Coorong

Declared in 1966, it protects a coastal lagoon more than 140 km long, cut off from the ocean by a narrow barrier of sand dunes, at the mouth of the Murray, Australia's longest river. The landscape was immortalised in the Australian children's novel Storm Boy (1964) and its later film adaptations, which tell of the friendship between a boy and an orphaned pelican raised in the region, making the Coorong a place of cultural pilgrimage for generations of Australians.