budget travel accommodat / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-3.0 / GFDL
Capital: Canberra
Population: 27.5 million+
Language: English
1 – Sydney (also above)
Sydney, Australia’s oldest and largest city, spreads around one of the world’s great natural harbours on Gadigal country, where the First Fleet, having reached Botany Bay on 18 January 1788, settled at Sydney Cove on 26 January and founded the convict colony from which modern Australia grew.
Sydney’s Opera House and Harbour Bridge bracket the water, the sandstone lanes of The Rocks hold the oldest part of the colony, and Hyde Park Barracks, where more than 2,000 Irish Famine orphan girls were lodged in 1848–50, holds Australia’s monument to the Great Irish Famine.
The little-known Danish architect Jørn Utzon won Sydney’s Opera House competition in 1957, according to a much-repeated but disputed story, after the judge Eero Saarinen rescued his entry from the rejected pile, yet Utzon resigned in 1966 amid political rows, left Australia and never returned to see the building, which opened in 1973.
2 – Adelaide
Adelaide was laid out on Kaurna land in 1836–37 by Colonel William Light as a grid ringed by parklands, the capital of a colony planned for free settlement, funded by land sales, with no convicts.
Adelaide’s North Terrace lines up the State Library, Art Gallery and South Australian Museum, the Central Market has traded since 1869, and the vineyards of the Adelaide Hills and the Barossa lie within easy reach of the city.
In 1894, South Australia’s parliament in Adelaide made it the first place in the world to give women both the vote and the right to stand for parliament, a right added by an opponent, Ebenezer Ward, who hoped it would sink the bill.
3 – Alice Springs
Alice Springs, known to its Arrernte traditional owners as Mparntwe, lies close to the centre of the continent, and its European story began in 1871–72 with a repeater station on the Overland Telegraph Line linking Adelaide with Darwin.
The Alice Springs Telegraph Station has been restored to its appearance of 1895–1905, the Royal Flying Doctor Service and the School of the Air, which began broadcasting lessons in 1951, show how the outback works, and the MacDonnell Ranges stretch either side of town.
The Todd River through Alice Springs is usually a bed of dry sand, which is why the town holds the Henley-on-Todd Regatta in it, with crews running inside bottomless boats, and the event was once famously cancelled because the river had water in it.
4 – Uluru (Ayers Rock)
Uluru, a monolith of arkose sandstone in the Northern Territory’s red centre, is the visible tip of a rock slab that extends far beneath the desert, and the land is Anangu country, handed back to its traditional owners on 26 October 1985 and leased back under joint management.
The 10.6 km base walk around Uluru passes the Mutitjulu waterhole and rock-art shelters at the foot of the cliffs, with the domes of Kata Tjuta a short drive to the west, and the climb closed on 26 October 2019 at the traditional owners’ request.
Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park has received hundreds of parcels of “sorry rocks”, posted back by visitors who took a piece of Uluru as a souvenir, many with letters blaming it for years of bad luck.
5 – Bare Island
Bare Island is a small rocky outcrop off La Perouse at the mouth of Botany Bay, joined to the shore by a wooden footbridge built in 1887, and it takes its name from James Cook’s 1770 description of “a small bare island”.
The fort on Bare Island was built between 1881 and 1889 amid fears of a Russian naval attack on Sydney, with tunnels and gun emplacements cut into the rock, while the reefs around the island are among the best-known dive sites in New South Wales.
A Royal Commission found much of Bare Island’s concrete defective, the fort’s military service ended in 1908, from 1912 to 1963 it was Australia’s first war veterans’ home, and in 2000 it appeared in the film Mission: Impossible 2.
6 – Brisbane
Brisbane, Queensland’s capital, spreads along a looping river on Turrbal and Yuggera country, and began in 1824 at Redcliffe, moving to the river in 1825, as the Moreton Bay penal settlement for convicts who had reoffended in other colonies, closed to free settlers until 1842.
Brisbane’s South Bank holds parklands, galleries and museums, the Story Bridge spans the river, the convict-built Old Windmill of 1828 is Queensland’s oldest surviving European building, and Mount Coot-tha looks out over the whole city.
Brisbane lies upriver from the sea, so in 1992 it built its own beach, Streets Beach, a chlorinated lagoon with white sand and lifeguards on the former World Expo 88 site at South Bank.
7 – Cairns
Cairns was founded in 1876 on the mangrove-fringed Trinity Inlet, on Yirrganydji and Yidinji country, as a port for the newly proclaimed Hodgkinson goldfield, and it became the gateway to the Great Barrier Reef and the Daintree rainforest.
From Cairns, the Kuranda Scenic Railway climbs the Barron Gorge through 15 tunnels, cut largely with hand tools and dynamite, to the village of Kuranda on the tableland, while the Skyrail gondola glides back over the rainforest canopy.
Cairns owes its railway to a crisis, after the 1882 wet season left the road inland from Port Douglas impassable, with the Herberton tin miners close to starvation, and in 1884, after a fierce contest with Port Douglas and Geraldton, later renamed Innisfail, the government chose Cairns as the railhead.
8 – Perth
Perth, often called the world’s most isolated major city, was founded on the Swan River on Whadjuk Noongar country in 1829 as the free Swan River Colony, which later asked Britain for convict labour, with the first convicts landing in 1850, before gold finds at Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie in the 1890s brought a boom.
Kings Park spreads over the escarpment above Perth’s river, Rottnest Island lies a ferry ride offshore, and Fremantle’s convict-built, World Heritage-listed prison is the one six Irish Fenian prisoners escaped from on 17 April 1876, sailing away on the American whaler Catalpa.
When John Glenn orbited the Earth on 20 February 1962, Perth turned on its lights so he could see the city from space, and Glenn radioed his thanks, earning it the name City of Light, before Perth did it again for his Space Shuttle flight in 1998.
9 – Mitchell Falls
Mitchell Falls, known as Punamii-Uunpuu, drops through four tiers of ancient sandstone in the remote Kimberley on Wunambal Gaambera country, reached by high-clearance 4WD on the Kalumburu Road and the Mitchell Plateau track in the dry season, or by scenic flight.
The 8.6 km return walk to Mitchell Falls passes Little Mertens Falls and Big Mertens Falls, with rock-art shelters holding Gwion Gwion figures dated to about 12,000 years ago, among Australia’s oldest dated rock art, as well as much later Wandjina paintings.
The pools below Mitchell Falls are home to the Wunggurr, the creator snake of Wunambal Gaambera belief, which is why swimming there is not allowed, while the pools above the falls are open to swimmers.
10 – Great Ocean Road
The Great Ocean Road runs about 240 km along Victoria’s coast from Torquay to Allansford, built between 1919 and 1932 by about 3,000 returned First World War servicemen with picks, shovels and explosives, and dedicated to those killed in the war, often described as the world’s largest war memorial.
Beyond the Memorial Arch at Eastern View, the Great Ocean Road’s set pieces are the limestone stacks of the Twelve Apostles and Loch Ard Gorge, named after the clipper wrecked nearby in 1878, whose only survivors were the apprentice Tom Pearce and Eva Carmichael, a young Irishwoman from Dublin whose mother died in the wreck.
The Twelve Apostles on the Great Ocean Road were known as the Sow and Piglets until 1922, when they were renamed to draw tourists, though there were never twelve, and one of the stacks collapsed on 3 July 2005.
11 – Hobart – Tasmania
Hobart, Australia’s second-oldest capital, was founded at Sullivans Cove on the Derwent in 1804, after a short-lived settlement at Risdon Cove, below kunanyi/Mount Wellington, on the country of the muwinina people.
Hobart’s Salamanca Place holds a Saturday market in front of 1830s sandstone warehouses, Battery Point behind it is a maze of colonial cottages, and the convict ruins of Port Arthur, where the Young Irelander William Smith O’Brien was held, lie down the Tasman Peninsula.
MONA, the Museum of Old and New Art, opened in Hobart in January 2011, funded by the professional gambler David Walsh and dug three levels into the sandstone banks of the Derwent, where most visitors arrive by ferry, descend a spiral staircase and work their way back up.
12 – Darwin
Darwin, the tropical capital of the Northern Territory on Larrakia country, lies closer to Indonesia than to Sydney, and its harbour was named in 1839 by John Lort Stokes of HMS Beagle after Charles Darwin, his former shipmate, while the settlement founded in 1869 was called Palmerston until 1911.
Darwin’s waterfront draws crowds as do the Mindil Beach markets in the dry season, the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory tells the story of Cyclone Tracy, and Litchfield and Kakadu national parks lie within reach of the city.
Darwin has been flattened twice, first on 19 February 1942, when the carrier force that had struck Pearl Harbor killed at least 235 people, then on Christmas Day 1974, when Cyclone Tracy devastated about 80% of the city and more than 30,000 of its 43,000 residents were evacuated, most by air.
13 – Melbourne
Melbourne was founded in 1835 on Wurundjeri and Boonwurrung land, made rich by the Victorian gold rush of the 1850s, and in the boom of the 1880s, it was often called the second city of the British Empire, leaving it a wealth of grand Victorian architecture.
Melbourne’s laneway cafés lead to the World Heritage-listed Royal Exhibition Building, the National Gallery of Victoria, the Queen Victoria Market and the MCG, while Old Melbourne Gaol is where Ned Kelly, the son of a County Tipperary convict, was hanged in 1880.
Melbourne kept the world’s largest urban tram network when other Australian cities scrapped theirs in the 1950s and 1960s, thanks partly to Tramways Board chairman Sir Robert Risson, who championed trams, and partly because the relatively new network was too valuable to tear up.
14 – Great Barrier Reef
The Great Barrier Reef stretches some 2,300 km along the Queensland coast, about 2,900 individual reefs and 900 islands built by coral polyps, often described as the largest living structure on Earth and visible from orbit.
Boats run out to the Great Barrier Reef from Cairns, Port Douglas or Airlie Beach for diving or snorkelling, the Whitsundays with Whitehaven Beach lie within it, and the southern islands of Lady Elliot and Heron are known for turtles as well as manta rays.
On the night of 10–11 June 1770, Cook’s Endeavour struck the Great Barrier Reef, nearly sinking as the crew threw six cannon with ballast overboard to float her off, and in 1969 an expedition from Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Sciences used a magnetometer to search the area on Cook’s charts, raising all six.
15 – Canberra
Canberra exists because Sydney and Melbourne could not agree which should be the capital, so the constitution required a new seat of government in New South Wales at least 160 km from Sydney, the site was chosen in 1908 on Ngunnawal country, and Parliament sat in Melbourne until 1927.
Anzac Parade runs from Lake Burley Griffin straight to the Australian War Memorial, Parliament House is built into Capital Hill beneath a grassed roof, and the National Gallery as well as the National Museum lie along the lake in Canberra.
Walter Burley Griffin of Chicago won the 1911–12 international competition to design Canberra, but the luminous renderings on cotton cloth that helped win it were made by his wife and partner, Marion Mahony Griffin, and were inscribed on the Australian Memory of the World Register in 2003.