Explore Oceania

Australia Guide →

The Great Barrier Reef, the Outback, iconic Sydney Harbour and some of the world's best surf beaches — Australia's sheer scale and natural variety are simply staggering.

New Zealand Guide →

Middle-earth come to life — towering fjords, geothermal wonders, bungee jumping birthplace and some of the most spectacular hiking trails on the planet.

American Samoa Territory

A US territory in Polynesia and the only part of the United States south of the equator, with the National Park of American Samoa spread over three islands of rainforest and reef.

Christmas Island Territory

An Australian territory closer to Java than to Australia, where tens of millions of red crabs migrate to the sea each year in one of the great wildlife spectacles.

Cocos (Keeling) Islands Territory

Two Australian coral atolls in the Indian Ocean with a Malay Muslim population, twenty-seven islands and almost no visitors.

Cook Islands Territory

Fifteen islands in free association with New Zealand, with Rarotonga's mountainous interior and the Aitutaki lagoon regularly called the most beautiful in the Pacific.

Federated States of Micronesia

Four states across 600 islands, including Chuuk Lagoon's sunken Japanese fleet and the basalt city of Nan Madol built on artificial islets off Pohnpei.

Fiji

Three hundred islands, of which about a third are inhabited, with soft-coral diving, the Yasawa chain and a kava-drinking welcome that visitors remember longest.

French Polynesia Territory

Tahiti, Bora Bora and the Tuamotus — 118 islands across an area the size of Europe, with overwater bungalows in the lagoons and Marquesan archaeology in the north.

Guam Territory

A US territory and the Pacific's main air hub, with Spanish colonial forts, war memorials from the 1944 recapture, and reef diving off Apra Harbor.

Kiribati

Thirty-three atolls straddling the equator and the date line, among the most exposed countries on earth to sea-level rise, with the vast Phoenix Islands marine reserve.

Marshall Islands

Twenty-nine atolls including Bikini, where nuclear testing left a lagoon full of sunken warships, and Kwajalein, the largest lagoon on earth.

Nauru

The world's smallest island nation at 21 square kilometres, stripped by a century of phosphate mining, with a single road around the perimeter.

New Caledonia Territory

A French territory with the world's second-largest barrier reef, a lagoon on the World Heritage list, and a Kanak culture distinct from the French settler population.

Niue Territory

One of the smallest countries anywhere, a single raised coral atoll in free association with New Zealand, where humpback whales come close enough to swim with.

Norfolk Island Territory

A tiny Australian external territory in the Tasman Sea, settled by Bounty mutineers' descendants from Pitcairn, with its own language and convict-era buildings.

Northern Mariana Islands Territory

A US commonwealth including Saipan and Tinian, with wartime history, limestone caves and the Mariana Trench — the deepest point on earth — offshore.

Palau

Jellyfish Lake, the Rock Islands and the wreck-strewn reefs make Palau one of the world's top dive destinations, and it protects 80 per cent of its waters.

Papua New Guinea

Over 800 languages, the Kokoda Track, Sepik river art and birds of paradise — the most culturally diverse country on earth and one of the least travelled.

Pitcairn Islands Territory

Four islands with fewer than fifty residents, all descended from Bounty mutineers, reached by a supply ship from Mangareva a few times a year.

Sydney

The Opera House and Harbour Bridge on one of the great natural harbours, with Bondi's surf and the Blue Mountains both within an hour.

Queenstown

New Zealand's adventure capital on Lake Wakatipu, where commercial bungee jumping was invented, with Milford Sound and Fiordland to the west.

Great Barrier Reef

2,300 kilometres of reef visible from orbit, the largest living structure on earth, and under sustained pressure from warming water.

Melbourne

Laneway coffee, street art and the best sport calendar in the southern hemisphere, with the Great Ocean Road running west from the city.

Auckland

Built across fifty volcanic cones between two harbours, with more boats per head than any city and Waiheke's vineyards a ferry ride away.

Bora Bora

A volcanic peak in a turquoise lagoon ringed by motu — the overwater bungalow was effectively invented here in the 1960s.

Uluru

A sandstone monolith 348 metres high and mostly underground, sacred to the Anangu, who asked visitors to stop climbing it — and in 2019 they did.

Rotorua

Geysers, mud pools and a sulphur smell you stop noticing, plus the strongest Māori cultural offering in New Zealand.

Fiji's Yasawa Islands

A chain of volcanic islands running northwest from Nadi, reached by a daily catamaran, with village stays and reef at every stop.

Milford Sound

A fjord where cliffs rise 1,200 metres straight from the water and waterfalls appear within minutes of rain — which is most days.

Tasmania

Cradle Mountain, the Overland Track and MONA, a museum built into a cliff by a professional gambler and unlike any other in the world.

Port Douglas

Where the Daintree rainforest meets the Great Barrier Reef — two World Heritage Sites adjacent, which happens almost nowhere else.

Apia & Upolu

Samoa's capital and main island, with the To Sua ocean trench, waterfalls into swimming holes and beach fale you sleep in open to the sea.

Rarotonga

A mountainous island you can circle by bus in under an hour, with a lagoon on the south coast and no building taller than a coconut palm.

Palau's Rock Islands

Mushroom-shaped limestone islets over a UNESCO marine area, with Jellyfish Lake's stingless jellyfish and German Channel's manta cleaning stations.

Vanuatu's Tanna

Mount Yasur has been erupting continuously for centuries and can be approached to the crater rim — the most accessible active volcano anywhere.

Wellington

New Zealand's compact, windy capital, with Te Papa museum, a film industry built around Weta, and a coffee scene that rivals Melbourne's.

Perth & Rottnest

The most isolated major city on earth, with Rottnest Island's quokkas a ferry ride offshore and Margaret River's vineyards three hours south.

Nuku'alofa

Tonga's capital and the base for swimming with humpback whales between July and October — one of very few places where it is permitted.

Port Moresby & the Kokoda Track

The start of a 96-kilometre trail across the Owen Stanley Range, walked for its 1942 campaign history and its sheer difficulty.

Chuuk Lagoon

Sixty Japanese ships and hundreds of aircraft sunk in 1944 and left where they fell — the largest concentration of wrecks on the planet.

New Caledonia's Isle of Pines

Araucaria pines above a natural swimming pool of impossibly clear water, in the world's second-largest lagoon.

Nearly 3,000 individual reefs over 348,000 square kilometres, built by coral polyps and now losing them to repeated mass bleaching events.

Inscribed for its geology and then again for Anangu cultural landscape — one of the first sites anywhere recognised for living Aboriginal tradition.

Fiordland, Mount Cook and Westland together, holding the takahē and the kea, and the clearest surviving picture of the ancient flora of Gondwana.

The world's first site inscribed for cultural landscape, in 1993 — three volcanoes gifted to the nation by Ngāti Tūwharetoa to protect them.

Utzon's shells, opened in 1973 after fourteen years and a cost overrun of fourteen times the estimate, and inscribed within his lifetime.

445 uninhabited limestone islands, with marine lakes holding jellyfish that lost their sting in isolation and evidence of abandoned Palauan villages.

Nearly 20,000 square kilometres of wetland and escarpment, with rock art at Ubirr and Nourlangie recording 20,000 years of continuous occupation.

The world's second-longest double barrier reef, enclosing lagoons of exceptional diversity and one of the healthiest dugong populations left.

One of the last temperate rainforests on earth, covering a fifth of Tasmania, with Aboriginal cave sites occupied through the last ice age.

Nearly 100 artificial islets of stacked basalt columns off Pohnpei, built from around AD 1200 and abandoned by the time Europeans arrived.

Subtropical rainforest along the Great Dividing Range, holding the most complete record anywhere of the major stages in the evolution of land plants.

Shared with North America as a Hawaiian site: the northwestern islands, sacred in Native Hawaiian cosmology and home to nearly the entire monk seal population.

A New Guinea highland swamp where drainage ditches show agriculture being independently invented around 7,000 BC — one of very few places on earth where it was.

The largest sand island in the world, 120 kilometres long, with rainforest growing straight out of sand and perched freshwater lakes on top of the dunes.

The largest raised coral atoll on earth, in the Solomons, with a brackish lake covering nearly a fifth of it — and on the danger list since 2013 over logging.

A marae complex on Raiatea that was the political and religious centre of eastern Polynesia and a departure point for the voyages that settled the Pacific.

Eleven penal settlements including Port Arthur and Norfolk Island, the best surviving record of the forced migration of 166,000 convicts.

Three Vanuatu sites tied to a 17th-century chief whose burial and the oral tradition around it match the archaeology almost exactly.

One of the largest and most remote marine protected areas on earth, covering an ocean wilderness in Kiribati that is almost entirely uninhabited.

Dry lake beds in New South Wales that produced Mungo Man and Mungo Lady — among the oldest human remains outside Africa, and the oldest known cremation.