The Best Experiences to Have in Australia in 2025

Arrive at Melbourne Place in the CBD’s east, and you’ll be greeted by an enormous screen unfurling a loop of digital art behind a linen-draped reception desk. Take the lift and you’ll notice that every floor is different: on level four, the ceilings glow magenta-pink; on the eighth, the walls are rich rainforest-green accented by luminous Atong Atem portraiture. By the time you’ve reached the rooftop restaurant Mid Air, where two huge brickwork portholes frame skyline views, it’s clear that this is Melbourne – but not as you know it.

The 191-room stay, which features voluptuous Jardan furniture and high-voltage hues, is as on-trend as it is timeless, as are the hotel’s two eateries. Hatted chef, Nick Deligiannis, at the helm of rooftop restaurant Mid Air, brings an earthy yet experimental feel to the mostly Mediterranean menu, borrowing flavours from both the Black Sea and North Africa to pair with chargrilled proteins of goat and octopus. Back down at street level is Marmelo, a Portuguese-ish restaurant from Ross Lusted of Woodcut fame, with its soaring ceilings and open kitchen.

The 55,000-year history of the Amurdak, the Traditional Custodians of Awunbarna (Mt Borradaile), comes into sharp focus through the rock art of West Arnhem Land, at the very top of the Northern Territory. See goannas, fish and dancing women painted in still-vibrant yellow, red and white, as well as more recent artworks depicting the arrival of Europeans, with ships and first attempts at letters. “No matter how many times you see these works, your emotions still get the better of you,” says guide Cameron Lambie from Davidson’s Arnhemland Safaris (davidsonsarnhemland.com.au). “There are scenes of love, jubilation and terror around every corner – you just have to know where to look.”

The Arnhem Land Day Tour, run in collaboration with Kakadu Air enables travellers to experience West Arnhem Land, a place of First Nations significance – one of Australia’s most sacred – in just nine jam-packed hours. The day begins with a 90-minute scenic flight from Darwin to Awunbarna. Fringed by idyllic billabongs, monsoonal rainforests and paperbark swamps, the region spans 700 square kilometres and is home to what’s believed to be the world’s largest collection of Aboriginal rock art. After a tranquil (and croc-heavy) billabong cruise, there’s a lunch, followed by the chance to crawl, climb, scramble and shimmy through tight crevices and over boulders to view the artworks dotted around the 65-or-so sites that Davidson’s has permission to visit.

The one that started it all is Lake Derby’s Floating Sauna, which sits inside a peaked-roof hut on a dock in the middle of a former tin mine that’s now filled with frigid, clear water – and the occasional platypus. The wood-heated space, which is 90 kilometres west of Launceston, seats five comfortably and can be booked by the hour. But no matter how long you stay, a swan dive into the icy lake’s sub-10°C winter temperatures is essential.

It’s one of the most famous stretches of sand in the world, celebrated for its dazzling white hue, but no-one knows for sure how Whitehaven Beach came to be. It’s 99 per cent silica sand and, puzzlingly, made from quartz – a rock that is nowhere to be found in Queensland’s Whitsunday Islands. But Ngaro, Gia and Kalkadoon man Robbie Congoo knows. “Our Dreaming story starts out there,” he says. “The Rainbow Serpent laid eggs and created mountains. She coloured the water from her skin and her scales.” And Whitehaven Beach? “The Rainbow Serpent shed the bottom of her skin to create it.” 

The Ngaro people – known as the Canoe People thanks to their distinctive, hand-sewn vessels – inhabited the Whitsundays some 9000 years ago and now Congoo is spearheading a First Nations tour to honour them. Available to guests of qualia, the luxury Hamilton Island resort, the immersive Cultural Island Discovery experience visits Hook Island, an hour by boat from the marina. Guests are ferried from the resort’s swanky MV Pebble Beach cruiser onto the island, where Congoo’s brother, Malcom, calls out to the ancestors to let them know visitors are coming onto Country before he performs a smoking ceremony. There’s also a guided tour of rock art and some delicious snacks celebrating native flavours.

The exterior of O Quarters at Bird in Hand winery, on Peramangk Country in the Adelaide Hills, is all bucolic charm. But step inside the luxurious boutique stay and your synapses are electrified by a giant Ben Quilty painting, After Life 2, splashed across the living room wall like a chaotic rainbow. It’s a dynamic and fitting centrepiece, a credit to the expert eye of the winery's co-owner, art collector Susie Nugent. It’s Nugent’s art collection – with pieces from Sidney Nolan’s Kelly series and spirit figure sculptures by Yirrkala artist Bulthirrirri Wunuŋmurra – that takes every corner of this unexpected residence from cosy country to country-cool.

The property’s three suites, the largest of which includes an egg-shaped bathtub positioned beneath a bubble-burst of illuminated glass spheres hanging from the ceiling, are available for weekend stays, with one delicious catch: you must be booked to dine at LVN, the equally creative onsite restaurant. There, head chef Jacob Davey designs a menu of native flavours and ingredients sourced from the same regions as the winery’s South Australian and Tasmanian vineyards. Book the Sparkling Suite and you can choose to add on the two Garden Suites and have the whole house for a group. The shared living space has a galley-style kitchen, sideboard stacked with books and board games and an open fire. A breakfast of local pastries, sourdough and granola is included (a light supper of charcuterie and quiches can be also delivered on request) and wine, such as Bird in Hand O Sparkling, is available to purchase by the bottle from the adjacent tasting room.

The renowned outback town of Longreach, 1200 kilometres north-west of Brisbane, is not only the gateway to Western Queensland — it’s a springboard to follow in the footsteps of the prehistoric beasts that once roamed these parts on a multi-day roadtrip. If you’re looking for dinosaurs, this is the trip for you. (It’s also the home of The Qantas Founders Museum, which is Aussie nostalgia at its best).

The current version of the Qantas Founders Museum was constructed in 2002 and pays tribute to the beginnings of Qantas with an onsite café and exhibition hall, with displays of everything from crew uniforms to eclectic cabin interiors. In the heritage-listed outdoor hanger, built in 1922, you can find vintage aircraft while another hanger houses the ticketed 747 Wing Walk tour where you can catch the night-time spectacular, Luminescent Longreach, a multimedia event using projection mapping and advanced lighting to turn the decommissioned aircraft into vibrant canvases. 

As for dinosaurs: the Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum, perched on a mesa approximately 25 minutes south-east of Winton, is divided into three sections and houses the largest collection of Australian dinosaur fossils in the world. Here you can hold the geological wonders in your hands, meet the country’s most complete carnivorous dinosaur, Banjo, and his aptly named friend, Matilda, and explore Dinosaur Canyon. 100 kilometres south-west of Winton is the Dinosaur Stampede National Monument in the Lark Quarry Conservation Park. After a drive on both sealed and unsealed roads, use your Australia’s Dinosaur Trail Multi-Day Pass to marvel at the world’s only recorded evidence of a dinosaur stampede. The uncovered footprints form tracks in the red earth, while animations bring to life the chaos of this prehistoric charge.

On the Eyre Peninsula, near South Australia’s seafood capital Port Lincoln (Galinyala), an amphibious Sealegs craft – part truck, part speedboat – awaits to trundle guests down to the ocean where 400hp outboards kick in and power the vessel across the Spencer Gulf to Louth Island. Cresting the dunes at Homestead Bay, Australia’s newest private-island resort, Rumi on Louth, reveals itself as a minimalist hangar of weathered blackbutt, steel and glass in bushland and gardens of dragon tree and boab, with luminous ocean views.

Given this landscape was until quite recently a remote sheep farm, the off-grid retreat is a surprisingly sophisticated haven amid textured and tonal heath and sand that shifts in the light from sunlit oasis to wild and woolly bunker. The five hotel-style rooms are all upstairs and there is also guest accommodation on the site of the former shearing shed, unrecognisable after an extreme makeover installed nine compact bedrooms and a terrace that faces the ocean.

You can pass the time kayak fishing, on SUPs and stargazing in a posh swag under glittering skies. There’s also a six-berth catamaran, Odyssey, for sunset cruises with refreshments and arcing dolphins, plus the chance to spot humpback and southern right whales in season (June to September). On shore and in the skies you might encounter protected breeding colonies of little penguins and curlews, nesting wedge-tailed eagles, ospreys and hawks, assorted reptiles and a local gaggle of Cape Barren geese.

Just 70 kilometres north-west of Sydney’s CBD is a 10-hectare site of savannah and bush that’s home to cheetahs, caracals, a fishing cat, servals and two breeding pairs of Australia’s only clouded leopards. Ben Britton founded the Wild Cat Conservation Centre in 2016 to conserve “smaller, more endangered wild cats, to breed and return them to their natural habitat”. Seen as “insurance” in case of disease or population loss in Africa, cheetahs born and raised here are rewilded to help support the remaining local animals’ gene pool. In partnership with the Cheetah Metapopulation Project in Africa, Britton’s is the only organisation in Australia carrying out this work.

Wander the property and you’ll encounter Scarlett and Rhett, two of the resident Aldabra giant tortoises. You’ll also see fluffy cheetahs chase each other as they would in the wild, and hopefully end up thriving in the Mziki Private Game Reserve. The project is funded by sponsorships, donations and visits; on hour-long tours, guests (age 14 and over) have sole access via a private guided experience.