Exmouth is a town on the tip of the North West Cape and on Exmouth Gulf in

Western Australia Western Australia (commonly abbreviated as WA) is a state of Australia occupying the western percent of the land area of Australia excluding external territories. It is bounded by the Indian Ocean to the north and west, the Southern Ocean to th ...

, north of the state capital

Perth Perth is the capital and largest city of the Australian state of Western Australia. It is the fourth most populous city in Australia and Oceania, with a population of 2.1 million (80% of the state) living in Greater Perth in 2020. Perth i ...

and southwest of Darwin. The town was established in 1967 to support the nearby United States Naval Communication Station Harold E. Holt. It is named after Exmouth Gulf. Beginning in the late 1970s, the town began hosting

United States Air Force The United States Air Force (USAF) is the Aerial warfare, air military branch, service branch of the United States Armed Forces, and is one of the eight uniformed services of the United States. Originally created on 1 August 1907, as a part ...

personnel assigned to Learmonth Solar Observatory, a defence science facility jointly operated with Australia's Ionospheric Prediction Service. The town is served by Learmonth Airport.

History

In 1618,

Dutch East India Company The United East India Company ( nl, Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, the VOC) was a chartered company established on the 20th March 1602 by the States General of the Netherlands amalgamating existing companies into the first joint-stock ...

ship ''

Mauritius Mauritius ( ; french: Maurice, link=no ; mfe, label= Mauritian Creole, Moris ), officially the Republic of Mauritius, is an island nation in the Indian Ocean about off the southeast coast of the African continent, east of Madagascar. It ...

'', under command of

Willem Janszoon Willem Janszoon (; ), sometimes abbreviated to Willem Jansz., was a Dutch navigator and colonial governor. Janszoon served in the Dutch East Indies in the periods 16031611 and 16121616, including as governor of Fort Henricus on the island of S ...

, landed near North West Cape, just proximate to what would be Exmouth, and named Willem's River, which was later renamed Ashburton River. The location was first used as a military base in

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing ...

. US Admiral James F. Calvert in his memoir, '' Silent Running: My Years on a World War II Attack Submarine'', and US Vice Admiral Charles A. Lockwood in ''Sink 'Em All'', his narrative of Allied submarine warfare, describe its history. After the retreat from Java in March 1942, Allied naval forces had need of a forward base for replenishing submarines, then the sole form of offensive warfare against the Japanese. Both Darwin, Northern Territory, and Broome, Western Australia, were too exposed to air attack, so a 500-ton unmotorized lighter was placed as a refuelling barge near the mouth of Exmouth Gulf, where the Allies were already maintaining a seaplane tender. Code-named " Potshot", the spartan base was also developed as an submarine advanced base and rest camp using the tender USS ''Pelias''. An airfield (now RAAF Learmonth) was constructed to provide fighter defence for the base.

Z Special Unit Z Special Unit () was a joint Allied special forces unit formed during the Second World War to operate behind Japanese lines in South East Asia. Predominantly Australian, Z Special Unit was a specialist reconnaissance and sabotage unit that i ...

used Potshot as a staging base for

Operation Jaywick Operation Jaywick was a special operation undertaken in World War II. In September 1943, 14 commandos and sailors from the Allied Z Special Unit raided Japanese shipping in Singapore Harbour, sinking six ships. Background Special Operations ...

, a raid on Japanese shipping in

Singapore Singapore (), officially the Republic of Singapore, is a sovereign island country and city-state in maritime Southeast Asia. It lies about one degree of latitude () north of the equator, off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, bor ...

Harbour, in September 1943.

Tourism

The town relies more on tourism than the station for its existence. At the 2016 census, Exmouth had a population of 2,486. At the height of the tourist season, the population swells to 6,000. Exmouth is popular for diving and snorkelling. Some of the most famous snorkelling spots include Turquoise Bay and Oysters Stacks. The Cape Range National Park, which has several gorges, is an area of and its main area is focused on the west coast of the Cape, which provides a large variety of camp sites on the coastal fringe of the Park. Yardie Creek and Charles Knife Gorge are land based attractions. On 20 April 2023, Exmouth will be in the direct path of a

total solar eclipse A solar eclipse occurs when the Moon passes between Earth and the Sun, thereby obscuring the view of the Sun from a small part of the Earth, totally or partially. Such an alignment occurs during an eclipse season, approximately every six month ...

, which will be the first to be visible in Australia since November 2012.

Weather events

On 22 March 1999, Tropical Cyclone Vance reached category 5 status as it made landfall near Exmouth. This resulted in the highest wind gust ever reported on the Australian mainland, at Learmonth, to the south. Vance caused significant flooding and property damage. There were no casualties. In April 2014, Exmouth was hit by a massive flash flood, nearly destroying the caravan park and seriously damaging much of the town's infrastructure, causing a severe blow to tourism in the region.

Climate

Exmouth has a hot

semi-arid climate A semi-arid climate, semi-desert climate, or steppe climate is a dry climate sub-type. It is located on regions that receive precipitation below potential evapotranspiration, but not as low as a desert climate. There are different kinds of sem ...

( BSh). Temperatures often reach over in summer; however, winters are warm with daytime temperatures around . There is no specific wet and dry season in Exmouth, although rain is most likely to fall between January and July, usually with

monsoon A monsoon () is traditionally a seasonal reversing wind accompanied by corresponding changes in precipitation but is now used to describe seasonal changes in atmospheric circulation and precipitation associated with annual latitudinal osci ...

al showers and storms from January to April and from the northern edges of

cold front A cold front is the leading edge of a cooler mass of air at ground level that replaces a warmer mass of air and lies within a pronounced surface trough of low pressure. It often forms behind an extratropical cyclone (to the west in the Northern ...

s in May, June and July. The area occasionally gets caught by tropical cyclones. The period from August to December is usually dry.

References

External links