The Most Beautiful Water Wonders in Australia
23 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful water wonders in Australia are Great Barrier Reef, The Twelve Apostles and Kangaroo Island. The list covers 23 lakes, waterfalls, islands and beaches. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Australia is an old, flat and mostly dry continent, and that is exactly why its waters are so distinctive. Warm, clear seas around its edges allow coral to grow on a scale found nowhere else, while soft limestone coasts are carved by the Southern Ocean into stacks and arches. Inland, salt lakes and dry basins wait years for rain, and some lakes take colour from algae and minerals that occur in few other places.
The Great Barrier Reef, off Queensland, is the largest coral reef system in the world, and Ningaloo on the west coast is a fringing reef so close to shore that it can be reached from the beach. Off New South Wales, Lord Howe Island is a remnant volcano with a lagoon and its own reef, and nearby Ball's Pyramid rises from the ocean as the tallest volcanic stack in the world. The Twelve Apostles stand in the surf along the Great Ocean Road in Victoria.
Whitehaven Beach in the Whitsundays is made of almost pure silica sand, and on K'gari, Lake McKenzie is a perched lake of clear water on white sand. In Tasmania, the Bay of Fires pairs white beaches with granite boulders covered in orange lichen. Lake Hillier off Western Australia is a vivid pink, the Blue Lake at Mount Gambier turns cobalt each summer, and Kati Thanda–Lake Eyre fills only after rare floods. In the Kimberley, the Horizontal Falls are created by tides forcing through narrow gaps in the cliffs.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Great Barrier Reef | Coral reef | ✓ |
| 2 | The Twelve Apostles | Stack | |
| 3 | Kangaroo Island | Island | |
| 4 | K'gari | Island | ✓ |
| 5 | Blue Lake (Warwar) | Volcanic crater lake | |
| 6 | Lord Howe Island | Island | ✓ |
| 7 | Bay of Fires | Beach | |
| 8 | Kati Thanda–Lake Eyre | Salt flat | |
| 9 | Christmas Island | Island | |
| 10 | Ball's Pyramid | Stack | ✓ |
| 11 | Ningaloo Reef | Coral reef | ✓ |
| 12 | Macquarie Island | Island | ✓ |
| 13 | Horizontal Falls | Waterfall | |
| 14 | Lake Hillier | Lake | |
| 15 | Whitehaven Beach | Beach | |
| 16 | Lake McKenzie | Lake | |
| 17 | Wineglass Bay | Beach | |
| 18 | Totem Pole, Tasmania | Stack | |
| 19 | Hutt Lagoon | Lagoon | |
| 20 | Mitchell Falls | Waterfall | |
| 21 | Lucky Bay | Beach | |
| 22 | Shell Beach | Beach | |
| 23 | Hamelin Pool | Lagoon |
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 That scale hasn't made it immune to stress. When water gets unusually warm, corals expel the colorful algae living in their tissue and turn ghostly white — a process called bleaching that isn't always fatal on its own, but leaves coral weakened and vulnerable if the heat doesn't ease up.
Did you know? Close to 5,000 species of molluscs have been recorded on the reef, from tiny sea snails to giant clams.
02 The Twelve Apostles
Australia38.641° S 143.049° E
Leonard Koh · CC BY-SA 4.0 The stacks are a textbook of how such coasts evolve. Waves exploit weaknesses in a headland to carve caves, the caves meet and become arches, the arches fall and leave free-standing pillars, and the pillars are eventually undermined and collapse themselves. The process is visible in real time here: a 50-metre stack fell in July 2005 and another in 2009, and today seven remain standing, six of them visible from the main viewpoint.
Did you know? The marine park also holds the wreck of the clipper Loch Ard, which struck Mutton Bird Island in 1878.
03 Kangaroo Island
Australia35.800° S 137.300° E
Image by xiSerge from Pixabay The western end belongs to Flinders Chase National Park, where the island's most famous sights stand on the edge of the Southern Ocean. The Remarkable Rocks are a cluster of huge granite boulders perched on a dome above the sea, hollowed and sculpted by wind, salt spray and rain and splashed with orange lichen. Nearby, at Cape du Couedic, Admirals Arch is a natural rock bridge hung with stalactites, where fur seals haul out on the ledges below.
Did you know? The Remarkable Rocks are granite boulders shaped over millions of years by wind, spray and rain.
04 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 What astonishes visitors is that a heap of sand can hold rainforest. Tall forests grow in its interior, sustained by fungi in the soil that let plants draw nutrients from nothing but sand, fed by spring-fed creeks that run through most of the island's valleys.
05 Blue Lake (Warwar)
Blue Lake
Australia · 2.1 km from Mount Gambier37.847° S 140.778° E
Dietmar Rabich · CC BY-SA 4.0 The crater itself belongs to the Mount Gambier maar complex, a group of explosion craters that once held four lakes; two of them have since dried out as the water table fell. Estimates for the last eruption vary widely, and if the youngest proposed date is right it would be among the most recent volcanic events on the Australian mainland.
Did you know? Lieutenant James Grant sighted the volcano in December 1800 from the survey brig Lady Nelson and named it after Admiral James Gambier.
06 Lord Howe Island
Australia31.550° S 159.083° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
EmGer7 · CC BY-SA 3.0 The island was first sighted by Lieutenant Henry Lidgbird Ball in February 1788 and it stayed uninhabited until 1834, when a whaling ship left three men to set up a supply station. Its isolation produced a remarkable roll of endemic life: the Lord Howe woodhen, a ground-dwelling bird found nowhere else; the kentia palm, Howea forsteriana; and the Lord Howe Island stick insect.
Did you know? Rats came ashore when the steamer Makambo ran aground in 1918; after an island-wide baiting campaign, Lord Howe was considered rat-free by 2023.
07 Bay of Fires
Australia41.137° S 148.308° E
Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 3.0 The name has nothing to do with the lichen. In 1773 the English navigator Tobias Furneaux, sailing along this coast, saw the fires of Aboriginal people burning on the beaches and named the bay after them. The coast was a meeting place for Aboriginal family groups long before that, and in the palawa kani language the northern headland is larapuna. Dozens of shell middens around Eddystone Point record those gatherings.
Did you know? The Eddystone Point lighthouse and its keepers' cottages were built from granite quarried on the spot, under a head mason brought out from Glasgow.
08 Kati Thanda–Lake Eyre
Australia28.667° S 137.167° E
Stephan Ridgway · CC BY 2.0 A true, near-complete fill has happened only three times in about 160 years of records. When it happens, the transformation is total: pelicans, banded stilts and other waterbirds detect the flood and fly in from hundreds of kilometers away, sometimes overnight, to breed explosively while conditions last, before the water disappears again and the boom-bust cycle resets.
Did you know? When more than 4 metres deep the lake is no saltier than the sea, but as the salt crust dissolves during a big flood, mass fish kills follow.
09 Christmas Island
Australia10.490° S 105.627° E
ChrisBrayPhotography · CC BY-SA 4.0 What makes the island famous is the red crab. Tens of millions of these bright scarlet land crabs live in the forest, and at the start of the wet season, usually in October or November, they leave it almost at once and march to the sea to breed. The females release their eggs into the surf at the turn of the high tide in the last quarter of the moon, so the timing of the migration can be predicted with some precision.
10 Ball's Pyramid
Australia31.754° S 159.252° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
PotMart186 · CC BY-SA 4.0 The rock takes its name from Lieutenant Henry Lidgbird Ball of the Royal Navy, after whom it was named in 1788. It was charted in detail in 1853, and the first person known to have set foot on it was the geologist Henry Wilkinson in 1882.
Did you know? Climbers on a failed 1964 attempt found and photographed a dead stick insect on the rock, the first hint the species had survived.
11 Ningaloo Reef
Australia22.739° S 113.628° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
W. Bulach · CC BY-SA 4.0 The reef is famous above all for its big visitors. From around March to August, whale sharks — the largest fish in the sea — gather along the outer reef, and Ningaloo is one of the most reliable places on earth to swim beside them. In winter the same waters become a migration route for humpback whales, manta rays, dolphins and dugongs. Within the reef itself live some 500 species of fish, around 300 of coral and some 600 of molluscs.
Did you know? In 2006 marine scientists surveying deeper water beyond the reef discovered previously unknown sponge gardens.
12 Macquarie Island
Australia54.630° S 158.860° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
L. R. Blake (d. 1918) · Public domain The island is long and narrow, about 35 km by 5 km, and lies roughly halfway between Tasmania and Antarctica, some 1,500 km southeast of Tasmania. Its beaches carry one of the great wildlife gatherings of the Southern Ocean. The entire world population of royal penguins comes here to breed.
13 Horizontal Falls
Australia16.380° S 123.959° E
Reefpix · CC BY-SA 4.0 What makes the spectacle so strange is that it keeps turning around. As the tide floods, the falls run inward into the basins behind the ridges; when it ebbs, they reverse and run back out to sea. David Attenborough called the falls one of the greatest wonders of the natural world, and the name "Horizontal Falls" is often said to have been his own coinage.
Did you know? The ridges of the McLarty Range that hem in the falls rise only some 150 to 200 metres above the sea.
14 Lake Hillier
Australia34.096° S 123.203° E
Aussie Oc · CC BY-SA 4.0 You likely won't walk up to it. Lake Hillier sits on Middle Island, part of the uninhabited Recherche Archipelago nature reserve off Western Australia's south coast, accessible only by permitted boat landing or, far more commonly, by air — which is precisely why almost every photo of it is an aerial shot rather than a beach snapshot. That restriction isn't red tape for its own sake; it's what keeps the fragile microbial community undisturbed.
Did you know? The lake is reportedly named after William Hillier, a crewman of HMS Investigator who died of dysentery in May 1803 before the ship left the island.
15 Whitehaven Beach
Australia20.283° S 149.035° E
DANIEL JULIE from Paris, France · CC BY 2.0 The most famous view is at the northern end, where the beach bends into Hill Inlet. Here tidal currents push the white sand and the sea water into each other in constantly shifting swirls — ribbons of white, turquoise and dark blue that never repeat from one tide to the next. 4 km return and takes around forty minutes.
Did you know? James Cook sailed through the area in June 1770 and gave the wider island chain the name Cumberland Islands.
16 Lake McKenzie
Australia · 27.9 km from Hervey Bay25.446° S 153.057° E
- UNESCO natural beauty
Hagai Agmon-Snir حچاي اچمون-سنير חגי אגמון-שניר · CC BY-SA 4.0 What makes it extraordinary is colour and clarity. The shore is almost pure white silica, soft underfoot, and the sand runs out under the water so that the shallows glow a pale aquamarine before the lake drops away into a deep, saturated blue. Because the water is filtered by sand and fed only by rain, it carries almost no nutrients; it is so pure that few plants and animals can live in it, which is exactly why it is so transparent.
Did you know? Its water is naturally acidic and extremely poor in nutrients, so the lake is considered biologically unproductive despite its brilliant colour.
17 Wineglass Bay
Australia42.156° S 148.332° E
Image by xiSerge from Pixabay The colours are what make Freycinet exceptional. The granite here is Devonian, and a pink feldspar, orthoclase, gives the mountains and the rocks at the water's edge a warm pinkish tint. Against that the sand is almost white and the sea runs from turquoise to ink blue. 3 km each way from the car park near Coles Bay; from there the path drops down to the beach itself, and a longer circuit of four to five hours returns via Hazards Beach.
Did you know? A shore-based whaling station once stood at the southern end of Wineglass Bay; whale oil went to Britain for lamps and baleen into corsets.
18 Totem Pole, Tasmania
Totem Pole
Australia43.139° S 148.006° E
Ed Dunens · CC BY 2.0 The stack belongs to the dolerite coast of Tasman National Park, proclaimed in 1999, where columnar cliffs rise to around 300 metres above the sea and rank among the highest of their kind in the world. Dolerite is a volcanic rock that cooled slowly from molten magma, contracting into tall, many-sided columns; the sea, wind and salt have worked along these joints, isolating columns from the cliff until one stood alone.
Did you know? His return to complete the climb in 2016, 18 years after the accident, was filmed as Doing It Scared, which won numerous awards.
19 Hutt Lagoon
Australia28.133° S 114.217° E
Stephen Edmonds · CC BY-SA 3.0 The lagoon is about 14 km long and just over 2 km wide, lying along the coast in a hollow between old dunes, and most of it sits a few metres below sea level. Seawater seeps into it continuously through the beach barrier, and in the wet winter months fresh groundwater rises from springs as well; in the long, hot summers evaporation takes over and much of the surface dries to a crust of salt.
Did you know? Salt from Hutt Lagoon was highly commended at the 1873 Sydney Intercolonial Exhibition, where gypsum from its western shore won a bronze medal.
20 Mitchell Falls
Australia14.822° S 125.695° E
Aussie Oc at English Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 3.0 The plateau is Ngauwudu, the country of the Wunambal Gaambera people, who have lived here for more than 40,000 years and whose law and culture centre on the Wandjina, the ancestral beings they call Gulingi, and on Wunggurr. Rock art survives in the park. Native title was formally recognised in 2011, and the Uunguu Indigenous Protected Area now covers a large part of the surrounding country.
Did you know? The black grasswren, a near-threatened bird of the region, builds its nests in crevices of the sandstone.
21 Lucky Bay
Australia · 35.2 km from Esperance33.994° S 122.232° E
Image by xiSerge from Pixabay The bay was named by Matthew Flinders during his survey of the southern coast in 1801–1802. Sailing HMS Investigator into the maze of islands and reefs of the Recherche as night fell, he found shelter here from a summer storm, and recorded that the critical circumstances of the discovery led him to call it Lucky Bay.
Did you know? The surrounding land has stood above sea level for well over 200 million years and was never glaciated, so it shelters relict species such as legless lizards with Gondwanan links.
22 Shell Beach
Australia26.215° S 113.774° E
Image by xiSerge from Pixabay The reason for such abundance lies in the water itself. Shark Bay is hot and dry, evaporation far outstrips rainfall, and dense seagrass meadows slow the tidal exchange with the open ocean, so the shallow bays become hypersaline, roughly one and a half to two times saltier than normal seawater.
Did you know? The water of L'Haridon Bight can hold up to twice as much dissolved salt as the open ocean, which keeps most of the cockle's predators away.
23 Hamelin Pool
Australia26.061° S 113.960° E
Donald Hobern from Copenhagen, Denmark · CC BY 2.0 That changed here in 1956, when surveyors working for an oil exploration company noticed the mounds at Hamelin Pool and they were recognised as living examples. The reason they survive in this bay is its water. Hamelin Pool, the eastern basin of Shark Bay, is hypersaline, with roughly twice the salinity of ordinary seawater — too salty for most of the marine animals that would otherwise graze on the microbial mats.
Did you know? At the pool's northern edge lies the Wooramel Seagrass Bank, covering about 1,030 square kilometres and considered the largest seagrass bank in the world.
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 water wonders in Australia?
- On our list, Great Barrier Reef ranks first, followed by The Twelve Apostles and Kangaroo Island.
- Why is Lake Hillier pink?
- Lake Hillier on Middle Island owes its pink colour to salt-loving microorganisms, chiefly the alga Dunaliella salina and halophilic bacteria, that produce red and pink pigments in its very salty water.
- How many of the Twelve Apostles are left?
- There were never twelve; the limestone stacks along the Great Ocean Road have always numbered fewer, and today several remain standing after others collapsed into the sea.
- What are the Horizontal Falls?
- The Horizontal Falls in Talbot Bay, in Western Australia's Kimberley, form when large tides push seawater through two narrow gaps in the cliffs faster than it can equalise, creating a waterfall-like rush sideways.
- How many lakes, waterfalls, islands and beaches are on this list in Australia?
- The list covers 23 lakes, waterfalls, islands and beaches.