Member for Geraldton Ian Blayney quits the Liberal Party and will sit as an independent while his application to join the Nationals is being considered.

The coral haven of the Houtman Abrolhos island chain off the coast of WA has been officially listed as a national park, with plans to protect the area and make it more accessible to tourists.

Ian Blayney is a regional MP who decided to quit the WA Liberals and move to the Nationals. But everyone, especially his own former party leader, is being strangely nice about it, writes Jacob Kagi.

Got a metal detector? This outback town is setting up a prospecting lease for tourists who want to try their hand at landing a gold nugget.

For many West Australians the beach forms the foundation of their lifestyle, but the oceanfront dream is under threat for many in Perth and towns up and down the coast.

Port Beach's Coast pub and surf life saving rooms should be moved and some Rottnest Island holiday bungalows should be pushed back from the beach in the long term, a report into WA coastal erosion hotspots says.

Foreign investors buy hundreds of hectares of land in WA's Midwest with plans to build homes specifically for Chinese migrants and associated services, including a school.

Two men are charged with trying to smuggle more than a tonne of cocaine and ecstasy into WA, after their yacht hit a reef and they were found on an island in the Houtman Abrolhos allegedly hiding the drugs with seaweed.

Large numbers of Chinese tourists are flocking to the pink lake near Port Gregory in Western Australia, but has it become a victim of its own popularity?

Three more men from different countries are arrested as part of an international investigation into an attempted billion-dollar drug smuggling operation uncovered when a yacht ran aground off the WA coast.

On the oldest landscape on earth, new technology is being developed to help remove dogs over millions of hectares.

A car and a bus carrying 34 people crash on Indian Ocean Drive north of Perth, at the turn-off to the world-famous Pinnacles rock formations, leaving two Chinese tourists who were in the SUV dead and a third in hospital.

Brutal heat and bitter cold have cost farmers in WA more than 1.5m tonnes in crops over the course of a fortnight, according to a grain industry report.

Locals say bad driving mainly from tourists is to blame for a spate of fatal crashes on a stretch of Indian Ocean Drive north of Perth, after the latest serious accident left two foreigners dead.

Friends and relatives of a woman who died in hospital after being shot by police on a suburban street in Geraldton question why police did not employ pepper spray or a Taser instead, as a protest erupts outside the local police station over what they say was excessive force.

As family and friends of Joyce Clarke demand to know why the young woman was shot dead by police, a tragic picture of her early life blighted by drugs and mental illness is beginning to emerge.