Whitsunday Islands

Whitsunday Islands National Park was declared in 1944 and protects much of an archipelago of seventy-four islands off the central coast of Queensland, between the mainland and the Great Barrier Reef. They are not coral islands but continental ones: the summits of a coastal range left isolated when sea level rose after the last glaciation, hence their mountainous relief and their cover of eucalypt woodland with rainforest in the gullies.

Its best-known feature is Whitehaven Beach, on Whitsunday Island: seven kilometres of silica sand of unusual purity, almost white, which does not hold the heat and whose exact origin is still a matter of geological debate. At its northern end, Hill Inlet forms an estuary where the tides mix sand and water in shifting patterns.

The waters of the archipelago lie within the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park and hold coastal fringing reefs, seagrass meadows that feed dugongs and green turtles, and a migration route of the humpback whale, which uses these sheltered waters to calve between June and September. The islands preserve sites and paintings of the Ngaro people, seafarers who occupied the archipelago for thousands of years, and today boating tourism is the main economic activity and also the main pressure on the area.