18 Days -Tuesday 21st September to Friday 8th October 2027
Accommodation: Ceduna Foreshore Motel, Border Village Roadhouse, Balladonia Hotel Motel, Plaza Hotel Kalgoorlie, Wave Rock Hyden Hotel, Quality Hotel Ambassador Perth, Bunbury Hotel Koombana Bay, The Clarence on Melville, Comfort Inn Bay of Isles, Norseman Eyre Motel, Golden Outback Cocklebiddy, Nullarbor Roadhouse & Ceduna Foreshore Motel
Highlights of the tour:
This 18 day coach tour travels from Adelaide across the Nullarbor Plain to Western Australia’s goldfields, Perth, the south west wine region, and the Great Southern coast, before returning across the Nullarbor to Adelaide. The itinerary is timed for the shoulder season, when temperatures across the Nullarbor and the south west are mild and the southern right whales that gather along the Great Australian Bight each winter may be present before their October deaprture.
The tour opens with the crossing of the Nullarbor Plain via the Eyre Highway, one of Australia’s classic road journeys. From Ceduna, the route runs through Penong, Yalata and the Head of the Bight, where elevated boardwalks look out over one of the world’s most significant southern right whale nurseries, then on to Border Village, Mundrabilla, Cocklebiddy and Balladonia. Roadhouse stops along the way mark the passage across some of the longest straight stretches of road on earth, including the Ninety Mile Straight, as well as the site of one Australia’s largest meteorite finds. The return leg later in the tour retraces much of this route via Eucla, Madura and the Nullarbor Roadhouse, taking in the historic Eucla Telegraph Station ruins along the way.
Crossing into Western Australia, the tour heads to the goldfields, taking in Norseman, Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie-Boulder, where heritage architecture, the museum of the Goldfields and the Super Pit reflect the region’s gold rush history. From there the route continues via Southern Cross to Hyden, home to the striped granite formation of Wave Rock, before heading west to Perth for a full day exploring the city and Fremantle, including Kings Park, a Swan River Cruise, the Western Australian Maritime Museum, Fremantle Prison and the Bon Scott statue at Fishing Boat Harbour.
South of Perth, the tour follows the coast to Bunbury and into the Margaret River wine region, taking in Busselton’s historic jetty, the Margaret River township, a tasting at Xanadu Wines and a visit to the Margaret River Chocolate Factory. The route ten turns inland through Collie, where the Wellington Dam wall carries the world’s largest dam mural, before continuing though the state’s timbered south west to Albany on the Great Southern Coast. Albany itself offers whaling history at the historic Whaling Station, the Amity Brig replica ship marking the 1826 founding of Western Australia’s first European settlement, Anzac Peace Park and the town’s heritage streetscape.
From Albany, the route turns east through Ravensthorpe and Esperance, a coastal town known for turquoise bays, pink lakes and a full scale Stonehenge replica, before heading back inland through Norseman to rejoin the Eyre Highway for the return crossing of the Nullarbor to Ceduna and on to Adelaide.
Across it’s 18 days, the tour combines several distinct regions in a single itinerary: the remote scale of the Nullarbor crossing, the historic goldfields, Perth and Fremantle, the wine and forest country of the south west, and the coastal scenery of the Great Southern. Coach travel, regional accommodation and included meals form the framework of each day, with free time built in at major stops for travellers to explore at their own pace.
- «Depart Mawson Lakes at 7.00am and head north through Adelaide’s outer suburbs into Mid North’s agricultural country with morning tea at Port Wakefield, on the northern reaches of Gulf St Vincent.
- «The coach continues to Port Augusta at the head of the Spencer Gulf, long known as the crossroads of Australia for it’s position where road and rail routes from every mainland state converge, where the group stops for a quick lunch.
- «Reach Ceduna by early evening where we will spend the first night.
- «Depart Ceduna and officially enter the Nullarbor. The highway tracks alongside the Nullarbor Links, the world’s longest golf course, an eighteen-hole par-seventy-two course spread across more than 1,300 kilometres between Ceduna and Kalgoorlie, with one hole at each town and roadhouse along the way.
- «Stop at Penong, windswept outpost known for it’s collection of historic windmills once used to pump water from the arid ground and still one of the largest windmill displays in the country.
- «Second day ends at Border Village Roadhouse, just inside the South Australian border to Western Australia, which has served as a key stop on the transcontinental route since the Eyre Highway was finally sealed in 1976, replacing a notoriously rough gravel crossing.
- «Departing Border Village, travellers cross into Western Australia and set their watches backward, gaining time as they enter the Central Western Time Zone. Stop for lunch at Madura Pass, where sweeping views open across the Roe Plains toward the distant coast.
- «Balladonia, reached by late afternoon, holds an unusual claim to fame as the site where fragments of the American Skylab space station fell to earth in 1979. The group overnights at the Balladonia Hotel Motel, finishing the day with a two course dinner.
- «Stop at Fraser Range Station, a working pastoral property established in the late nineteenth century and notable for the dense eucalypt woodland that surrounds it, a striking change after days crossing the largely treeless Nullarbor Plain.
- «The coach continues to Norseman, the western gateway to the Eyre Highway, for a lunch stop. The afternoon drive follows the Coolgardie-Esperance Highway north to Kalgoorlie-Boulder, heart of the Western Australian goldfields and still home to one of the country’s largest working gold operations. On arrival travellers have free time to explore the city centre, with it’s grand hotels and ornate gold rush era architecture reflecting the wealth generated by the Golden Mile in the 1890s. The group checks into the Plaza Hotel.
- «Day 5 is entirely dedicated to uncovering Kalgoorlie’s rich mining heritage and it’s remarkably distinct historical identity. Tour through the city, taking in the elaborate facades of hotels and public buildings raised during the gold boom of the 1890s. Free time in the main street follows.
- «Visit the Museum of the Goldfields on Hannan Street, which traces the districts mining history from the 1893 gold rush through to today, before continuing to the Super Pit, one of the largest open cut gold mines in Australia, stretching roughly 3.5 kilometres long, 1.5 kilometres wide and mote than 600 metres deep, a scale often described as visible from space.
- «Leaving Kalgoorlie after breakfast, the coach heads west into the Wheatbelt, stopping first at Coolgardie, which briefly ranked as Western Australia’s third largest town during the peak of the gold rush before it’s population dwindles as richer finds drew prospectors elsewhere.
- «Visit Coolgardie Visitors Centre and Museum, along with Warden Finnerty’s Residence, a nineteenth century stone hosue maintained by the National Trust.
- «The afternoon’s destination is Wave Rock near Hyden, granite cliff around 15 metres high, streaked with colour from mineral run off and shaped by weathering over tens of millions into the unmistakable form of a breaking wave.
- «As we depart Hyden, we continue west through the Wheatbelt toward Perth. Stopping for lunch at the farming town of Brookton, one of many small Wheatbelt centres built around a rail siding in the early 1900s.
- «Take a guided tour of the Perth Mint on Hay Street. Opened in 1899, it is Australia’s oldest continuously operating mint and offers insight into historic coin production and gold pouring demonstrations, alongside displays of some of the largest gold coins ever minted.
- «A full day is dedicated to Perth and Fremantle. the group departs for Barrack Street Jetty near Elizabeth Quay to join a hop-on hop-off bus tour of the city’s landmarks, travelling through Kings Park along the way, the four-hundred-hectare parkland overlooking the Swan River known for it’s spring wildflowers.
- «Free time in the wharf precinct allow travellers to shop and find lunch, before the group boards a Captain Cook Cruise across the Swan River to Fremantle, passing beneath the Narrows Bridge and by Perth’s growing skyline of high-rise towers.
- «On arrival at Fremantle’s O’Connor Landing, free time allows for independent exploration of the historic port city’s nineteenth-century streetscape. .
- «visits the Western Australian Maritime Museum on Victoria Quay, home to a rich collection charting the state’s maritime history from early exploration and shipwrecks through to the America’s Cup.
- «Before travelling South we explore more of Fremantle’s convict history. Travel to Fremantle Prison, built by convict labour between 1852 and 1859 from limestone quarried on site and used as a working prison until 1991, it’s cell blocks among the most intact convict-era structures anywhere in the country.
- «Free time at the High Street Mall allows travellers to browse and find lunch, before a stop at the Bon Scott statue in Fishing Boat Harbour, a bronze tribute to the AC/DC frontman who spent part of his youth in Fremantle after his family emigrated from Scotland in the 1950s and remains one of the city’s most photographed landmarks.
- «The coach then heads south along the coast through Mandurah and Rockingham, both popular coastal towns for Perth day-trippers with a stop at Mandurah’s Eastern Foreshore. The day concludes in Bunbury, Western Australia’s second-largest city and Koombana Bay.
- «Start the round trip from Bunbury into Margaret River wine region. The route passes through the town of Busselton, home to the longest wooden jetty in the Southern Hemisphere at close to 1.8 kilometres, extending far out into Geographe Bay.
- «Continuing south, the group visits the Margaret River Mouth Viewpoint on Wallcliffe Road, where the river meets the Indian Ocean, before free time at the Margaret River Visitors Centre to wander the township and find lunch.
- «Visit Xanadu Wines for a wine tasting, this is one of the region’s established cellar doors.
- «Stop at the Margaret River Chocolate Factory at Metricup, where visitors can watch chocolate being made and sample the range. The coach returns to Bunbury by early evening via the Bussell Highway, passing more of the region’s vineyards along the way.
- «Start another day by driving south-east to Albany, beginning with a short driving tour of Bunbury before the coach head inland to Wellington Dam near Worsley. The dam wall here carries “reflections”, the world’s largest dam mural, an 8,000 square-metre artwork painted by Guido van Helten in 2021 depicting scenes from Collie’s mining history, including local workers and families drawn from historical photographs.
- «Drive through the small Wheatbelt and forestry settlements of Duranillin and Cranbrook, marking the transition from timbered south-west into the more open pastoral country of the Great Southern, with sheep and cattle properties lining much of the route toward the coast.
- «Day 12 is spent exploring Albany’s whaling and wartime history with a visit to the historic Whaling Station at Torndirrup, Australia’s last operating whaling station before it’s closure in 1978 and now a museum with displays including the whale chaser Cheynes IV, once used to hunt sperm whales off the coast.
- «After free time in the town’s main street, the afternoon continues with a local guide leading a tour of Albany’s key landmarks, including the AMity Brig, a full scale replica of the vessel that carried Major Edmund Lockyer and forty-five settlers, soldiers and convicts into Princess Royal Harbour on Christmas Day 1826. The tour also takes in Anzac Peace Park, which commemorates the departure of the first ANZAC troop convoy from Albany’s King George Sound in 1914, and Dog Rock, a natural granite outcrop resembling a dog’s head, before finishing at a chainsaw sculpture park near Walmsley.
- «Drive east to Esperance before the coach turns inland. Visit Stonehenge Esperance, a full-scale working replica of England’s prehistoric monument built from local granite and aligned to track the seasons, Lake.
- «Have free time to explore the towns centre and arrange your own lunch..
- «Head to Norseman, with a stop at Grass Patch along the way. Norseman itself grew from an 1894 gold discovery said to have been made when a prospector’s horse, Hardy Norseman, pawed up a nugget while tethered overnight; a bronze statue of the horse now stands in the town centre.
- «Day 15 sees us depart Norseman for the return crossing of the Nullarbor, passing the Tin Camel roundabout on the way out of town, a nod to the camel trains once used to supply the goldfields before motor transport. A stop is made at Balladonia, retracing part of the outbound route and offering a second look at the Skylab display, before the coach reaches Caigunam the western end of the Ninety Mile Straight. The day concludes at Cocklebiddy.
- «Drive from Cocklebiddy to the Nullarbor Roadhouse, with stops at Madura and Mundrabilla along the way, the latter offering a further chance to view the site connected to the district’s famous meteorite find. The highlight of the day is Eucla, where traveellers can view the ruins of the Old Eucla Telegraph Station, once a vital link in the overland telegraph line connecting Western Australia to the eastern colonies in the 1870. Nearny, the Eucla lookout offers sweeping views from the top of the enscarpment down to the coastal plain, close to Eyre’s Memorial, which commemorates explorer Edward John Eyre’s 1841 overland crossing of the Nullarbor with his Aboriginal guide Wylie.
- «Today is the final leg of the Nullarbor crossing back to Ceduna. The route retraces sections of the outbound journey through Yalata and Penong. The terrain gradually shifts from the incredibly arid, completely treeless plain back into structured, heavily fenced agricultural fields as the tour approaches the coastal edges of the Eyre Peninsula.
- «On arrival in Ceduna, we explore the town and its foreshore, with a brief visit to Thevenard, Ceduna’s historic port and one of South Australia’s busiest fishing harbours, from which much of the region’s oyster, tuna and grain trade is shipped, and which has served the area since the late nineteenth century.
- «Day 18 begins with the departure from Ceduna for the long drive back to Adelaide. The coach retraces the outbound route through Wirrulla and Wudinna, home to Mount Wudinna often described as one of Australia’s largest granite monoliths after Uluru.
- «A lunch stop follows at Kimba, once again marking the symbolic halfway across the continent, before the coach continues through the same rolling grain country passed on the outbound journey..
- «After eighteen days of travel, the group arrives back at Innovation House in Mawson Lakes in the early evening, nringing to a close a journey spanning the Nullarbor Plain, the Western Australian goldfields, Perth, the south-west wine region and the Great Southern Coast.
Inclusions
- « 17 nights accommodation at the listed motels/hotel
- « Cooked or continental breakfast on days 2 – 18
- « Lunch on Days 1, 2, 11, 12, 15, 17 and 18
- « Two course dinner on Days 1 to 17
- « Entrance to Museums/attractions listed
- « Fully escorted with a tour host
- « Deluxe coach travel
COMPLIMENTARY HOME PICK AND RETURN TO SELECTED SUBURBS
A more detailed itinerary is available, please contact the office for your copy