Lonely Planet Beautiful World Australia

By Lonely Planet

Immerse yourself in Australia with this stunning collection of photographs and discover the nation's extraordinary range of landscapes and environments, cultures, creatures and people - from world-famous wineries and white-sand beaches to buzzing cities and ancient rainforests.

Beautiful World Australia is the perfect way to lose yourself in the country. Striking photos fill each page, while special gatefolds open to reveal magnificent panoramas. If you've been, retrace your steps and relive the time you spent there. If you haven't, this book is the perfect way to start planning an adventure.

We've divided the contents into states and territories. On your journey across Australia you'll explore the tropical paradise of the Whitsunday Islands and their impossibly white beaches, the Great Ocean Road and its star attraction, the 12 Apostles, snow-covered mountains, hip and happening Melbourne with its street art-filled laneways, migrating humpback whales and east coast surfing communities.

As you continue further, you'll discover the Great Barrier Reef and the incredible variety of life it harbours, as well as indigenous animals like the Tasmanian devil. You'll then discover the cowboys of Queensland cattle country, Aboriginal culture and craftwork, vineyards adorning the southern hills, the vast emptiness of the Outback and much more.

About Lonely Planet: Lonely Planet is a leading travel media company and the world's number one travel guidebook brand, providing both inspiring and trustworthy information for every kind of traveller since 1973. Over the past four decades, we've printed over 145 million guidebooks and grown a dedicated, passionate global community of travellers. You'll also find our content online, on mobile, video and in 14 languages, 12 international magazines, armchair and lifestyle books, ebooks, and more.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lonely Planet
• Release date: May 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781788685474

Lonely Planet

Lonely Planet has gone on to become the world’s most successful travel publisher, printing over 100 million books. The guides are printed in nine different languages; English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Chinese and Korean. Lonely Planet enables curious travellers to experience the world and get to the heart of a place via guidebooks and eBooks to almost every destination on the planet, an award-winning website and magazine, a range of mobile and digital travel products and a dedicated traveller community.

Book preview

Australia

BEAUTIFUL WORLD

Contents

Introduction

Regional map

New South Wales & Australian Capital Territory

Victoria

Queensland

Western Australia

South Australia

Tasmania

Northern Territory

Photo captions

Acknowledgements

Australia

Such is Australia’s scale that it can be snowing at one end of the country while daytime temperatures may be tropical at the other. In the hours that it takes to fly across its 8.6m sq km area (or the four days if you take the Ghan train from Adelaide to Darwin), you’ll pass over vast deserts, forests, mountains, gorges and lakes. It is, after all, a continent.

Forty five million years ago, Australia split from the ancient supercontinent of Gondwana and remnants of that land’s fauna and flora evolved into the unique Australian species that you see today – quokkas in Western Australia, quolls in Tasmania. Tracts of forest that date back to the era of the dinosaur survive in several locations.

But, as art critic Robert Hughes wrote in The Fatal Shore, his seminal account of Australia’s founding, ‘Australia is not, to me, a picturesque little country full of cute marsupials at the end of the world.’ Its land may be old – and the earliest humans arrived 50,000 years ago – but Australia’s modern cities are some of the youngest and most creative on the planet, some fewer than 200 years old.

This book of photography depicts the most beautiful aspects of Australia’s natural world and its most extraordinary scenes. We’ll travel from the warm waves of the Queensland coast, ushering surfers to shore, to the red deserts of its centre, where the land is so inhospitable that settlements are subterranean. We’ll also visit Australia’s thriving, cosmopolitan cities, experience rural life, and climb its highest mountains, trees and a very famous bridge.

We’ve organised the book by state and territory: the personality of each shines through the images, from raw and rugged Tasmania to the rocky, alien landscapes of the Northern Territory. We hope that this pictorial journey through Australia inspires you to take many trips of your own around this remarkable country.

New South Wales › | Byron Bay, bohemian town

Turnervisual | Getty Images ©

Outback › | The Milky Way above Bourke

David Trood | Getty Images ©

Blue Mountains National Park › | Hanging Rock at Blackheath

Craig Holloway | 500px ©

Byron Bay › | Dolphins at Cape Byron

RugliG | Shutterstock ©

Byron Bay › | Surfers’ paradise

Andrey Bayda | Shutterstock ©

Hunter Valley › | Food and vines

Andrey Bayda | Shutterstock ©

Bondi Beach › | Star beach of Sydney

Jonathon Stokes | Lonely Planet ©