a significant cause of accidents.

Once away from the city and wheatbelt, the road is mostly across desert for 1000 km to the half-way point at Port Hedland, then comes another 1500 km of coastal desert. But especially in the tropical north, this is a monsoon climate that flips from desert to downpour from October to April. The highway is a good sealed road passable in all weathers - that's the whole point of it - but slow down in the wet, when side roads become tricky, dirt roads may be impassable, and the caravan park you were aiming for has closed for the season.

Road trains make a great whoosh

Bring a big water container and spare fuel canister, say 10 litre apiece. The roadhouses are 24-hour service stations and may have rooms; never pass one by with less than half a tank of fuel. If possible, bring a full-sized spare tyre, as the standard skinny spare is only good for about 500 km.

Once you leave the Tonkin Highway, the route is mostly two-lane undivided, and the whoosh of road trains passing or overtaking demands two firm hands on the wheel. Plan to avoid driving at night: every wild and farm animal around enjoys a sundown passeggiata on the road, and their eyes are dark so you don't see a glint in your headlights. The damage sustained from hitting a big roadkill is their revenge for whatever struck them down.

Keep your mobile fully charged, but much of the highway has no signal.

Get in

The airports at Newman, Port Hedland, Broome and Kununurra all have daily connections to Perth.

There are few cross-connections from other highways once you get clear of Perth. Highway 123 links Geraldton on the coast via Mullewa and Yalgoo to Mount Magnet, and Highway 136 is a shortcut between GNH and North West Coastal Highway as they converge on Port Hedland.

It's possible to do almost all of this route by bus, though it's a weary journey and the bus stops may be some distance from accommodation and sights. Integrity Coaches run one day a week from Perth via Mount Magnet and Newman to Port Hedland, taking 22 hours. There they turn west to go back to Perth via the coast, but you change onto the coach coming up the coast, which takes another 7 hours to Broome. Change again for the Greyhound, heading for Darwin via Derby, Fitzroy Crossing, Hall's Creek, Warmun, Cameron Junction and Kununurra. But at Cameron you have to get off in the middle of the night - this is just a rest area with no facilities, and you must organise a ride the last 60 km into Wyndham.

Transwa buses run twice a week from Geraldton to Meekatharra and Mount Magnet.

Go

• 1 Perth the state capital is a lively cosmopolitan city. You'll probably fly here, because if you drive from the eastern cities, both you and your vehicle on arrival may only be fit for the scrap yard. If you fly in from a distant time zone, take the bus into town to acclimatise for a couple of days before starting out on this long road, where falling asleep at the wheel is a real danger. One-way hire is expensive but there should be no extra charge to pick up a vehicle downtown and later return it to the airport.
• Swan Valley is the historic line of the GNH, as National Highway 95 from Midland in the northeast of the city up to Muchea. This is scenic but slow, on a trip with a lot of ground to cover, so you'd probably only come this way if your schedule dictated a stopover within an hour of the city and airport.
• Tonkin Highway or State Route 4 is the freeway that now bypasses Swan Valley to the west. It ends at Muchea, where Highway 1 branches north as the main coastal route, while the GNH continues as Highway 95 all the way up to Port Hedland.
• 2 New Norcia is 124 km from downtown Perth via Tonkin Highway. It's an oddity, Australia's only monastic town.
• 3 Wubin (264 km) is a small farming town at the edge of the irrigated Wheat Belt.
• 4 Mount Magnet (561 km) is an old gold-mining town, and gold is still mined on a small scale, but the iron ore that deviates compasses is the main mineral nowadays.
• 5 Cue (640 km) is a village little altered from its gold-mining era of the 1890s.
• 6 Meekatharra (755 km) is a small mining town, and had a modern gold rush in the 1980s.
• 7 Newman (1177 km) is where you enter the Tropic of Capricorn. Lots of accommodation, though much of it is block-booked to mine workers rotating through two-week "swings".
• Karijini National Park is reached by a turn-off at Juna Downs. It's the Pilbara's top sight, with scenic red canyons. You could continue through Tom Price to loop back on Highway 136 through Wittenoom to GNH.
• Highway 138 is an alternative road from Newman to the coast via Marble Bar, notorious for its fierce summer heat. This takes about 200 km off the total journey, rejoining the coast road east of Port Hedland, but then you miss a major rest stop.
• 8 Port Hedland (1627 km) marks half-way, as the long dusty overland route meets the North West Coastal Highway. But you're not done with dust, as the port is busy with iron ore shipments, and much is drab, industrial and rust-streaked. Still there's decent accommodation, and a couple of museums and other sights. From here on the GNH trends east and is designated as Highway 1.
• North West Coastal Highway is how you might prefer to return south from Port Hedland: it's longer but with more to see and do, taking in Exmouth, Carnarvon and Geraldton. South of there it's called Brand Highway to its terminus at Muchea.
• 9 Broome (2237 km) was a pearl fishing harbour and is now a holiday destination.
• Derby is a fishing port 220 km from Broome and 41 km off the main highway, turning off at Willare.
• Gibb River Road is a 660 km dirt road between Derby and Wyndham which is only passable in the dry season May-September, and only by high-clearance 4WD. On the map it looks like a short-cut but will take almost a week lurching through potholes and creeks, if you're lucky and avoid breakdown. Car rental clerks will throw a conniption fit if they hear you're taking their vehicle here.

Take it slow in the wet

• 10 Warmun or Turkey Creek (3013 km) has a roadhouse and an Aboriginal arts scene, but its main draw is as the entry point to Purnululu National Park, the "Bungle-Bungles".
• 11 Wyndham (3221 km) is the end of the road, at last. A giant crocodile grimaces a greeting as you enter the main settlement, then 5 km further on the road ends rather inconsequentially by the old wharves and the modern docks.
• Kununurra is reached by staying eastbound on Highway 1 (now called Victoria Highway) instead of turning north to Wyndham. It's the centre of a bold irrigation scheme that has created tracts of lush farmland and leisure water facilities, and it's your last chance to stop off before heading into lonely Northern Territory.

Go next

The rental office has probably given upon their vehicle by now, so you might as well continue across the continent:

• North West Coastal Highway is the other route from Perth to Port Hedland.
• Victoria Highway goes east from Cameron junction to Kununurra then across Northern Territory via Timber Creek to Katherine: turn north for Darwin or south for Alice Springs and Queensland.
• Highway 94 goes away east from Perth to Kalgoorlie, Norseman and the Nullarbor Plains. Highway 115 is a short-cut onto it between Pithara on GNH and Northam.