World Heritage Sites — Oceania

World Heritage in Oceania

The smallest continental list, at 38 sites, and the most spread out — from Western Australia's Shark Bay to Rapa Nui, 8,000 kilometers east. Australia has 20: the Great Barrier Reef, Uluru-Kata Tjuta, Kakadu, the Tasmanian Wilderness, Fraser Island (now K'gari), the Sydney Opera House, the Blue Mountains, and the Gondwana rainforests among them. New Zealand has three — Te Wahipounamu in the southwest, Tongariro, and the Sub-Antarctic Islands.

The Pacific sites are the rare ones: Papua New Guinea's Kuk early agricultural site, East Rennell in the Solomon Islands, Chief Roi Mata's domain in Vanuatu, Levuka in Fiji, Nan Madol in Micronesia, Bikini Atoll, the Phoenix Islands, the Rock Islands of Palau, and Henderson Island in the Pitcairns — which has had perhaps a few hundred visitors in its history. Hawaii's Papahānaumokuākea and the French Pacific sites (Taputapuātea, the Marquesas, New Caledonia's lagoons) are placed here by geography.

Crossing the date line

The map is drawn across the antimeridian so the Pacific reads as one ocean rather than two edges; Rapa Nui is on the right, Australia on the left. Macquarie Island and New Zealand's sub-Antarctic groups sit at the bottom; Heard Island, in the southern Indian Ocean, is on the list but off the frame. Click a badge or its pin to mark a site visited, again for want-to-go.

Australia's list

Twenty of the 38 are Australian, and they divide cleanly into the natural and the cultural. The natural sites are mostly national parks and reefs: Kakadu, Uluru, the Reef, the Wet Tropics, Fraser Island, the Blue Mountains, the Gondwana rainforests, Shark Bay, Purnululu, the Tasmanian Wilderness, and the remote islands — Lord Howe, Macquarie, Heard. The cultural ones are recent additions and tell a different story: the Sydney Opera House, the Royal Exhibition Building in Melbourne, the Australian Convict Sites (11 places from Fremantle to Norfolk Island), and Budj Bim, the first Australian site listed for Aboriginal cultural values alone. A trip that covers Sydney, the Reef, and the Red Centre ticks five without trying.