Volume 39, Number 02
Travel
World Heritage Sites of Australia
Courtesy of Tourism Australia
We have more than our fair share of world heritage sites, but only two of them weren’t made by the hand of Mother Nature. You’re not going to find many of them in cities, towns or even in the form of ancient building ruins. Australia’s world heritage sites have been sitting around for eons—literally—and you’ll have to strap on your walking boots to find many of them.
The world’s largest island continent, Australia has a disproportionately large number of the world’s natural wonders—treasures such as the Great Barrier Reef, Uluru, Kata Tjuta and Kakadu National Park. Others, such as the Australian Fossil Mammal sites and Purnululu National Park, are lesser-known but also available to visit. When our island continent split apart from the mainland it launched a time capsule that was preserved for generations by its Aboriginal inhabitants but is only now being rediscovered and recorded by its settlers.
We are custodians of 17 unique World Heritage areas, some of the oldest rainforests on Earth and a massive one-third of the world’s protected marine areas. You can visit all of these except two—McDonald ands Heard Islands. However, many of our national parks are open to the public to visit and we’ll even provide you with educational and interpretive material and assistance at each site.
Though many are in remote areas by international standards, they are well served and easily accessible by road or plane, or on foot. So, get out of your comfort zone and adventure out and about into our unique nature and wilderness areas!
Some of our world heritage areas can only be accessed by 4WD or air, but most can be reached by self-drive. Generally, you’ll find a wide range of accommodation on the fringe of these areas—everything from camping grounds and tented accommodation to luxury stays in spa, nature and wilderness retreats.
Immerse yourself in our natural wonders; they’re there to be enjoyed—whether it’s walking with aboriginal elders around the monolith of Uluru, snorkeling the Great Barrier Reef or trekking through the Tasmanian Wilderness. Australia’s natural wonders, its protected rainforests, glorious reefs, spectacular ranges and wilderness are waiting for you.
Some World Heritage Facts
• Two of our World Heritage sites are buildings—the Royal Exhibition Building and associated gardens in Melbourne, Victoria and the Sydney Opera House in NSW. The rest are natural, not man-made.
• Australia sits at number 14 on a list of countries with the most listed World Heritage sites.
• Few places in the world meet all four World Heritage natural criteria, but we have four that do: Queensland’s Great Barrier Reef and Wet Tropics, Tasmania’s Wilderness, and Western Australia’s Shark Bay.
• The Great Barrier Reef is the largest marine park in the world. A maze of 2,900 reefs and islands, it stretches from Cape York (Cooktown) south to Bundaberg along the northeast coast of Australia.
• The Opera House, designed by Jorn Utzon and of- ficially opened in October 1973, is the youngest building to be included on the World Heritage List and only the second by a living architect.
• Prehistoric man occupied the Lake Mungo area 40,000 years ago. The 26,000-year-old grave of an Aboriginal woman is believed to be the world’s earliest cremation site. The 17 dry lakes (they dried up 14,000 years ago) that comprise the Willandra Lakes area cover nearly 30,000 hectares and are an extraordinarily rich source of fossils and information about the last ice age on earth.
• The Daintree Rainforest is the oldest in the world— 135 million years old. It supports over 3,000 plant spespecies, 13 mammal species found nowhere else in the world and nearly half of Australia’s birds.
• Kakadu covers almost 20,000 sq. km—the same size as many countries, such as Israel.
• The amazing Bungle Bungle Ranges and its ringed beehive-like domes are located within one of our newest listings, the Purnululu National Park. They were virtually unknown to White Australia until 1982 when a stock pilot flew over them with a couple of filmmakers.
• The traditional owners of the area prefer visitors to respect their culture and not climb “The Rock” (Ayers Rock, or Uluru, as it is now known.) This giant red sandstone monolith, 9.4 km in circumference, has been the focus of Aboriginal “Dreaming” for thousands of years.
• Stretching more than 120km, Fraser Island, off the southern Queensland coast, is the largest sand island in the world.
• Some of the world’s oldest ferns from the Carboniferous period can be found in the rainforest reserves of the Eastern coast, along with outstanding examples of other relict vertebrate and invertebrate fauna from the time of the break up of the ancient southern landmass Gwondana.
• The semi-arid Willandra Lakes region in the Murray region of southwest NSW is a system of Pleistocene lakes, formed over the last two million years.
• The Blue Mountains are blue because of the fine droplets of oil released into the air by the 90 species of eucalypts there.
• The exact location of the recently discovered Wollemi Pine, a living fossil dating back to the age of the dinosaurs, is being kept secret to protect them from destruction. But one thing we can tell you is that they’re located in the Blue Mountains.
• Some of the world’s oldest trees, such as Huon Pines that can grow for 2,000 years, grow in the Tasmanian Wilderness.
• Shark Bay, Western Australia, is home to the remarkable Hamelin Pool stromatolites—the oldest and largest living fossils in the world. The mystery surrounding their origin has attracted scientists from across the globes, who have compared the find to that of a zoologist discovering a living dinosaur.
• Visits to remote Heard, McDonald and Macquarie Islands are strictly controlled and usually restricted to scientific visits only. Macquarie is a rare above water section of the ancient ocean floor and Heard is known as the wildest place on earth.
And, we’ve only just scratched the surface! Attention was recently drawn to one of Australia’s bestkept secrets, a national treasure to equal Uluru and Kakadu. A cast and magical ancient art gallery in the outback on Western Australia’s Burrup Peninsula, in the remote far northwest of the continent, is being hailed as the world’s greatest, most significant collection of rock art.
For further information, please see: www.australia.com.