Fitzroy Island
The photograph that sells Fitzroy Island is a white beach under granite boulders, and it is a forty-five minute walk from where the boat puts you down.
Fitzroy is the other island off Cairns, and the opposite of Green Island in nearly every way. It is a piece of the mainland's mountain range, cut off when the sea rose, and still behaves like one: granite, steep forested slopes, a summit track the park service grades difficult, and a fringing reef that starts a few metres off the shore. The beach you land on is not sand — Welcome Bay is broken coral, and the white sand in the pictures is Nudey Beach, a hill away. A walking island with a reef attached, then. We have not been, so every figure below was read at the operator or the authority on 21 September 2026.
Last updated 21 September 2026
The island is the same whichever boat you take; what differs is how many hours you get on it, and the price does not tell you. Fitzroy Island Adventures charges $108 for its full day and $108 for its half day — the same fare for about six hours ashore or a little over two. Sunlover's two departures differ by an hour and a half ashore at the same price, because both of its boats come back at 3.30pm. And the Fitzroy Island Flyer's middle return sails at 12.15pm against a last boat at 5pm, which is the difference between a morning and the longest day anyone sells here. Before you pay, check the return time rather than the departure, and check it against the day you were planning to have.
Why it matters
Fitzroy is not an island the reef made. It is a hill the sea cut off. Queensland Parks describes it as part of "the granite mountain chain along the coast", separated from the mainland when the sea rose some 6,000 years ago — the same rise that finished the reef flats Green Island sits on, doing the opposite job twenty-five kilometres away. What was left is a summit the Queensland Government puts at 269 metres, with the Bellenden Ker range still visible across the water on a clear day, looking like what it is: the rest of the same country.
That history is why the island carries vegetation no coral cay could. Queensland Parks records heaths and open woodlands of eucalypt, acacia and turpentine on the exposed slopes, rainforest in the damp valleys, mangroves along the creeks and casuarinas and pandanus behind the beaches — four distinct communities on one small island, which is a mainland inventory rather than an island one. The wildlife follows the same rule: yellow-spotted monitors to 1.2 metres, carpet pythons, pied imperial-pigeons that fly in from New Guinea to breed, ospreys, and leaf-nosed bats. You can walk from heath to rainforest in ten minutes here. On a cay you cannot, because there is only one kind of ground.
A yellow zone, not a green one — and it changes what you may do
The two islands sit in the same marine park under different rules, and almost nobody tells you. The waters around Green Island are zoned Marine National Park or Scientific Research, the strictest categories there are, and nobody fishes. Fitzroy's surrounding waters are a Conservation Park — the Yellow Zone — where limited line fishing is permitted subject to Fisheries Queensland rules, while spearfishing is prohibited and anchoring inside the reef protection markers is not allowed.
It is worth knowing for two reasons. If you fish, this is the island where you may, within the rules, and you should read the zoning map before you do. And if you snorkel, it explains something you may notice in the water: a reef that carries more fishing pressure than its neighbour, in an area where the last two summers have already been hard on the coral. The Australian Institute of Marine Science's 2025 survey — its largest in forty years of monitoring — found reefs near Cairns had lost between 17 and 60 per cent of the coral cover they carried the year before. Fitzroy's fringing reef is inshore, like Green Island's, and sits inside that range.
Myth and reality: "Australia's best beach" is a 2017 list, and it is mostly not sand
Every operator page and half the guidebooks still carry it: Nudey Beach, named Australia's best beach. The award is real and it is worth knowing exactly what it was. Nudey Beach topped the 101 Best Australian Beaches list compiled by the researcher Brad Farmer with Tourism Australia, published on 21 December 2017. One list, one compiler, nine years ago, and nothing has been awarded to the beach since.
The bigger misunderstanding is about what you will be standing on. Nudey is the sandier of the island's two swimming beaches, and it is genuinely beautiful — granite boulders, rainforest to the waterline, the reef close in. But Welcome Bay, where every boat lands and where most day visitors spend the day, is a bank of broken coral. The resort's own advice is to wear water sandals there. A reader who books on the Nudey photograph and then spends the day at Welcome Bay in bare feet has been misled by an accurate picture of the wrong beach. And the name is a third small fiction: nudity is not practised there and has not been for many years.
Quarantine, mission and lighthouse — and a name nobody official will confirm
The island's recorded history is short and mostly unhappy. James Cook named it in 1770 after the Duke of Grafton. In 1876 a quarantine station was established here for Chinese labourers bound for the Palmer River goldfields; Queensland Parks' own account of it is that "conditions were poor and starvation, sickness and death were common".
In the early 1900s the island became part of the Anglican Aboriginal mission at Yarrabah and was farmed for bananas, pawpaw, potatoes and cassava. The Yarrabah community's memories of that period, as Queensland Parks records them, are of family separations, attempted runaways and the coral church; the Menmuny Museum at Yarrabah holds the displays. A lighthouse was built in 1943, replaced by the light on Little Fitzroy Island in 1973 and automated in 1991. Its road is now one of the island's four walks, which is a tidy summary of how the place has been used: worked, then left, then walked on.
On the island's Aboriginal name we have to be honest about a gap. Queensland Parks names the mainland point opposite as Djilibiri — Cook's Cape Grafton — but publishes no Aboriginal name for the island itself. Two are in circulation and they do not agree: Gabar, given as Yidiny and translated as "lower arm", and Koba, given as Gunggandji and translated as "the fist". We have found no official source that settles it, so we give both and prefer neither.
What it's like
The crossing is short and unremarkable, which is the point of it. Forty-five minutes from the Cairns waterfront in a large air-conditioned catamaran, out past the mouth of Trinity Inlet with the ranges on your right the whole way, and then the island stands up out of the water ahead — dark green, steep, and obviously a mountain rather than a sandbar. You come alongside a jetty at Welcome Bay and walk off onto concrete.
And then the beach. Welcome Bay is a wide, shallow, sheltered bay with the resort behind it, and its shore is hard coral washed up into a bank, in the operator's own words — white, bright, and about as comfortable underfoot as gravel. It crunches when you walk on it and it clicks in the shallows when the water moves. Plenty of people find it beautiful once they stop expecting sand; almost nobody finds it comfortable barefoot. Water sandals are not a refinement here, they are the difference between swimming twice and swimming once.
What the island does better than anywhere else reachable from Cairns in forty-five minutes is walking. There are four tracks; they are short by mainland standards and steeper than short suggests.
The Secret Garden is 700 metres return into a rainforest gully behind the resort, about twenty-five minutes. Nudey Beach is 1.2 km return over the shoulder of the hill, about forty-five minutes, graded moderate. The Lighthouse Road is 3.6 km return and two hours, graded difficult, with open ocean views most of the way and whales in the channel in winter. And the Summit track is 4 km return and three hours, also graded difficult, climbing through rainforest and then out into open heath to the top.
Somewhere above halfway up the summit track the rainforest simply stops. Stand at that line for a minute before you go on. Behind you the air is still and close and smells of wet leaf litter; a step or two ahead the canopy gives out into open heath — eucalypt, acacia, turpentine, ankle-high scrub over grey granite — and the whole climate of the walk changes at once. The wind arrives. So does the sun, straight down and unfiltered, and the heat comes back off the rock at you as much as it comes out of the sky; Queensland Parks warns in plain terms that the temperature and humidity here cause heat exhaustion "even for fit walkers", and this is the stretch where it happens. Listen, too, because the sound swaps over: the low insect hum of the closed forest drops away and the cicadas of the open slope take it up, louder and more brittle. You are two hundred metres above a coral reef, standing on the same granite as the mountains across the water, in vegetation that belongs to them and not to the sea. Drink something here, not at the top.
The snorkelling is better than Green Island's and harder to get at. Queensland Parks names two places worth entering the water: Welcome Bay and off Nudey Beach, both over a fringing reef it describes as "supporting many species of fish and invertebrates". The geometry differs between them — at the northern end of Welcome Bay the reef sits a fair way out, while at Nudey it comes almost to the shore, which is why the walk over the hill is worth making with a mask in your bag. Everywhere else, the park service's warning is unambiguous: snorkelling elsewhere around the island "may be dangerous due to strong currents".
The last thing to know about the day is how it thins. Almost every visitor arrives between half past nine and eleven, and the boats begin taking them off at two. By mid-afternoon Welcome Bay is noticeably emptier, the light over the water is better than it was at midday, and the 5pm Flyer is the only scheduled way to still be there for it. Everyone on the earlier boats sees the island at its busiest and never sees it any other way.
How to visit
Everything below was read at the operator's or the authority's own page on 21 September 2026. Prices are in Australian dollars. Child ages differ between operators and are given in each row, because they are not the same, and a family is two adults and two children unless stated.
The three boats, and what each one does with your day
Three companies run a day trip to Fitzroy Island and all three leave from the Cairns waterfront. The Fitzroy Island Flyer is the resort's own 190-seat catamaran, sailing at 8am, 11am and 1.30pm and returning at 9.30am, 12.15pm and 5pm — the only operator with a late boat, and therefore the only way to buy a nine-hour day. Fitzroy Island Adventures, part of Reef Unlimited, sails at 8.30am and 10.45am, returning at 4pm on its full day and 2pm on its half day. Sunlover Reef Cruises sails at 8.45am and 10.15am, and both of its boats come home at 3.30pm.
The Flyer's 11am and 12.15pm sailings do not run Monday to Thursday during February and March, which removes the short-day option for two months of the year. Fitzroy Island Adventures states its fares valid to 31 March 2027 and includes a $5 per person facilities levy in them; the other two publish no validity dates.
| Operator and product | Price | Departs / returns | Ashore | What the fare includes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fitzroy Island Flyer — ferry only | From $99 adult, $55 child 4–13 | 8, 11, 1.30 / 9.30, 12.15, 5 | Up to 9 hrs on the 8am–5pm pair | The crossing. The longest day available here, and the cheapest way to buy it. No family fare published |
| Fitzroy Island Flyer — with snorkel gear or glass-bottom boat | From $126 | 8 or 11 / 5 | Up to 9 hrs | The crossing plus either snorkel hire for the day or a one-hour glass-bottom boat trip — one, not both |
| Fitzroy Island Adventures — full day | $108 / $62 child 4–15 / $278 family | 8.30 or 10.45 / 4 | Up to 6 hrs | The crossing, snorkel gear and lycra suits. Glass-bottom boat and guided snorkel sold on top |
| Fitzroy Island Adventures — half day | $108 / $62 / $278 | 10.45 / 2 | A little over 2 hrs | The same money as the full day for a third of the time. Read that row twice before you book it |
| Sunlover — Island Essentials | $134 / $85 / $353 | 8.45 or 10.15 / 3.30 | About 6 hrs or about 4½ | The crossing and one activity. The earlier departure is worth an hour and a half more ashore at the same price |
| Sunlover — Best of Island | $202 / $137 / $541 | 8.45 or 10.15 / 3.30 | About 6 hrs or about 4½ | The crossing, all-day snorkel gear, the glass-bottom boat and lunch. Frequently discounted — check before paying full |
What the fare does not buy
Landing is free — the island is a national park and there is no admission — but the resort is a private business and day visitors are not resort guests. The swimming pool and the resort's facilities are for resort guests only. What day visitors get is toilets and showers, Foxy's Bar and Cafe, a general store, and the tour desk. Lockers near the general store are $10 for four hours or $12 for eight. You may bring your own food; you may not bring alcohol onto the island in any form. Camping is a separate arrangement again, covered below.
Queensland Parks posts two hazard warnings for this park and a third condition inside its snorkelling advice. On crocodiles: "estuarine crocodiles can occur in waters around the islands and cays of North Queensland" — this is Croc Country, and the advice is to expect them whether or not a sign is up. On stingers: dangerous jellyfish "may be present in the coastal waters at any time, but occur more frequently in the warmer months", which on this coast means November to May, and the answer is a full-body lycra suit, hired on the island if you have not brought one. On currents: snorkelling anywhere other than Welcome Bay and Nudey Beach "may be dangerous due to strong currents". And one thing nobody publishes: neither Queensland Parks nor the resort names a lifeguard or a patrolled area at Welcome Bay, where Queensland Parks does name one for Green Island. Snorkel with a buddy, stay in the two named places, and if you are choosing an island for young children this difference is worth more than the fare difference.
The four walks, and which of them you should actually do
Queensland Parks grades and times all four tracks, which makes this one of the few Cairns day trips where you can plan the day honestly before you sail. Take the grades seriously: two of the four are graded difficult, and the park service's heat warning is about these walks specifically.
| Track | Distance | Grade | Time | What it is for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Secret Garden | 700 m return | Moderate | 25 min | Rainforest in a gully behind the resort. The one walk that fits inside a half-day ticket |
| Nudey Beach | 1.2 km return | Moderate | 45 min | The sandy beach and the closest-in reef. Do it with a mask in your bag, not as a photograph errand |
| Lighthouse Road | 3.6 km return | Difficult | 2 hrs | Open ocean views along a made road, and whales in the channel in winter. Easier underfoot than the summit |
| Summit | 4 km return | Difficult | 3 hrs | Rainforest into open heath and the whole reef laid out below. The reason to come, if you are up to it |
The turtle centre, and the timetable that decides whether you can see it
The Cairns Turtle Rehabilitation Centre is a volunteer-run non-profit that takes in sick and injured marine turtles and returns them to the water, and it runs 30-minute guided tours of its facility on the island. Tours go Wednesday to Sunday only, at 2.15pm and 2.45pm, cost $20 an adult and $12 a child, take a maximum of fifteen people, and should be booked in advance because they fill.
Those times do not fit every ticket, and this is the trap. Tours are stated as available to resort guests and Fitzroy Island Flyer passengers. A 12.15pm Flyer return misses them entirely. A Fitzroy Island Adventures half day, back at 2pm, misses them. And on Monday and Tuesday nobody sees them at all. If the turtles are why you are going, the combination that works is the Flyer out in the morning and back at 5pm, Wednesday to Sunday, booked ahead — and if you are travelling with another operator, confirm you can book before you buy the boat.
Facilities, camping and accessibility
Food and drink on the island are Foxy's Bar and Cafe and the general store; the resort restaurant is for guests. Water, hats, reef-safe sunscreen and something on your feet should come with you, because the store is small and the island is not where you want to discover you are short.
Camping is not national park camping, which catches people out: the national park prohibits camping and campfires outright, and the campground is on Cairns Regional Council land managed by the resort. It is $39 a tent a night for up to four people across about twenty sites, with cold-water showers and a barbecue, a 3 m by 3 m tent limit, no fires, no generators, no alcohol and quiet from 10pm. You bring everything; nothing is hired to you.
On accessibility this island publishes more than most, and the answer is genuinely mixed. The Flyer has ramp access on and off the vessel with a gangway width of 790 mm, though some assistance is generally needed; check-in opens an hour before departure and boarding closes fifteen minutes before. There is an accessible toilet near resort reception for day guests, and the resort has five accessible rooms. But there are no wheelchair-accessible tracks in the national park, and Welcome Bay's loose coral makes reaching the water difficult without help. If mobility matters to the day, this is a page to read alongside a phone call to the operator rather than instead of one.
If the boat does not sail, and what you cannot check from the island
Wind, not rain, is what stops a reef boat out of Cairns, and two of the three operators publish a weather policy — which is two more than Green Island's operators manage. The resort's is that if the Flyer or any component of a full-day tour does not operate for any reason, an alternative date or vessel is offered, and where no alternative can be arranged the affected component is refunded. Its window for a change of mind of your own is 48 hours.
Fitzroy Island Adventures states that where it cancels for weather or tides the guest is given an alternative day, another Reef Unlimited product or a full refund — with a 100 per cent fee if you cancel inside 24 hours. Sunlover publishes no equivalent statement where we could find one, so ask before you pay. And whichever boat you take, do not put this island on your last day in Cairns: a rebooking is only worth having if there is a day left to use it.
One thing we could not establish, and would rather say so than guess: nobody publishes mobile coverage for the island or its tracks. Neither the park service nor any of the three operators says what you will get, and the resort advertises free wifi without saying whether day visitors may use it. Plan the summit walk as though you may have no signal on it — sensible anyway on a track graded difficult with a heat warning attached — and tell someone at the resort or on the boat if you are walking it alone.
In words: Fitzroy Island lies about 25 kilometres east of Cairns and roughly four kilometres off Cape Grafton, the headland south of the city that shelters Yarrabah — close enough inshore that the mainland ranges are in view from the island's tracks all day. Green Island, the coral cay, is about 25 kilometres to the north-west of it and a wholly different kind of place. All three operators leave from the Cairns waterfront within a few minutes' walk of each other, and parking at the Cairns Cruise Liner Terminal car park is around $10 a day.
Making the most of it
Buy the 8am Flyer and the 5pm boat back. It is the only nine-hour day anyone sells to this island, it is the cheapest ticket of the three operators, and it is the difference between fitting one walk in and fitting the summit, Nudey Beach and two swims in. Every other product brings you home between 2pm and 4pm.
Climb first, swim afterwards. The summit track is three hours graded difficult on an island the park service warns about for heat, and the first two hours after the early boat are the coolest of the day you will be there. Doing it at noon is how a good day becomes a bad one. The swim afterwards is also the better swim, because the reward is in the right order.
Put something on your feet and keep it on. Welcome Bay is broken coral, the shallows are broken coral, and the tracks are granite and root. One pair of water sandals covers the beach, the snorkelling entry and the Secret Garden; proper shoes are worth the bag space if you are going up.
Walk to Nudey with your mask, and not for the photograph. The award is nine years old and the beach does not need it. What is worth the forty-five minutes is that the fringing reef comes almost to the shore there, which it does not at the northern end of Welcome Bay — so the walk buys you better snorkelling, and the sand is a bonus rather than the point.
And two kinds of visitor should go elsewhere. If what you want is the best coral the region can show you, neither inner island will give it to you and the outer ribbon reefs will; our reef page sets the trip types against each other. And if you want to step off a boat onto sand with the snorkelling starting a few metres away and no hill in the day at all, that is Green Island, which is also the better island for small children and for anyone who would rather swim where somebody is watching the water.
Nearby
Cairns is where the day begins and ends, and our city guide sets out the areas and the choices; where to stay matters less for this trip than for most, since all three operators sail from the same stretch of waterfront.
Green Island is the obvious pairing and the obvious comparison — the coral cay is the flat, easy, sandy version of the same idea, and a day on each is a better week than two days on either. Beyond the water, the Daintree is the rainforest day and Kuranda the journey day.
A final word on Fitzroy Island
Go for the walking, and let the reef be the reward at the end of it. Fitzroy is the only place within forty-five minutes of Cairns where you can climb two hundred and sixty metres through rainforest into open heath, look down on a fringing reef, and then go and swim on it — and for anyone who finds a flat sandy island a slightly thin day, that is worth more than better sand. Take the longest ticket, go up before the heat, and bring something to put on your feet.
Andrew + Margaret
- Cairns and the Great Barrier Reef Overview
- Green Island Highlight
- The Great Barrier Reef from Cairns Highlight
- The Daintree and Cape Tribulation Highlight
- Kuranda, by railway and cableway Highlight
- Where to stay in Cairns Decide
- Queensland Parks — Fitzroy Island National Park Official
- Queensland Parks — visiting safely Safety
- Queensland Parks — walking tracks and snorkelling Official
- Fitzroy Island Flyer — times and fares Booking
- Fitzroy Island Adventures — tours and fares Booking
- Sunlover Reef Cruises — Fitzroy Island day trip Booking
- Cairns Turtle Rehabilitation Centre Official
Fitzroy or Green Island — if I can only do one, which?
Ask what you want under your feet. Green Island is flat, sandy, twelve hectares, twenty minutes to walk round, with snorkelling a few steps off the beach and a lifeguard on it — the better island for small children, poor sailors and anyone who wants the reef without effort. Fitzroy is a mountain: granite, four walking tracks including two graded difficult, a 269-metre summit, a coral-rubble beach at the jetty and the sand a hill away. Fitzroy asks more of you and gives more back if you are willing to climb. Neither will show you the coral of the photographs — that is the outer reef, ninety minutes further out.
Is the summit track really "difficult", or is that the park service being careful?
Take it at face value. It is 4 km return, about three hours, climbing to roughly 269 metres, and the grade is Queensland Parks' own. The hard part is not the distance but the conditions: the second half is open heath with no shade, over granite that holds the heat, and the park service warns specifically that the island's temperature and humidity cause heat exhaustion "even for fit walkers". It is very doable for a reasonably fit adult who starts early and carries water. It is a poor idea at midday in February, and it is not a walk to attempt on a half-day ticket that has you back at the jetty by half past one.