The Most Beautiful Islands in Australia
7 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful islands in Australia are Great Barrier Reef, Kangaroo Island and K'gari. The list covers 7 islands. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Australia's most celebrated islands and reefs exist because warm currents carry coral far down its coasts. Along the Queensland shore and the Western Australian coast, reef-building corals have grown into some of the largest living structures on Earth, while in the Tasman Sea the eroded remnant of an ancient volcano supports the world's southernmost coral reef.
The Great Barrier Reef is the largest coral reef system in the world, a mosaic of thousands of individual reefs and hundreds of islands stretching along Queensland, inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1981. Lord Howe Island, off New South Wales, is a crescent of forested volcanic peaks, Mount Gower and Mount Lidgbird, around a coral lagoon; it is also a World Heritage Site. Ningaloo Reef in Western Australia is a fringing reef that lies just off the beach, where whale sharks gather each year to feed alongside manta rays and turtles.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Great Barrier Reef | Coral reef | ✓ |
| 2 | Kangaroo Island | Island | |
| 3 | K'gari | Island | ✓ |
| 4 | Lord Howe Island | Island | ✓ |
| 5 | Christmas Island | Island | |
| 6 | Ningaloo Reef | Coral reef | ✓ |
| 7 | Macquarie Island | Island | ✓ |
01 Great Barrier Reef
Australia · 37.6 km from Port Douglas16.400° S 145.800° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by alicia3690 from Pixabay There's still an enormous amount of reef left to see, and it changes character depending on when you visit. Dwarf minke and humpback whales pass through the northern reef from around June to October, with July and August the peak; further north, a multi-species coral spawning event follows the November full moon most years, a synchronized release that briefly turns whole reef sections into a snowstorm underwater.
Did you know? Aboriginal Australians have lived alongside the reef for at least 40,000 years, and Torres Strait Islanders for about 10,000.
02 Kangaroo Island
Australia35.800° S 137.300° E
Image by xiSerge from Pixabay The island takes its name from a meal: in March 1802 the English navigator Matthew Flinders landed on its north coast and called it Kangaroo Island after the animals his hungry crew shot there. The French expedition of Nicolas Baudin arrived soon afterwards and charted much of the coastline, which is why so many capes and bays bear French names. Sealers and escaped convicts lived rough on the island for decades before the first official settlers of the new colony of South Australia landed at Kingscote in 1836. In 1885 the island was declared a sanctuary for Ligurian honey bees, imported from Italy, and their pure-bred descendants are still kept here.
Did you know? Kingscote, founded in July 1836, was the first official settlement of the colony of South Australia.
03 K'gari
Australia · 31.6 km from Hervey Bay25.240° S 153.150° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Poidabro · CC BY-SA 4.0 The ocean side is a different world. The so-called 75-Mile Beach runs along most of the east coast and is legally a road, used by four-wheel drives and even as a landing strip for light aircraft. Along it lie the Champagne Pools, the rocky headland of Indian Head, the outflow of Eli Creek and the rusting hull of the Maheno, a former trans-Tasman liner and First World War hospital ship that was driven ashore by a cyclone in 1935 while under tow to the breakers. The island's dingoes are believed to be among the purest in eastern Australia; dogs are banned to keep them that way, and feeding them is prohibited.
04 Lord Howe Island
Australia31.550° S 159.083° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
EmGer7 · CC BY-SA 3.0 The Lord Howe Island Group was inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 1982. Life on the island is deliberately small in scale: a few hundred residents and a cap of 400 visitors at any one time. The rewards are quiet ones — snorkelling over the reef in the lagoon, watching seabirds wheel around the cliffs, or climbing Mount Gower to look down on the whole island and the pyramid beyond.
Did you know? It sits on the Lord Howe Rise, part of Zealandia, a largely sunken microcontinent that broke away from Gondwana.
05 Christmas Island
Australia10.490° S 105.627° E
ChrisBrayPhotography · CC BY-SA 4.0 Beyond the crabs, the island is a sanctuary for seabirds found nowhere else, including the Christmas Island frigatebird and Abbott's booby, as well as the Christmas Island blue crab, which depends on the island's few freshwater streams to breed. The Dales on the west coast, a series of forested gullies listed as a Ramsar wetland, lead down to Hugh's Dale waterfall along a boardwalk path; the Blowholes on the south coast throw spray high above the cliffs when the swell is running; and Dolly Beach is reached through shore-terrace forest.
06 Ningaloo Reef
Australia22.739° S 113.628° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
W. Bulach · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Ningaloo Coast, including the reef, the Cape Range park and the land around it, was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2011.
Did you know? The name Ningaloo comes from the Wajarri language and is variously translated as "promontory", "deep water" or "high land jutting into the sea".
07 Macquarie Island
Australia54.630° S 158.860° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
L. R. Blake (d. 1918) · Public domain Sealers found the island in July 1810, when the Australian captain Frederick Hasselborough came upon it while looking for new hunting grounds. For more than a century seals and then penguins were boiled down for oil, until some populations were close to vanishing. The hunters also brought rabbits, rats and mice, which stripped the vegetation. After a seven-year eradication campaign, the island was declared free of these pests in 2014. It was the largest successful island eradication attempted up to that time. Australia's Antarctic program keeps a research station on the narrow isthmus at the northern end, with a small year-round crew.
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 — 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 islands in Australia?
- On our list, Great Barrier Reef ranks first, followed by Kangaroo Island and K'gari.
- How big is the Great Barrier Reef?
- It stretches for about 2,300 km along the coast of Queensland and is made up of around 2,900 individual reefs and some 900 islands.
- What is a fringing reef?
- A fringing reef grows close to the shore, separated from it by little or no lagoon; Ningaloo is one of the largest fringing reefs in the world, reachable straight from the beach.
- How many islands are on this list in Australia?
- The list covers 7 islands.