Getting around Australia

Why "getting around" is its own decision

Every state and territory guide on this site assumes you can actually get from one to the next, and in Australia that assumption does more work than it does almost anywhere else in this fleet. This is a continent, not a country you cross over a long weekend, and the honest starting point for planning any multi-region trip is picking which of three real tools you'll lean on: domestic flights, the two great long-distance trains, or self-driving (often in a campervan). None of them is universally "better" — each solves a different distance problem, and most real Australian trips end up combining at least two of them rather than committing to just one.

Flying is what actually connects the state silos this site is organised around — Sydney to Perth is a flight of roughly five hours, longer than Perth's flight to several Southeast Asian capitals, and Cairns to Melbourne covers a similar sort of distance again. Driving is what you do once you're inside a region — the classic Sydney-to-Cairns coastal run, the Great Ocean Road, a Red Centre loop out of Alice Springs — rather than the way most people move between them. And the two great trains, The Ghan and the Indian Pacific, sit in a category of their own: multi-day journeys that are as much the point of the trip as the destination at the end of them.

Domestic flights: the default long-haul connector

For any hop longer than a comfortable day's drive, flying is the realistic default, and Australia's domestic network is dense enough to make that easy. Qantas, founded in 1920 and one of the longest continuously operating airlines in the world, and Virgin Australia are the two full-service names, each running frequent jet services between the capital cities and major regional hubs. Jetstar is Qantas Group's low-cost arm, serving many of the same routes with the usual budget-carrier trade-offs — smaller included baggage allowances, extra fees for seat selection and checked bags, less flexible changes. Regional Express, better known as Rex, fills a different niche again: rather than competing head-on for the big east-coast trunk routes, it focuses on smaller regional destinations, connecting country towns to state capitals on a mostly turboprop network. Rex went through a well-publicised voluntary administration after collapsing in 2024 and re-emerged under new ownership in December 2025 with a rebuilt focus on that regional network — worth knowing if part of your trip depends on a smaller regional airport, and worth double-checking the current route map rather than assuming an older itinerary's flight still runs.

Booking patterns are much the same as anywhere else — fares fluctuate with school holidays, long weekends and the Christmas–New Year peak, and booking a few weeks ahead of a popular route generally beats a last-minute fare. The bigger adjustment for international visitors is scale: connecting through Sydney, Melbourne or Brisbane on a multi-leg domestic itinerary is completely normal, and it's worth building in a reasonable buffer between an international arrival and a same-day domestic connection.

The Ghan and the Indian Pacific: seeing the country slowly

Australia's two great long-distance trains, both operated by Journey Beyond, are worth understanding as a genuinely different kind of trip rather than a practical transfer. The Ghan runs between Adelaide and Darwin via Alice Springs — named after the Afghan cameleers whose camel trains once opened up the same north–south route — covering just under 3,000 kilometres and typically running as a multi-day journey with off-train touring stops built in along the way. The Indian Pacific runs between Sydney and Perth via Adelaide, a journey of just over 4,300 kilometres that crosses the Nullarbor Plain's famously long, dead-straight stretch of track — commonly cited as one of the longest uninterrupted straight sections of railway anywhere in the world.

Neither train is a fast or especially cheap way to get between two cities — flying will always beat them on time, and a budget flight will usually beat them on price. What they sell instead is the journey itself: a multi-day, all-inclusive experience with cabins, dining and guided excursions at stops along the way. Schedules, fares and cabin classes are seasonal and operator-set, so treat any specific figure as a starting point and check Journey Beyond's official site for current timetables before booking.

Self-drive and campervan road-trip culture

Road-tripping is a mainstream, culturally central way to see Australia — not a niche pursuit for the adventurous few. The classic Sydney-to-Cairns coastal run, Victoria's Great Ocean Road, and a Red Centre loop out of Alice Springs are all well-worn routes with established campervan and caravan-park infrastructure built around them, and plenty of backpackers and domestic travellers alike do at least part of their trip this way. The trade-off for that freedom is the same one that runs through this whole page: distances between towns are routinely much larger than visitors from Europe or the US expect, road quality swings from excellent multi-lane freeway near the capitals to unsealed, single-lane tracks a few hours inland, and Australia drives on the left, with the steering wheel on the right-hand side of the car.

None of that should discourage a self-drive trip — it should just shape how you plan one. A coastal road trip within a single region (Sydney to Byron Bay, Melbourne to the Great Ocean Road) is a comfortable, well-supported drive; a cross-country or outback leg needs real preparation around fuel, water and phone coverage.

Connecting the silos: the routes that matter

Australia's state and territory guides each behave like their own mini country guide, and this site's route pages exist specifically to answer the question that sits between them: how do you actually get from one to the next. Only real, commonly travelled connections are covered — there's no point inventing a route nobody takes. On the east coast, that means Sydney–Melbourne, Sydney–Brisbane and Sydney–Cairns as the backbone, plus shorter well-worn hops like Cairns–Airlie Beach, Sydney–Byron Bay and Sydney–Blue Mountains. Feeding into the Red Centre, Adelaide–Uluru and Darwin–Uluru cover the two practical ways in from the south and the north. Regional routes round it out — Melbourne–Adelaide, Melbourne to the Great Ocean Road, Perth to Margaret River, Hobart to Cradle Mountain — each one a real, specific hop rather than a generic "how far is it" answer.

Each of those route pages weighs the same three tools this page introduces — flight, train, drive — against the specific distance involved, because the right answer genuinely changes route to route: Sydney to Melbourne works by air, train-adjacent coach or a full day's drive; Adelaide to Uluru is really a flight-or-drive-plus-days decision, not a train one (The Ghan runs through Alice Springs, a further drive from Uluru itself); the Great Ocean Road is a drive by definition, since the coastline is the destination.

A handful of short ferry crossings round out the picture and are easy to overlook when you're focused on flights and trains: Perth to Rottnest Island and Adelaide to Kangaroo Island are both genuine, well-used ferry routes rather than a novelty option, and each solves a getting-around problem a flight or a bridge simply can't — Rottnest in particular has no general public car access at all, so the ferry (plus bikes or a shuttle once you're there) is the entire transport story for that island.

• East coast: Sydney–Melbourne, Sydney–Brisbane, Sydney–Cairns, Cairns–Airlie Beach, Cairns–Port Douglas, Brisbane–Gold Coast, Sydney–Byron Bay
• Into the Red Centre: Adelaide–Uluru, Darwin–Uluru, Uluru–Kings Canyon
• Regional hops: Melbourne–Adelaide, Melbourne to the Great Ocean Road, Perth to Margaret River, Sydney to the Blue Mountains, Hobart to Cradle Mountain
• Ferries: Perth to Rottnest Island, Adelaide to Kangaroo Island

Cost is part of the mode decision too

Money shapes this decision as much as time does, and the three tools trade off in predictable ways. A domestic flight booked with reasonable lead time is very often the cheapest way to cover a long distance, not just the fastest — budget carriers in particular can undercut the cost of fuel and accommodation for the equivalent multi-day drive. Driving trades a lower direct transport cost for the accumulating cost of fuel, accommodation along the way and simply more days of your trip spent travelling rather than at a destination — worth it when the route itself is the point (the Great Ocean Road, the classic Sydney-to-Cairns run), less obviously worth it for a pure point-to-point transfer. The Ghan and the Indian Pacific sit at the other end entirely: they're priced and sold as an all-inclusive travel experience, cabins and touring included, and should be budgeted as a trip highlight in their own right rather than compared line-for-line against a flight.

None of that means the cheapest option is automatically the right one — it means cost is worth weighing alongside time and experience for every leg, the same way this page treats flight, train and drive as three genuinely different tools rather than one "best" answer.

Picking the right tool for your trip

A short trip inside one region rarely needs more than a drive or a couple of short flights — a week on the east coast, or a focused Red Centre loop, is easy to move around by car or the odd domestic hop. A multi-region trip is where flying has to do the heavy lifting: two or three weeks combining the east coast with the Red Centre or the west almost always means booking domestic flights for the long jumps and reserving driving for the shorter legs inside each region. Travellers with an open-ended schedule and no fixed itinerary — backpackers and working-holiday travellers especially — are exactly who campervan and caravan culture is built for, trading speed for flexibility along the well-supported east-coast route. And for anyone who wants a train journey as a genuine highlight rather than a means to an end, The Ghan or the Indian Pacific is worth booking as its own multi-day chapter of the trip, not squeezed in as a fast way to cover ground.

Whichever combination you land on, the same rule holds across every route page on this site: work out the mode first, then the days, rather than assuming distance alone will tell you how long a transfer takes.