Lucky Bay
Interesting facts
- In 2023 Lucky Bay topped The World's 50 Best Beaches, a ranking based on votes from more than 750 travel writers and industry experts.
- Flinders' ship HMS Investigator sheltered in the bay from 9 to 14 January 1802, and a plaque at the eastern end of the beach marks the visit.
- While the ship lay at anchor, the expedition's botanist Robert Brown went ashore and found a largely unknown flora, describing many species new to science.
- William Westall, the Investigator's landscape artist, depicted the bay in the painting A Bay on the South Coast of New Holland, one of the earliest European images of this coast.
- 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.
- Cape Le Grand, which gives the park its name, honours an officer of L'Espérance, a ship of Bruni d'Entrecasteaux's French expedition of 1792.
- Nearby Mississippi Hill is named after the Mississippi, a French whaling ship, a reminder of the whalers who worked this coast.
- The Wudjari people are recognised as the Traditional Owners of Cape Le Grand National Park.
- With night falling among reefs and islands, Flinders ran before the wind towards the mainland and anchored here in about seven fathoms over sand.
Why it is worth it
Lucky Bay is a long, gentle arc of beach in Cape Le Grand National Park, on the south coast of Western Australia east of Esperance. Its sand is extraordinarily white and fine: made almost purely of frosted quartz grains, with nothing to dull them. In 2017 a comparison of Australian beaches judged it the whitest in the country, ahead of the well-known Hyams Beach in New South Wales. Against that white the water of the Southern Ocean is a startling turquoise, sheltered by granite headlands and by the scattered islands of the Recherche Archipelago offshore.
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. The coast around it is ancient and rugged: domes of bare granite, heathland that blooms with wildflowers, and the 262-metre summit of Frenchman Peak inland, whose climb gives views over the park and the archipelago.
The most famous image of Lucky Bay is not the sea at all but its kangaroos. Western grey kangaroos come down to the beach and lie on the warm sand, sometimes at the water's edge, an incongruous sight that has made the bay known far beyond Australia. Swimming, snorkelling, fishing, launching small boats and whale watching are all possible from the beach, and 4WD vehicles may drive along the sand. There is a campground behind the dunes; pets are not allowed in the park.
Getting there
Lucky Bay is roughly 60 km by road from Esperance, the nearest town, the last stretch through Cape Le Grand National Park. The nearest airport is Esperance (EPR), about 51 km away. Kalgoorlie, the nearest large city, is more than 360 km to the north.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Lucky Bay is a bay on the south coast of Western Australia, part of Cape Le Grand National Park. Located southeast of Esperance, the bay is a tourist spot known for its bright white sands and turquoise-coloured waters.
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