Paleoclimate proxy records from regions sensitive to humidity/aridity extremes provide valuable insights into natural forcing mechanisms underlying long-term climate variability in the wider region. One such area is Northwest Australia, where the Australian monsoon impacts its northernmost fringes, which are bordered by the Great Sandy Desert inland. Marine sediments from the Australian Northwest Shelf record fluvial run-off and aeolian dust input during the wet and dry seasons. The location is therefore ideal for investigating long-term variability in the Australian monsoon and Northwest Australian dust fluxes over orbital timescales. However, there are few continuous, high-resolution paleoclimate records from the Australian Northwest Shelf spanning the Early Pleistocene, and there is ambiguous orbital phasing even among Late Pleistocene paleoclimate records from the region. Here, we present geochemical and environmental magnetic proxy records of CaCO3 and dust-flux variability spanning 2.9 to 1.6 Myr ago from International Ocean Discovery Program Expedition 356 Site U1464 on the Australian Northwest Shelf. We establish a new, orbitally-tuned chronology for Site U1464, and observe strong obliquity variability (41 kyr and 54 kyr periodicities) but almost no precession signal in our dust records. We propose that the 41 kyr cycle in Northwest Australian dust fluxes could be a linear response to the East Asian winter monsoon (EAWM) and/or summer inter-tropical insolation gradient (SITIG), whereas the 54 kyr cyclicity might be a non-linear response to obliquity amplitude modulation via the SITIG effect on cross-equatorial flows.