Wildest Places

Australia’s vast interior is dry: nearly a fifth is classified as desert. With little rainfall and temperatures soaring above 50 degrees Celsius, it’s an unrelenting habitat. But these arid areas are also surprisingly varied, and can be breathtakingly spectacular.

Some of the world’s most ancient and ecologically diverse rainforests are in Australia: from the oldest tropical rainforest on earth, North Queensland’s Daintree, to the stunning central highlands of Tasmania in the far south.

Australia’s semi-coastal interior is vastly referred to as ‘the bush’. These forested tracts are lush and varied, coloured by extraordinary landscapes and wildlife found nowhere else on the planet.

Australia has more than 35,000 kilometers of coastline. From broad, sandy beaches to towering cliffs and mangrove swamps, Australia’s coast can be a strange mix of soil and sea; rainforest and reef.

Hundreds of millions of years of volcanic activity, isolation and powerful currents have shaped Antarctica and its surrounding islands into varied and fascinating terrains.

Every animal in Antarctica answers the call of the seasons, and the continent itself is vastly different in Summer and Winter.

Antarctica was once the centre of the ancient southern supercontinent, Gondwana. Traces of these connections remain throughout the southern hemisphere today: in plants and marine species with similarities that have long-ago changed and adapted to the environment around them.

When it’s time to haul ashore for breeding, mating and raising young, marine mammals return from the Antarctic Peninsula to island beaches in the middle of the South Atlantic oceans.