Broome Beach Resort

Our most remote resort just celebrated a milestone many thought it would never reach, writes Julietta Jameson.

The eccentric Englishman Lord Alistair McAlpine announced his plans to build a resort in Broome in the mid-1980s when the town was an off-the-map, rundown shadow of a formerly glorious pearling centre with a population of 4000, had next-to-no tourism traffic and was 2200kilometres from Perth on roads that were often washed away.

If Perth seemed remote to eastern seaboarders, then Broome was a blip. And if Broome was a blip, then the shabby caravan park inhabited by pot-smoking dropouts next door to a sewage outlet on a lonely beach out of town was a pimple on the blip's backside.

Lord McAlpine was building a luxury resort at the back of the back of the back of beyond.

Here on that blip's blemish, a parcel of land on Broome's Cable Beach, the Perth-based Lord-at-large, 10th richest man in Britain who grew up in a swish London hotel and who, by his own admission, didn't at all like beaches, was planning to build luxury villas and plant lavish gardens.

He was going to furnish both with antiquities from across the centuries and the Asian continent and valuable artworks from Australian masters.

And he was going to build a place that paid homage to the then shabby lattice and corrugated ironclad homes of the pearler captains, and to Broome's Asian cultural heritage, with not a bit of chrome or mirroring in sight.

At the time, Perth had Alan Bond building an edifice of a hotel. Port Douglas had Christopher Skase building the Mirage, both in the style of the times, all chrome, mirrors and brass.

Some commentators dismissed Lord McAlpine as having no idea and his vision as a grand folly (though the West Australian government, his partner in the $34million venture, did not).

No one called Bond or Skase or their hotels anything of the sort.

Two decades on, the product of Lord McAlpine's vision, the Cable Beach Club Resort averages 75percent occupancy across its 11hectares, with a 100percent occupancy in high season. Where Bond's and Skase's visions ended up needs no recap here.

And while Lord McAlpine hasn't owned the Cable Beach Club Resort for more than a decade and now lives in Europe, his name resonates almost reverently (and affectionately irreverently with those who know him) along the resort's boardwalks and verandas.