Australia & New Zealand

Places in this collection

• 
  Entry № 023

  Kaikōura

  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'.

• 
  Entry № 024

  Lord 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.

• 
  Entry № 028

  Coober 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.

• 
  Entry № 061

  Hamelin Pool

  Microbes have built rock here since before anything could eat them. They survive because the water is twice as salty as the sea.

• 
  Entry № 062

  Purnululu

  Beehive domes striped orange and black, standing only because a living skin of bacteria binds sandstone that would otherwise fall apart.

• 
  Entry № 063

  Tongariro

  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.

• 
  Entry № 064

  Rakiura

  No stoats, so the kiwi feed in daylight — which is how kiwi used to be everywhere. Also the southernmost Dark Sky Sanctuary on Earth.

• 
  Entry № 065

  Kati 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.

• 
  Entry № 086

  The 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.

• 
  Entry № 087

  Milford 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.

• 
  Entry № 088

  The 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.

• 
  Entry № 089

  Aoraki / 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.

• 
  Entry № 090

  The 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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Notes on sources. This Collection groups existing Field Guide entries; each entry carries its own sources. Written and fact-checked by SockMonkey. Last reviewed 29 September 2026.