In the third in a series of special reports on the nation’s most extraordinary marine environments, Guardian Australia’s ocean correspondent visits the proposed Great Kimberley marine park, and its amazing jewel in the crown: Horizontal Falls

On the other side of Australia, a marine wonder to rival the Great Barrier Reef

Soon after taking off in our small aircraft, the Kimberley Aviation pilot, Ralph Bancroft, was confronted by a wall of wet season storm clouds. As we got closer, the clouds looked more like a mountain range than severe weather.

Bancroft was taking us north from Broome airport over the Dampier Peninsula and, he said over the plane’s intercom, there would be no going directly through a cloud like the one right in our path.

Instead he banked the aircraft and aimed for a canyon of clear sky between the clouds. Passing through the gap we were witness to one of the two great forces at play on this vast and wild environment: the summer monsoon. At this time of year a good Kimberley downpour is capable of dropping rain on a biblical scale, filling rivers with roaring floodwaters, making the entire region impassable by vehicle and, over millennia of wet seasons, eroding the Kimberley into its distinctive, world-famous topography.

On the other side of the thunder storm the weather was much better and Bancroft said: “Looks like we might be lucky. Clear skies ahead now.”

Below us the peninsula was giving way to the King Sound and instantly the region’s second great force was in evidence: mind-boggling tides, regarded as the biggest tropical tidal flows on Earth. An immense and shallow continental shelf combined with the complex coastal terrain mean that along this stretch of Australia tides rise and fall by as much as 10 metres.

Those tides and the impact they have on the Kimberley shoreline was the main reason for our flight. Our destination was the Horizontal Falls, the jewel in the crown of the proposed Great Kimberley marine park.

On the northern shores of King Sound we passed over a landscape so remote and tortured that it is where candidates for the Army’s Special Air Service are left to survive for weeks as part of their training.

Soon we were approaching Talbot Bay and then the Horizontal Falls came into focus as the aircraft dropped to 500 feet (152 metres) for a flyover.

The phenomenon of the tides pouring through the two gaps in the McLarty Range has become increasingly well known to Australians, and shows up clearly on satellite images. But it is one of those natural wonders that is incomprehensible without the full context of the location, the scale, the power of nature and the extraordinary coincidence of landscape and tide.

To have just one Horizontal Fall would be spectacle enough to draw international visitors, but to have two, almost perfectly aligned and so close to each other, is hard to fathom. As the water successively builds and then drains away it is forced through the chasms in the red rock of the parallel ranges, creating exactly what the name prosaically suggests: a horizontal waterfall.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Aboriginal children practise spear fishing near Roebuck Bay in the Kimberley. Photograph: James Woodford/Guardian Australia

Turquoise is an overused descriptor for tropical water but in this case there was no other and, on the morning we were there, Talbot Bay was so still that, except for the torrent flowing through the falls, the clouds were mirrored perfectly on its surface.

After circling the Horizontal Falls for a couple of loops, the pilot flew west and within moments we had left Talbot Bay and were heading towards the Buccaneer Archipelago. To begin to visualise it, think Palau meets the Great Barrier Reef – hundreds of islands constructed in Kimberley red. It was understandable why the pilot said this was his favourite part of north-western Australia.

It is also easy to see why the Horizontal Falls/Buccaneer Archipelago area is a key rallying point for a fight to try to turn a hodge-podge of disconnected state and federal marine reserves into the West Australian equivalent of the Great Barrier Reef marine park.

The proposal being put forward by scientists and environmentalists would see a marine park run from the Horizontal Falls right along the Kimberley coast to the Northern Territory border.

It would extend from the state-managed shoreline through to the commonwealth waters far out to sea and to depths of more than 5,000 metres. While such a marine reserve would be one of the grandest ever created on the planet, the ultimate vision is to see an even bigger marine park.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Buccaneer Archipelago, a key rallying point in fight to create a huge marine park. Photograph: James Woodford/Guardian Australia

Conservationists see the Horizontal-Falls-to-the-Northern-Territory-border proposal as a first stage. They say a true Great Kimberley marine park needs to start at 80 Mile Beach south of Broome, take in Roebuck Bay and its snub-finned dolphins, stretch to the Dampier Peninsula then wrap around the remainder of the Kimberley wilderness.

To manage the threats posed by oil, gas and commercial fishing, the marine reserves also need to reach far out into commonwealth waters, say scientists. But the region’s marine parks are managed separately by state and federal authorities. They are disconnected and it is feared their sanctuary zones are too few.

Martin Pritchard is the executive director of Environs Kimberley, a green group dedicated to the protection of the region, and he says it is critical that the state and federal governments consolidate and build on their proposals.

“We need to fill in the gaps between the Buccaneer Archipelago and 80 Mile Beach,” Pritchard says. “Both state and federal governments need to commit to filling in the missing pieces of the jigsaw. Then we would have a coastal area comparable to the Great Barrier Reef marine park.

“All people would then understand that the Kimberley coast is one of the most special coasts on the planet and one of the best protected and one of the most significant marine tourism magnets in the world. The opportunity is here right now to have a world-class marine park in state and commonwealth waters off the Kimberley coast.”

Pritchard is critical of the national review of 2.3m square kilometres of commonwealth marine reserves, including 13 reserves in north-western Australia which total more than 335,000 square kilometres.

He says the parks’ zoning is disappointing because so much of the area inside their boundaries has not been given protection from commercial exploitation.

“So any further clawing back would be incredibly disappointing,” he said. “We don’t want to end up with paper parks.”

He has more praise for the state government component of the Great Kimberley marine park. Led by the premier, Colin Barnett, the WA government has surprised even green groups with its enthusiasm for protecting the Kimberley coast.

“The premier is to be congratulated for driving this proposal, but the devil is in the detail,” he said. “If we are going to get Australia’s best marine park then we need its zoning to be science-based and have large sanctuary zones to make sure special areas are properly protected.”

Bancroft lands his small plane on a bush strip at Cape Leveque. Pritchard cites plans to seal the road to Cape Leveque as an example of why the Kimberley needs a comprehensive marine park. He says once the route is upgraded it will be permanently accessible to fishers.

The owner of Leveque Wilderness Fishing Charters, Peter “Tux” Tucker – who operates a very remote fishing camp in the middle of the proposed parks – says Cape Leveque is an increasingly popular tourist destination that has, in just a generation, gone from one of the wildest places on the continent to a tourist gateway.

“I think in principle the idea of protection is great. But I don’t think it goes far enough,” says Tucker, who also runs Wandjina Tours. “The special purpose zones that make up most of the parks still allow mining exploration. I believe the Kimberley coast deserves even stronger protection and international recognition, and world heritage listing should be in the mix for some areas.”

I ask him what a man, whose business depends on fishing, thinks of the creation of some areas where fishing would be banned.

“Ninety-eight or 99% of my clients all believe that the Kimberley coast deserves the highest level of protection that you can get. My biggest concern is that the mining, oil and gas industries still have a very big say in moulding the direction of the Kimberley coast.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Another view of the Horizontal Falls. Photograph: James Woodford/Guardian Australia

“It’s a place to get away from the maddening 21st century. It’s one of the most pristine environments in the world; our governments just don’t seem to recognise its worth.”

From Cape Leveque we fly to Cygnet Bay, where I meet a third-generation pearl farmer, marine scientist and tourism operator, James Brown. He is the general manager of Cygnet Bay Pearls. After completing his marine science studies at James Cook University, Brown set up the Kimberley marine research station, a central place for marine scientists to be able to study the Kimberley.

It is the only marine research station in the Kimberley and gives researchers access to an otherwise impossibly isolated marine environment. “The lack of scientific knowledge about the Kimberley’s extremely unique marine environment is one of its biggest threats,” says Brown.

Pearl farming has become a cripplingly difficult industry, and operators such as Brown say tourism is increasingly important to their business and that the creation of good marine parks should be a boost to their bottom line.

A popular “Giant Tides” tour that is run out of Cygnet Bay is drawing tourists from around the world.

“The Horizontal Falls or the Giant Tides are a bit like the Bungle Bungles or Uluru,” Brown says. “We all know about them because they are marketed. Here you are dealing with over 14,000 kilometres of coastline and 2,633 islands and islets. Thirty per cent of all of Australia’s islands are in the Kimberley.”

Flying back to Broome, Bancroft followed the coast, dodging small squalls and thunderstorms. As we approached our final landing we flew over James Price Point. It is a lonely stretch of coast that rose to national fame as a location where conservationists, locals and scientists fought against a multibillion-dollar LNG project.

The development has been abandoned. But it is clear from the air that even an aborted idea can have devastating consequences. Roads were built in and around James Price to support the proposal and they have become popular with fishermen and campers.

While a few extra anglers and four-wheel-drivers may be one of the smaller threats facing the Kimberley coast, it is a telling example of the battle to hold back the biggest tide of all: progress. The world is busting to get into one of the planet’s last great wilderness areas and how that massive influx will be managed is to be imminently decided by state and federal governments.

Guardian Australia contacted the chief executive of the Dambimangari Aboriginal Corporation, Peter McCumstie, for the position of traditional owners on the proposal for a Great Kimberley marine park. McCumstie replied by email: “We, the traditional owners, do not wish to make comment at this point in time in relation to this proposal. This should not be misinterpreted as not being or being supportive of the proposal.”

The peak national body representing Australia’s oil and gas exploration and production industry, the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association, was contacted for this story but did not respond.

The public has until the end of March to make submissions to the commonwealth marine reserves review.

• James Woodford is Guardian Australia’s ocean correspondent. The position is a non-profit journalism project funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts. For more information on Woodford’s work for Guardian Australia, click here. He is on Twitter at @jameswoodford1.