The Most Beautiful Film Locations in Oceania
7 places in 2 countries ยท updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful film locations in Oceania are Uluru (Australia), Great Barrier Reef (Australia) and Kakadu National Park (Australia). The list covers 7 film locations in 2 countries. Australia has the most, with 4. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Oceania gives filmmakers landscapes that no set designer could invent: red desert monoliths, coral seen from the air, fiords under rainforest and volcanic cones standing alone above farmland. Australia and New Zealand have been standing in for other worlds and other countries since the first location crews came.
Uluru, the sandstone monolith sacred to the Anangu people, is the backdrop of A Cry in the Dark, the 1988 film about the Chamberlain case. The Great Barrier Reef, the largest coral reef system on Earth, has filled decades of natural history documentaries, David Attenborough's among them. Fiordland National Park lent its forests, mires and fiords to the Lord of the Rings films. Taronga Zoo sits on the slopes of Sydney Harbour, with giraffes and the Opera House in the same frame. Taranaki Maunga, an almost perfectly symmetrical volcano on New Zealand's North Island, stood in for Mount Fuji in The Last Samurai.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Uluru | Rock formation | Australia | |
| 2 | Great Barrier Reef | Coral reef | Australia | โ |
| 3 | Kakadu National Park | National park | Australia | โ |
| 4 | Fiordland National Park | National park | New Zealand | โ |
| 5 | Taronga Zoo | Zoo | Australia | |
| 6 | Taranaki Maunga | Volcano | New Zealand | |
| 7 | Mount Sunday | Rock formation | New Zealand |
01 Uluru
Australia25.345ยฐ S 131.036ยฐ E
Image by Walkerssk from Pixabay 4 km around its base. That makes it one of the most recognisable landforms on the continent. Geologists call it an inselberg: an isolated remnant that outlasted the rock around it because it has almost no joints or bedding partings for erosion to exploit. Its strata are tilted almost vertical, and much of the formation continues underground.
Did you know? The rock's sandstone layers stand almost on end, dipping at about 85 degrees, and at least 2.4 km of their thickness is exposed at the surface.
02 Great Barrier Reef
Australia ยท 37.6 km from Port Douglas16.400ยฐ S 145.800ยฐ E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by alicia3690 from Pixabay At around 344,400 square kilometers and roughly 2,300 km long, the Great Barrier Reef isn't one reef so much as some 3,000 individual reefs and hundreds of islands strung together โ a footprint about the size of Italy or Japan, and by most measures the largest living structure ever built by living organisms, coral included.
Did you know? On 11 June 1770 James Cook's ship Endeavour ran aground on the reef, and repairing her took about seven weeks.
03 Kakadu National Park
Australia13.005ยฐ S 132.520ยฐ E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Squirrel_photos from Pixabay Kakadu, in the Top End of Australia's Northern Territory, is the country's largest national park after one desert reserve: about 19,800 square kilometres, roughly the size of Wales, running from tidal rivers on the coast to the sheer sandstone wall of the Arnhem Land escarpment.
04 Fiordland National Park
New Zealand45.386ยฐ S 167.347ยฐ E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Julius_Silver from Pixabay 2 million hectares of temperate rainforest and 14 fjords gouged out by glaciers that retreated long enough ago for forest to reclaim nearly every slope down to the waterline. Rudyard Kipling once called Milford Sound the eighth wonder of the world, and the sound alone gets roughly 6,000 to 8,000 millimetres of rain a year โ several times London's annual total โ spread across some 180 days.
Did you know? Its mountains and fiords have stood in for other worlds in The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit and Alien: Covenant.
05 Taronga Zoo
Australia ยท 4.1 km from Sydney33.843ยฐ S 151.241ยฐ E
istolethetv ยท CC BY 2.0 Taronga Zoo occupies one of the most enviable pieces of land in Sydney: a steep, wooded slope on the northern shore of the harbour at Mosman, looking straight across the water to the Opera House, the Harbour Bridge and the towers of the city. The name is said to come from an Aboriginal word meaning "beautiful view", and the setting delivers it.
Did you know? From 1999 to 2014 Taronga cared for three leopard seals rescued sick or injured from New South Wales beaches, at the time the only ones held by any zoo.
06 Taranaki Maunga
New Zealand ยท 26.7 km from New Plymouth39.296ยฐ S 174.065ยฐ E
Image by Browser from Pixabay Few mountains look so much like the idea of a volcano. Taranaki Maunga rises to 2,518 metres from the coastal farmland of New Zealand's west coast as an almost perfectly symmetrical cone, snow-capped for much of the year and standing entirely alone, with nothing of comparable height nearby. The resemblance to Mount Fuji is close enough that the mountain stood in for it in the 2003 film The Last Samurai.
Did you know? According to Mฤori tradition, Taranaki once stood in the centre of the North Island and fled west after losing a battle with Tongariro over the beautiful mountain Pihanga.
07 Mount Sunday
New Zealand43.548ยฐ S 170.893ยฐ E
Jeff Hitchcock from Vancouver, BC, Canada ยท CC BY 2.0 In the upper valley of the Rangitata River, a lone rocky knoll rises from a broad, braided floodplain ringed by snow-streaked ranges. Mount Sunday is only a modest hill, its summit at about 611 metres, but few places in New Zealand capture the scale of the South Island high country so completely.
Did you know? Mount Sunday served as the site of Edoras, capital of Rohan, in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings films.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented โ the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful film locations in Oceania?
- On our list, Uluru (Australia) ranks first, followed by Great Barrier Reef (Australia) and Kakadu National Park (Australia).
- Which country has the most film locations in Oceania?
- In our collection, the most come from Australia (4) and New Zealand (3).
- Which mountain played Mount Fuji in The Last Samurai?
- Taranaki Maunga in New Zealand. Its symmetrical cone and the farmland around it were used for the Japanese scenes of the 2003 film.
- Where were the Lord of the Rings films shot?
- Across New Zealand, from Matamata in the Waikato to the Southern Alps and Fiordland. Locations near Te Anau and in Fiordland were used for forest and marsh scenes.
- How many film locations are on this list in Oceania?
- The list covers 7 film locations in 2 countries. Australia has the most, with 4.