Five Australian World Heritage Sites to visit on your next road trip
An interesting way to see the world would be to tick off the list of places on UNESCO’s World Heritage List, and the best place to start is in our own backyard.Australia currently features 19 examples of the world’s best cultural and natural heritage locations. Here are five that you may not know are on the Aussie list.
Mungo National Park, New South Wales
The Sydney Opera House is on the list, but for something naturally beautiful, a visit to Mungo National Park is a must. Okay, it’s much further from Sydney (just a lazy 1000km west) but the now dry lake beds, sand dunes and eroded features like the Walls of China are hauntingly beautiful. Indigenous Australians inhabited the area for millennia and the likes of 42,000 year-old Mungo Man and Mungo Lady left their mark with middens of clam shells, from when the lakes were full of water, still visible.
The Budj Bim Cultural Landscape, Macarthur, Victoria
Victoria’s most recent addition to the UNESCO list is the Budj Bim Cultural Landscape (formerly Mt Eccles), just outside Macarthur and north of Portland. It’s the site of a relatively recent volcano just 30,000 years old plus fascinating evidence of aboriginal settlement and their harnessing of water around the crater to farm eels as a food source thousands of years ago. There are ample walking and learning opportunities and it makes for an interesting addition to a trip down the Great Ocean Road.
Brickendon and Woolmers Estates, Tasmania
There are actually 11 listings for Australian convict sites, but these two near Launceston are the only ones where you can stay and get a feel for convict living. The 1820s Brickendon Estate has been farmed by generations of the Archer family who have ensured the convict-built farm complex, Georgian country house and formal garden remain largely intact. The Woolmers Estate is a beautiful 19th century homesteads and is significant for once employing convicts through the assignment system, which provided labour to settlers in exchange for food and clothing.
Riversleigh Fossil Sites, Mount Isa, Queensland
The Great Barrier Reef is on the list, but way up in north-western Queensland is the Boodjamulla National Park which is home to the heritage-listed Riversleigh fossil site. Here, paleontologists have uncovered an astonishing array of extinct Australian mammals, some as old as 25 million years. The area covers 10,000 hectares but you can easily see fossils in-situ at the Riversleigh D-site, which is open to the public, or learn even more at the fossil centre in nearby Mount Isa.
Shark Bay, Western Australia
Shark Bay became WA's first World Heritage-listed area in 1991 and it’s most famous for dolphins at Monkey Mia. And if like snorkelling, chances are you’ll see turtles, manta rays, whales and dugongs as well as the largest area of sea-grass beds in the world. Other curiosities are the unique stromatolites - colonies of algae which form hard, dome-shaped structures thought to be among the oldest forms of life on earth. Throw in white beaches, red sand dunes and crystal clear water and you've got a World Heritage area that's definitely worth visiting.
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