Where to go in Australia

Why "where to go" is the real Australia question

Ask someone who's been to France whether they should "see the whole country" and the answer is usually yes, given enough time. Ask the same question about Australia and the honest answer is: pick a region. Australia's land area is roughly comparable to the contiguous United States, and bigger than Western Europe — which means the four big shapes a trip can take (the east coast, the Red Centre, Tasmania, and the west) don't sit next to each other the way a country's regions usually do. They sit a flight apart.

That's not a reason to feel daunted, it's the single most useful planning fact in this guide: once you accept that this is a "pick a region" trip rather than a "see it all" trip, the rest of the decisions get much easier. This page compares the four shapes by who they suit, then hands off to the state and territory guides for the details.

It's worth adding one more layer before you pick a region: Australia's seasons run opposite the Northern Hemisphere's, so "winter" here is June–August and "summer" is December–February — and that reversal interacts with the where-to-go decision as much as the when-to-go one. The Red Centre is at its best in the cooler months (roughly May–September), while the tropical far north runs its own wet-season/dry-season year rather than a four-season one. None of that should be decided in isolation from which region you're weighing up.

The east coast: Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and the Cairns run

The east coast is where almost every first-time trip to Australia starts, and it's the closest thing this guide has to a default answer. Sydney to Melbourne is about 1.5 hours by air (or a long day's drive); Sydney to Brisbane is shorter again, around 1.5 hours; Sydney to Cairns, at the top end of Queensland, is roughly 3 hours. That means the whole corridor — Sydney's Harbour, Melbourne's laneway culture, Brisbane and the Gold Coast, and Cairns as the gateway to the Great Barrier Reef — is genuinely joinable in one trip, by air, train or a proper road trip, without the multi-day transfers the rest of the country involves.

It suits almost everyone: first-timers who want the famous names, families who want direct flights and reliable infrastructure, honeymooners routing through the reef, and backpackers doing the classic Sydney-to-Cairns run by bus or campervan. If you've got one to three weeks and this is your first Australia trip, the east coast is very rarely the wrong call — the harder question is how far up the coast you get, not whether to start here.

The corridor isn't one uniform experience, either. Sydney and Melbourne are the two cities most first-timers weigh against each other — Sydney for the Harbour and beach culture, Melbourne for laneways, coffee and a slower, more European-feeling pace — and plenty of two-week trips do both rather than choosing. Further north, the reef splits into two real gateway choices that aren't interchangeable: Cairns and Port Douglas access the reef's northern sections and sit beside the Daintree Rainforest, while the Whitsundays, further south near Airlie Beach, lean toward sailing and island-hopping around Whitehaven Beach. Byron Bay and the Gold Coast sit in between, on the NSW–Queensland border, and work well as a link between a Sydney leg and a Brisbane or reef-bound one.

The Red Centre: Uluru, Kata Tjuṯa and Alice Springs

The Red Centre is Australia's interior — vast, red-earthed desert country built around Uluru-Kata Tjuṯa National Park, on the land of the Anangu, the Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara people who are its traditional owners. Climbing Uluru has been permanently closed since 26 October 2019, following the traditional owners' own 2017 decision, timed to the 34th anniversary of the 1985 Handback of the land — visiting today means walking the base, watching the rock change colour at sunrise and sunset, and joining the ranger-led and Aboriginal-guided tours that are openly part of how the park welcomes visitors.

This is genuinely a different-shaped trip from the coast: most visitors fly into Alice Springs or the small airport near Uluru itself, then focus on a tight 3–5 day loop covering Uluru, Kata Tjuṯa and, often, Kings Canyon a few hours further on. It suits travellers who want one of the country's defining landscapes and don't mind that it's a flight, not a drive, from anywhere else — as an add-on to an east-coast trip if you've got two-plus weeks, or as its own focused outback trip if you don't.

Timing matters more here than almost anywhere else on this page: the cooler months, roughly May through September, are the comfortable window for walking and outdoor touring, while summer's extreme desert heat genuinely limits what you can do in the middle of the day. Kings Canyon, a few hours from Uluru by road, sits in a separate national park and is usually treated as its own short leg rather than a same-day extension — worth building into the itinerary rather than assuming it's a quick add-on.

Tasmania: the wilderness state

Tasmania is Australia's island state, separated from Melbourne by the Bass Strait and reached by a short flight or, if you want your own car along for the trip, the Spirit of Tasmania ferry. It runs cooler and greener than the mainland, and it's built around a genuinely different kind of drawcard: Hobart's food and arts scene (anchored by MONA, the Museum of Old and New Art), and a wilderness interior — Cradle Mountain, Freycinet's Wineglass Bay, the state's southwest — that reads as a real cold-weather, hiking-and-scenery destination rather than a beach add-on.

It suits travellers who want to slow down after the east coast's pace, hikers and wildlife-watchers (Tasmania is the best place in the country for a wild Tasmanian devil sighting), and anyone who's already done Melbourne and wants a genuinely different week rather than more of the same coastline. A week is a comfortable length for a first Tasmania trip; ten days lets you add the island's far south and east without rushing.

Even Tasmania's summer runs noticeably cooler than the mainland's, which is exactly why it works as a counter-seasonal escape from the east coast's peak-summer crowds and heat, and why its own winter (June–August) genuinely feels like winter, with the alpine areas around Cradle Mountain seeing snow. Bringing your own car over on the Spirit of Tasmania ferry from Melbourne makes sense for a longer, self-drive loop; flying in and hiring a car locally suits a shorter, single-region visit better.

The west: Perth, Ningaloo and Margaret River

Western Australia is the region most first-time visitors underestimate, mostly because of where it sits: Perth is a flight of roughly five hours from Sydney — longer than Perth's flight to several Southeast Asian capitals — which makes "just adding it on" to an east-coast trip a much bigger ask than it sounds. Once you're there, though, it delivers a genuinely different Australia: Margaret River's wine country and surf coast a few hours south of Perth, and Ningaloo Reef further north near Exmouth and Coral Bay, one of the few reef systems in the world close enough to shore to snorkel straight off the beach, and one of the most reliable places anywhere to swim alongside whale sharks in the right season.

This region suits wine travellers, divers and snorkelers chasing Ningaloo specifically, and repeat visitors who've already done the east coast and want a trip that doesn't retrace it. Because of the distance involved, it's rarely worth bolting onto a two-week east-coast trip — it works best as its own dedicated week-plus, or as the whole trip for a return visitor.

Ningaloo's whale sharks have a real season behind the hype — tours typically run from around March through to the middle of the year, so it's worth checking current operator dates rather than assuming it's a year-round certainty. Perth itself is worth more than a stopover, too: Rottnest Island, a short ferry ride offshore, is an easy, well-loved day trip built around its beaches and famously approachable quokkas, and a good way to build a rest day into a west-coast itinerary without leaving the city far behind.

The quieter add-ons: South Australia and Canberra

Two smaller regions round out the map without demanding a trip of their own. South Australia — Adelaide, the Barossa Valley's wine country, and Kangaroo Island's dense wildlife — pairs naturally with either an east-coast trip (Melbourne to Adelaide is a manageable flight or a scenic multi-day drive) or a Red Centre trip, since Adelaide is the southern end of The Ghan, the long-distance train that runs north to Darwin via Alice Springs. It's a genuinely worthwhile few days rather than a full separate itinerary for most first-time visitors.

Canberra, the Australian Capital Territory's national capital, works differently again: it's a deliberately compact, low-key city built around national museums and galleries, and for most visitors it's best treated as a day trip or weekend add-on from Sydney rather than a destination that needs its own multi-day stay.

South Australia has a particularly good case for travellers already considering the Red Centre: Adelaide is the southern terminus of The Ghan, so it's genuinely possible to link the two regions by rail rather than by air alone, turning what could be two separate side-trips into one overland thread. The Flinders Ranges, a further extension north of Adelaide into outback South Australia, is worth knowing about too, though it's a longer detour than the Barossa or Kangaroo Island and suits travellers who've already done the more accessible parts of the state.

Matching the region to your kind of trip

Trip style narrows the choice almost as much as trip length does. Family travelers weighing beach bases against long internal flights generally do best sticking to the east coast, where direct flights, reliable childcare-friendly infrastructure and short transfer times matter more than reaching every region; the Red Centre and the west both ask more of young kids in flight time and heat than most families want to trade for the scenery. Honeymoon and slow-luxury travelers, by contrast, are exactly the audience the Red Centre and the Whitsundays were built for — fewer stops, longer stays, and destinations (Uluru's desert lodges, the Whitsundays' resort islands) designed around slowing down rather than covering ground.

Wildlife, wine and reef travelers usually already know their answer: if the trip is organised around the Great Barrier Reef, that's Queensland; if it's wine country, that's Margaret River, the Barossa, the Yarra Valley or the Hunter Valley, each in a different state; if it's wildlife density specifically, Kangaroo Island and Tasmania outperform the more famous names. Road-trippers and campervan travelers — a genuinely mainstream way to see Australia, not a niche one — tend to gravitate to the east coast's Sydney-to-Cairns run or Tasmania's compact loop, both of which have well-established campervan and caravan-park infrastructure; the Red Centre and outback South Australia reward self-drive too, but demand more remote-driving preparation. And domestic Australian travelers doing shorter interstate trips — Melburnians on the Great Ocean Road, Sydneysiders in the Blue Mountains or on the South Coast — read differently again: for that audience, this whole "pick one big region" framing matters less, since a long weekend closer to home is the more common trip shape.

How to actually choose

Trip length is the biggest lever. A week or less realistically covers one region properly — the east coast's southern half (Sydney, maybe Melbourne), or a focused Red Centre trip, or Tasmania — rather than a taste of several. Two weeks is the classic length for the full east-coast run, Sydney to Cairns or a solid slice of it, and is also enough to combine a shorter east-coast stint with a focused Red Centre add-on. Three to four weeks is where combining two of the big four genuinely works well — east coast plus Red Centre, or east coast plus the west — without every day becoming a transit day.

Budget and interests matter too, but usually point in the same direction as trip length: budget and backpacker travellers doing working-holiday-style trips lean toward the east coast, where hostels, buses and campervan routes are most developed; wine, wildlife and diving travellers often have a specific region in mind already (Margaret River or the Barossa for wine, Ningaloo or the reef for diving, Kangaroo Island or Tasmania for wildlife) that should anchor the whole trip rather than compete with it. The honest rule of thumb: choose the region that matches what you actually want to do, give it the days it deserves, and let the rest of the map wait for next time.

It's also worth accepting that this decision doesn't need to be made once and for all. Most repeat visitors to Australia build their relationship with the country region by region over several trips rather than trying to complete it in one — an east-coast trip first, then a Red Centre or Tasmania trip a few years later, then the west after that. Treated that way, "where to go" stops being a single high-stakes decision and becomes the first chapter of a longer, more relaxed answer.

• 1 week or less: one region, done properly — usually the east coast's southern half or a focused Red Centre trip
• 2 weeks: the classic east-coast run, or a shorter east-coast stint plus the Red Centre
• 3–4 weeks: two of the big four combined — east coast plus Red Centre, or east coast plus the west
• Repeat trips: this is where Tasmania, the west and the quieter add-ons (South Australia, the Red Centre) come into their own