Visiting Australia
Travelling in Australia
The mistake almost everyone makes with Australia is treating it as a country you can see. It is closer to the truth to treat it as a continent you can visit part of, and the sooner that lands the better every other decision gets.
The numbers are the argument. Australia is the smallest continent and the sixth largest country, and close to 28 million people live on it — 27.8 million at the end of 2025, on the Bureau of Statistics' count — almost all of them on a thin coastal margin. Between the cities is the Outback: arid, ancient and very largely empty. We once rode across it, Perth to Sydney: 4,929 kilometres and fifty days, and that was taking the direct way. A fortnight spent trying to cover the country will give you a great deal of airport and not much of Australia.
So the first decision is not when to go, or for how long. It is which part, and it is worth making deliberately rather than by default. A trip built around the south-east is a different holiday from one built around the tropics, and neither is a lesser version of the other. The guides below are listed by state, because that is how the map is drawn and how most trips are booked; but on this continent state borders are lines of administration and little else — they run straight through the things a traveller actually notices.
There is also no single answer to when you should come, because Australia runs three seasonal systems at the same time — a wet and a dry season in the north, hot and cool in the centre, four seasons in the south. Pick the part of the country first. The month follows from it, not the other way round.
Last updated 8 October 2026
Australia at a glance
Where Australia changes character
By state and territory, with every place we have published a guide to listed under the one it belongs to. Nothing is held back. Choose a state on the map or from the list to see its guides.
Where nearly every first visit begins: Sydney’s harbour, then a coast road north past headlands, surf beaches and small harbour towns.
- SydneyThe harbour, the beaches, and the country's oldest European city
- Port StephensA headland, dolphin boats and the Stockton dunes, a first night north of Sydney
- Port MacquarieThe Coastal Walk, Town Beach and the surf beaches north to South West Rocks
- Coffs HarbourThe jetty, Muttonbird Island and a marine park full of islands, halfway up the coast
- Byron BayThe lighthouse, the surf beaches and the busiest night on the coast road
Melbourne’s laneways, coffee and galleries, in a city with a genuine four-seasons climate.
Where the four-season model stops working. The north runs on a wet season and a dry one, and the difference between them decides the whole trip.
- BrisbaneA subtropical river city whose best months are the ones the south calls cold
- Gold CoastFifty kilometres of surf beaches, with rainforest an hour behind
- Cairns and the Great Barrier ReefThe reef gateway, and rainforest that reaches the sea
- Port DouglasThe small-town base for the outer reef and the Daintree
Two very different kinds of heat. The Top End is monsoonal and green for half the year; the Centre is arid, and in summer the walking stops before lunch.
The far corner, and the one place whose year runs opposite to the east coast: dry summers, wet winters, and a wildflower season that moves down the state for six months.
The southern edge, where wine country runs close to the city and the summer is short, busy and worth planning around.
The island state at the southern edge, where the summer is short, genuinely busy, and worth planning around rather than turning up in.
Fifteen guides across seven states and territories. If we have published it, it is here.
The four practical questions
Which part, in which season?
No single best time, only a best time for the part you are going to, under three seasonal systems.
Read the guide → What it costsIs Australia expensive?
Where Australia is cheaper and dearer, a whole-trip example, and how to keep the journey affordable.
Read the guide → Where to stayWhich bed for a trip that keeps moving?
The accommodation types, what they cost, and when to book on a trip that keeps moving.
Read the guide → Getting aroundFly, drive or take the train?
Flights, real driving distances, the Ghan and the Indian Pacific, and whether a campervan makes sense.
Read the guide →Six things worth planning a trip around
Australia is too big to fit these into one trip, and that is the point of listing them: each one is far enough from the others that it decides a route rather than fits into it. Pick one or two and build the country around them.
Northern TerritoryWalk the base at dawnUluṟu rewards the walker and disappoints anyone who came for the photograph. Two days, and the things Aṉangu ask of you before you arrive.
QueenslandBook the right reef boatThe outer reef is ninety minutes off Cairns and the boat you choose decides the day. Non-swimmers can see it from dry seats.
Western AustraliaSwim in off the beachNingaloo's whole proposition is that you do not need a boat — the reef runs close inshore. It has also just had a very bad year.
VictoriaDrive it, don't rush itA war memorial 240 kilometres long, and most people treat everything before the Twelve Apostles as the approach. The road is the thing.
TasmaniaGive it a whole dayYou cannot drive to Dove Lake, and that one rule organises the day. The mountain is often in cloud — the ordinary condition, not a ruined visit.
New South WalesTake the commuter ferryA drowned river valley with a city around it, and the cheapest good idea in Sydney. Not a chartered cruise — the fleet that crosses it all day.
Scroll or swipe for all six — every one is a link
The practical ground
Australia is a straightforward country to travel in and an expensive one to reach. Most of the difficulty is distance, and almost none of it is bureaucracy.
| Question | The short answer | Where to check |
|---|---|---|
| Getting there from the UK | No non-stop service to the east coast. Qantas flies London to Perth non-stop; the return leg currently refuels in Singapore because of airspace closures, and the timetable has moved more than once. Everything else is one stop, usually through Singapore, Hong Kong, Dubai or Doha. | The airline, close to booking — this one changes. |
| Visas | Almost everyone needs something before boarding. British citizens use the free eVisitor; some other nationalities use the ETA app, which carries a service fee; other passports and longer stays use the Visitor visa. New Zealanders are exempt. | Home Affairs. We do not print the fee — it has changed twice recently. Our entry requirements page has the detail. |
| Paperwork on arrival | The Digital Passenger Declaration was abolished in July 2022 and you will still find guides telling you to complete it. Incoming passenger requirements have changed since and are changing again. | The official source, not a guide — including this one. |
| Biosecurity | Taken seriously, and enforced. Declare food, plant material, wooden items and anything that has been on a farm. Declaring costs nothing; not declaring can cost a great deal. | The incoming passenger card, and read it properly. |
| Money | Australian dollars, and a card economy — cash is genuinely optional in the cities and useful in small towns. | — |
| Weather | Three seasonal systems at once. There is no national answer. | Best time to visit Australia |
The distances deserve a warning of their own, because they are what ruins itineraries. Australia is served by a small number of very long internal flights and an enormous quantity of road, and the road is emptier than European drivers expect — fuel, water and phone signal become things you plan around rather than assume. A drive that looks like an afternoon on a continental map is a day; a day is two. The rule of thumb that works is to halve what you were going to attempt, and spend the time you get back on staying still somewhere.
Two things worth correcting, because both are widely repeated. The Spirit of Tasmania sails from Geelong, not Melbourne — the terminal moved in 2022 and sits about 70 kilometres south-west of the Melbourne CBD, arriving at Devonport. And driving times in Australia are not European driving times: the distances look tractable on a map drawn at continental scale and are not.
The culture you’ll travel through
What is here is much older than the map suggests. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have lived on this continent for at least 65,000 years, which makes their cultures among the oldest continuous ones on earth. Dutch ships charted parts of the coast in the 1600s; British settlement began in 1788 with a penal colony at Sydney Cove; the six colonies federated in 1901. All of that is recent by the longer measure, and it is worth holding both timescales in your head at once.
That older Australia is not a museum exhibit, and it is not confined to the centre. It is present in the names of places you will pass through, in what the land is used for and who speaks for it, and in seasonal calendars that divide the year quite differently from the one you arrived with — the Larrakia calendar for the Darwin region recognises seven seasons where a visitor sees two. Some of that we have written about where it belongs, on the pages for the places concerned. We have not yet written a guide to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australia, and we would rather say so plainly than gesture at it. It is the largest gap in our Australian coverage and it is the next thing we intend to fix.
The fullest of those place pages is Uluṟu and Kata Tjuṯa, which explains how Aṉangu law shapes a visit there: why the climb is closed, which places may not be photographed, and the walks Aṉangu guide themselves. There is no national food guide yet either; the city guides carry it, starting with where to eat in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.
Journeys through Australia
Australia rewards the long way round more than most countries, because the space between the places is not empty in the way the map suggests.
Perth to Sydney
Western Australia, the Nullarbor, Adelaide and Melbourne, and then Sydney — the whole width of the continent on a loaded bike.
Perth to Sydney →
ResearchedThe central and northern NSW coast by rail
The slow way up the coast from Sydney, on a line that keeps stopping at places worth getting off at.
The NSW coast by rail →
A final word on Australia
Australia's scale is both the difficulty and the point. You cannot see it in one trip, and the attempt is the surest way to waste it. Pick a region, go deep, and let the country move at the speed it actually moves at. Then come back for another one.
Andrew + Margaret
- How many days in Australia Practical
- Sydney to Brisbane: eight days up the coast Journeys
- Best time to visit Australia Practical
- Sydney Overview
- Cairns and the Great Barrier Reef Overview
- Perth Overview
- Journeys, by how you travel Journeys
- Entry requirements for Australia Practical