Spectacular SA shines in new Lonely Planet book

From our inhospitable Red Centre to our sun-kissed coasts, a new Lonely Planet tome captures and celebrates Australia’s breathtaking breadth. Here’s sneak peak of what’s inside.

Such is Australia’s scale that it can be snowing at one end of the country while daytime temperatures may be tropical at the other.

In the hours that it takes to fly across its 8.6 million square kilometre area (or the four days if you take The Ghan train from here to Darwin), you’ll pass over vast deserts, forests, mountains, gorges and lakes. It is, after all, a continent.

Forty-five million years ago, Australia split from the ancient supercontinent of Gondwana and remnants of that land’s fauna and flora evolved into the unique Australian species that you see today — quokkas in Western Australia, quolls in Tasmania. Tracts of forest that date back to the era of the dinosaur survive in several locations.

Gallery: Lonely Planet’s Beautiful World Australia

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But, as art critic Robert Hughes wrote in The Fatal Shore, his seminal account of Australia’s founding; “Australia is not, to me, a picturesque little country full of cute marsupials at the end of the world.” Our land may be old — and the earliest humans arrived 50,000 years ago — but Australia’s modern cities are some of the youngest and most creative on the planet, some fewer than 200 years old.

Lonely Planet’s Beautiful World Australia depicts the most picturesque aspects of Australia’s natural world and its most extraordinary scenes. From the warm waves of the Queensland coast ushering surfers to shore to the red deserts of our centre — where the land is so inhospitable that settlements are subterranean — the book also honours Australia’s thriving, cosmopolitan cities and unique rural life.

Organised by state and territory, the personality of each shines through the images, from raw and rugged Tasmania to the rocky, alien landscapes of the Northern Territory.

We hope that this pictorial journey through Australia inspires you to take many trips of your own around our remarkable country.