Places in this collection
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Entry № 023Kaikōura
A deep-sea canyon starts almost at the beach, so sperm whales feed year-round within sight of a town whose name means 'eat crayfish'.
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Entry № 024Lord Howe Island
An island capped at 400 guests at a time, with the world's southernmost coral reef and the tallest sea stack on Earth next door.
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Entry № 028Coober Pedy
The opal capital of the world solved the desert sun by moving underground — homes, churches, hotels, and a golf course with no grass at all.
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Entry № 061Hamelin Pool
Microbes have built rock here since before anything could eat them. They survive because the water is twice as salty as the sea.
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Entry № 062Purnululu
Beehive domes striped orange and black, standing only because a living skin of bacteria binds sandstone that would otherwise fall apart.
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Entry № 063Tongariro
Three sacred volcanoes given to the Crown in 1887 to stop them being sold — and the first cultural landscape ever inscribed on the World Heritage List.
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Entry № 064Rakiura
No stoats, so the kiwi feed in daylight — which is how kiwi used to be everywhere. Also the southernmost Dark Sky Sanctuary on Earth.
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Entry № 065Kati Thanda–Lake Eyre
A salt pan most of the time. When floodwater finally arrives from Queensland, pelicans appear in their tens of thousands, and nobody knows how they know.
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Entry № 086The Great Barrier Reef
The world's largest reef system has died five times in 30,000 years, stranded as the sea fell and drowned as it rose, and survived each time by moving. The reef you swim over is less than 10,000 years old.
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Entry № 087Milford Sound / Piopiotahi
So much rain falls here that fresh water floats on the sea like a lid, and deep-sea black coral grows within a diver's reach. The boats pass right over it.
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Entry № 088The Twelve Apostles
Named for tourists, never twelve, and now seven: the stacks were carved in the last few thousand years, and the only extra Apostles anyone has found stand drowned offshore.
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Entry № 089Aoraki / Mount Cook
Measured at 3,764 metres for a century, New Zealand's highest mountain lost ten metres in a night in 1991 and thirty more since. To Ngai Tahu it is an ancestor, not a summit.
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Entry № 090The Blue Mountains
Not mountains but a sandstone plateau cut into gorges, blue because of its eucalypts and World Heritage-listed for them. One canyon hid a tree known only from fossils until 1994.
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Entry № 140The Pinnacles
Thousands of limestone pillars in yellow sand north of Perth, called a desert where it rains most winters. In 2024 iron nodules on the pillars were used to date them.
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Entry № 157Horizontal Falls
Two narrow gaps in a range of hills on the Kimberley coast, where tides of up to about ten metres heap the sea up on one side and pour it through. To the Dambimangari it is Garaan-ngaddim, a powerful, sacred place.
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Entry № 178Maria Island
A mountainous island off the east coast of Tasmania, all of it national park, where wombats graze between the brick buildings of a World Heritage convict station and sandstone cliffs are stained in swirls of orange.
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Entry № 189Chatham Islands
A windswept archipelago about 800 km east of New Zealand’s South Island that keeps its own clock, 45 minutes ahead. It is home to the Moriori, its first people, and to the black robin, once down to five birds.
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Entry № 203Christmas Island (Indian Ocean)
An Australian territory in the Indian Ocean, nearer Java than Perth, two-thirds of it national park. At the start of each wet season, red land crabs leave the forest in their millions to spawn in the sea, and roads close to let them cross.
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Entry № 219Aotea / Great Barrier Island
A big, hilly island at the edge of the Hauraki Gulf, 100 km from Auckland, with no mains power: its people live on sun and wind. Most of it is conservation land, and its night sky earned it the world’s first island dark-sky sanctuary.
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Entry № 227Norfolk Island
A small Australian island in the South Pacific where convicts built a stone town beside a reef lagoon, and where descendants of the Bounty mutineers, resettled from Pitcairn in 1856, still speak a creole of their own under the island’s tall pines.
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Entry № 234Waitomo Glowworm Caves
A limestone cave in New Zealand’s North Island where a guide pulls a boat in silence along an underground stream beneath a ceiling of glowworms, on land returned in 1989 to the descendants of the man who first led visitors through it.
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Entry № 243Lake Mungo
A dry lake in the outback of New South Wales whose crescent of wind-carved dunes, the Walls of China, held burials made more than 40,000 years ago, among the oldest ritual burials known, on the country of the Paakantyi, Mutthi Mutthi and Ngiyampaa peoples.
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