An African-style safari on home soil? This Aussie resort is a game-changer

If you’re an elephant with Australian or New Zealand residency rights, the chances are that all trunk roads have lately been leading to one new, and extremely large, shared home.

South Australia’s new Monarto Safari Resort.

The destination for these precious pachyderms? South Australia’s Monarto Safari Park, where elephants from zoos in Sydney, Perth and Auckland are being transferred to create a new robust and genetically diverse herd in significantly more spacious surroundings than traditional urban settings.

Permai and Burma meet for the first time at Monarto Safari Park in South Australia after Permai’s trip across the Nullarbor.

So large is Monarto Safari Park that at 1500 hectares it’s claimed to be the biggest such facility outside of Africa, with the newly relocated elephants set to enjoy their own 12-hectare habitat at the open-range zoo under an hour’s drive south-east of Adelaide.

However, nellies won’t be the only recipients of new accommodation at Monarto, with a new and deluxe 78-room resort for humans – the product of the visionary owners of Victoria’s Mitchelton Estate winery which includes its own 58-room hotel – due to open at the end of May.

Poolside at the 78-room resort.

Adelaide-based Journey Beyond, operator of, among other ventures, The Ghan and the Indian Pacific luxury long-distance trains, has been appointed to manage the new resort which will overlook a new “Wild Africa” zone.

The new resort will feature restaurants, two swimming pools and a spa including treatment rooms, thermal plunge pool, ice bath and sauna.

Monarto Safari Park... at 1500 hectares it’s claimed to be the biggest such facility outside of Africa.

It’s all part of a global trend for zoos, such as Sydney’s Taronga with its acclaimed harbourside Wildlife Retreat, to offer bricks and mortar five-star-standard hotel and resort-style accommodation for visitors as an extension of the more common, canvas-tented variety.

Reservations for the Monarto Safari Resort are already being accepted and a further 20 luxury tents will become available later this year.

While human visitors will need to wait a bit for check-in, at least two happy VIPs (Very Important Pachyderms) have already done so in the form of Burma and Permai, formerly of Auckland and Perth Zoos respectively.

The duo were recently photographed sharing a touching trunks-entwined greeting at their new South Australian abode.

Rooms from $285 a night. See monartosafariresort.com