Australia Scuba Diving
Including the Great Barrier Reef, Heron Island and Whitsunday Islands

An Undercurrent Insider Report on Australia Diving
The Consumer Newsletter for Serious Divers Since 1975

Overview of Australia

Cairns, the jumping-off spot for the Great Barrier Reef, is a youth-oriented, tropical city with plenty of hotels and restaurants as well as an assortment of day boats going to the Reef and overnight trips to Cod Hole. Cairn's "beach" is a mud flat dotted with roseate spoonbills and other tropical birds, and you can visit the reptile farm to gawk at saltwater crocodiles eating chickens or take the Kuranda Railway for a look at a magnificent waterfall. ...

The best diving, with pristine reefs and oodles of fish, is to the north, reachable only by live-aboard during their summer months, roughly November to March. The Ribbon Reefs are known for big sharks, lots of them, including fleets of bronze whalers.... Pack safety sausages, whistles, strobes, mirrors, and any other safety devices that would make you noticeable if a current carries you too far from the boat. However, Aussie dive rules are now tight (far tighter than the Florida Keys, for example), with redundant head counts after every dive.....

Pricey Lizard Island is the northernmost land-based operation; they have day trips to Cod Hole to pet friendly, refrigerator-sized potato cod. Although the GBR (or, as our correspondent called it, the Pretty Good Barrier Reef) gets most of the press, better by a hundred miles is the Coral Sea, whose outlying atolls and pinnacles such as Marion Reef offer some of the best diving in the world. To the south, the wreck of the /Yongala /out from Townsville may be the best fish-covered wreck in the world....

Moving from Queensland south, you'll pass from full-on tropics, through temperate water, to chilly water in Sydney, and finally into the really cold stuff when you reach Tasmania.... Don't worry about the Great White in the GBR; they hang around south of Sydney, off Adelaide where the water is cooler. On the west coast of Australia, sea planes from Exmouth lead dive boats to schools of whale sharks on Ningaloo Reef.

Australia Seasonal Dive Planner

Yes, it's reversed Down Under: Australia's winter is during the Northern Hemisphere's summer. Summer weather is sultry and oppressive, with tropical showers.... Water temperature is below 80 and colder in their winter, so bring rubber; visibility can at times be in the 50-foot range. That's the easy part. From there, it gets increasingly complex; Australia's diving areas are vast. Cyclone season is January through March; April, May, and June see heavy trade winds. The best season to dive Australia on a liveaboard (really the only way to see the best) is July through November. Best vis at Osprey, in the northern Coral Sea, is between June and September. Whale Sharks congregate at Ningaloo Reef during March and April.

Australia Feature Articles and Reader Reports

Editor's Book Picks for Australia
Including the Great Barrier Reef, Heron Island and Whitsunday Islands

The books below are my favorites about diving in this part of the world All books are available at a significant discount from Amazon.com; just follow the links. -- BD

Reef Fish Identification: Tropical Pacific: by Gerald Allen, Rodger Steene, Paul Humann, & Ned DeLoach. At last, here's a comprehensive fish ID guide covering the reefs of the Pacific and Indian Oceans. The generous 500-page text, displaying 2,500 underwater photographs of 2,000 species, identifies the myriad fishes that inhabit the warm tropical seas between Thailand and Tahiti. The concise text accompanying each species portrait includes the fish's common, scientific and family names, size, description, visually distinctive features, preferred habitat, typical behavior, depth range, and geographical distribution. This is an essential book for every diver traveling westward. 6x9 inches. Order through us, get Amazon.com's best price and a good hunk of the profit will be donated to the Coral Reef Alliance.

Dive Sites of the Great Barrier Reef by Neville Coleman. With 2900 reefs in 220,000 square miles, the enormous Great Barrier Reef has incredible dives -- and some very ordinary ones. If you're contemplating a trip, Neville Coleman's Dive Sites of the Great Barrier Reef and the Coral Sea will help you ensure you pick the best. This 176 page book, with good maps and scores of colorful photos, describes the significant sites, the topography and the critters, then rates and ranks them so you can pick the best. Don't even consider a trip to Australia without consulting this. $24.95

Coral Reef Animals of the Indo-Pacific
by Terrence M. Gosliner, David W. Behrens, Gary C. Williams.

At last -- a just-published, complete guide to help you identify the uncountable variety of weird critters you'll see on any Indo-Pacific dive, complete with full-color photo of 1,100 species. About Coral Reef Animals of the Indo-Pacific, Chris Newbert says, "This invaluable new book makes identification easy and enjoyable." There are scores of flatworms, nudibranchs galore, bumblebee shrimp, painted crayfish, pompom crabs, side-gilled sea slugs, and endless corals. Marine biologists Terry Gosliner, David Behrens, and Gary Williams cover the reefs from the Solomons to Sipadan, from the Maldives to Maui, from Palau to Papua New Guinea. They provide good notes to help you find and identify each critter. Indispensable for any Indo-Pacific trip. Paperback, 8x110, 314 pages, $45.00.

Indo-Pacific Coral Reef Field Guide by Gerald R. Allen, Roger Steene. I was trying to pack light for a change. Surely the Solomon Sea would have good identification books aboard. Not so; the only book on the boat belonged to a fellow passenger. It was one that I had not seen before, the Indo-Pacific Coral Reef Field Guide, by two of the best fish guys around, Gerry Allen and Roger Steene. The problem was this fellow passenger kept it in a plastic baggie most of the trip and I had to beg to see it. Great book, good traveling size, and it covers everything from fish, shells, marine plants, mammals, corals, and invertebrates to sea birds and more. Now I've got my own, and it won't do you any good to beg me to borrow it. This is one of two books that I will not travel to the Pacific without. Good for travel to the Red Sea, East Africa, Seychelles, Mauritius, Maldives, Andaman Sea, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Australia, Micronesia, Polynesia, and Hawaii, it has 1,800 color illustrations in a 6x8 1/2 paperback format with 378 pages. $39.95.

If you're headed south out of San Diego, Fishes of the Tropical Eastern Pacific by Gerald R. Allen, D. Ross Robertson, is the fish guide you need. With 324 photo-packed pages covering 680 species of sharks and sailfish, wrasses and razorfish, pipefish and pearlfish, this is the ultimate ID book for the Baja, Costa Rica, the Galapagos, and the Sea of Cortez. Sponsored by the Smithsonian Institute Drs. Gerald Allen and Ross Robertson took years to produce this definitive volume that describes and comments on the remarkable behavior of these critters. Hardbound, $85.

Coral Seas by Roger Steene. It's not just the frightening photos of a nine-foot Bobbit worm that emerges from Philippine rubble like a giant Phoenix (with jaws worthy of its name, it's even known to attack divers) that makes the book a blockbuster. It's every one of the 340 photos that show hundreds of unique critters in circumstances -- like an octopus using a coconut shell for a carapace, or pearlfish emerging from the anus of a sea cucumber, its host -- that only an exceptional photographer could capture. Each year one new coffee table book stands above the rest and I have no doubt that Coral Seas by Roger Steene is the book for 1999 -- and most likely the new millennium as well. Steene's remarkable and beautiful photographs break new ground; indeed 25 of the critters featured are new to science, some appearing here for the first time. Take the newly discovered mimic octopus, photographed disguising itself as a jellyfish, a feather star, a stingray, and even a jawfish. Nudibranchs with shrimp on their backs, cigar jellyfish in the dark of the night, rare weedy scorpionfish -- and even a white whale, shades of Moby Dick. What a fine book to own! Hardbound coffee table book, 272 pages, hardbound, $35.

You might find some other books of interest in our Editor's Book Picks section.