K'gari (Fraser Island)

Protected since 1971 and a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1992, it is the largest sand island in the world, built up over 750,000 years by sand carried north on coastal currents, with no underlying rock core at all. In 2023 it officially took back its traditional indigenous name, K'gari, which in the language of the Butchulla people means paradise, after years of campaigning to leave the colonial name Fraser behind. Its hundred-odd freshwater lakes, some of them perched literally on the sand itself on impermeable layers of compacted organic matter, hold water of exceptional clarity. The island also holds one of the genetically purest dingo populations in Australia, having been relatively free of the interbreeding with domestic dogs that has diluted the species on the mainland.