10 Wildly Unexpected Things To Do In Australia

I met Isla on a verandah in Coober Pedy at the tail end of a stinking hot afternoon, mid conversation with a man selling raw opal out of a biscuit tin. She had grown up shuttling between Alice Springs, a sheep station near the Eyre Peninsula coast and a share house in Hobart, and she had the particular gift of a person who has spent a lifetime driving very long distances between very small towns. She could tell you which waterhole actually had water in it that week. She could tell you, unprompted, which festival had quietly folded and come back changed. She could tell you why the mail truck in Coober Pedy matters more to that town than the highway ever will, because her own father drove one for a season and came home every second night smelling of diesel and red dust and stories.

What follows is not a list copied out of the same fifteen articles that already rank for every Australian keyword worth chasing. It is thirteen places Isla actually took me, in the rough order she took me to them, told the way she told them to me, over campfires, in the front seat of a ute with the windows down, and once, memorably, halfway across a glass bridge while she gripped the rail and swore quietly under her breath. Every place here comes with the story a local would tell you, the food a local would feed you, the season a local would pick for you, and the exact moment it turns from merely beautiful into something closer to enchanted.

1Deliver outback mail in Coober Pedy

Isla told this one slowly, the way she told all her father's stories, like she was handing me something breakable. In most of the world the mail simply arrives and nobody gives it a second thought. Out here, on the gibber plains around Coober Pedy, the twice weekly mail run is closer to a small pilgrimage than a delivery service. A single truck sets out loaded with parcels, fresh bread, spare fan belts, birthday cards and prescriptions, and drives for the better part of a day out to station homesteads and tiny settlements scattered across land so flat and so red it looks scorched rather than simply dry. You can book a seat beside the driver, and it is not staged for tourists in the slightest. It is the actual working run, dogs barking at the gate, station owners leaning on the fence for a chat that might be the only conversation they have with someone new all week.

Her father drove that same kind of run out of Marree for a season in his twenties, back when the mail still occasionally travelled by a mix of truck and old bush track rather than sealed road. He told her that loneliness and friendliness live closer together out there than anywhere else in the country, because every single person you pass, without fail, lifts a hand off the wheel to wave, and you wave back, and for one second two strangers a hundred kilometres from the nearest town acknowledge that they are both, improbably, alive out here together. She said she still cannot drive an empty outback road without doing it, a habit passed down like a family recipe.

Somewhere along the route the truck usually detours past the Breakaways, a range of low striped mesas the colour of rust and bone that barely appear in a single photograph of Australia despite being one of the strangest landscapes on the continent. Local Arabana and Antakirinja Matu Yankunytjatjara families hold deep knowledge of this country, of which waterholes hold on longest after rain and which plants can be eaten and which cannot, knowledge Isla says she has only ever brushed against, respectfully, from the outside, and never claims to fully hold herself.

Feed yourself properly before you go, because there is nothing out there. Isla always packs a thermos of billy tea, a few thick slices of damper with golden syrup, and dried fruit, the same simple stockman's tucker her grandmother packed for droving trips decades earlier. She says it tastes different eaten on the tray of a mail truck with red dust already ground into your teeth than it ever does at home.

2See eerie steel statues at Lake Ballard

Isla warned me before we even arrived. She said the first time she saw Lake Ballard as a teenager, driving out from Kalgoorlie with her uncle on a whim, she genuinely thought the heat had gotten to her. Fifty one stainless steel figures stand scattered across a vast dry salt lake in the Western Australian goldfields, each one modelled on a real resident of the tiny nearby town of Menzies. The artist scanned the townspeople, compressed the figures across their width and cast them in metal, then set them loose on the lakebed to slowly, endlessly disappear toward the horizon.

What almost nobody tells you, and what Isla only learned from a Menzies local pouring beers at the pub one night, is that the figures are hollow, and a small gap left in the casting between neck and back traps the desert wind. On a breezy afternoon the statues genuinely seem to whisper, a low, almost human hum carried across seven square kilometres of cracked white salt. Locals from Menzies still play a quiet private game whenever they visit, picking out which statue is a cousin, an old schoolteacher, or the bloke who used to run the general store, because every single figure is somebody's actual face.

Isla walked me out at first light, the only time of day she trusts the lake, when the surface is still cool underfoot and the low sun turns the whole plain the colour of a blood orange cut in half. She said Lake Ballard sits within Wongatha and Wongutha country, and traditional custodians hold their own much older stories about this lakebed, stories about drought, about ancestral travel across the goldfields, that predate the sculptures by tens of thousands of years and outlast them completely. The steel figures are a modern layer laid over a much deeper one, and she always makes a point of saying so before anyone starts snapping photographs.

Bring closed shoes with real grip. The lakebed looks solid from the shore and is not always solid two hundred metres out, and more than one confident visitor has gone straight through the crust into soft red mud beneath, Isla included, on her second visit, much to her uncle's amusement.

3Race bottomless boats in Alice Springs

Isla's cousin has raced this event three separate years and lost every single time, which she says is entirely on brand for the whole occasion. In 1962 a local Rotary club decided Alice Springs needed a proper fundraiser, and a meteorologist on the committee suggested a regatta with the bottoms cut clean out of the boats, so competitors carry the frames and simply run along the bone dry bed of the river rather than paddling anything. It began as a joke at the expense of the very formal British regattas the town's earliest settlers had left behind, and more than sixty years later the joke is still, gloriously, running.

Before Isla ever explains the regatta itself, she explains the river underneath it, because to her the two cannot be separated. The Todd River is known to the local Arrernte people as Lhere Mparntwe, and Alice Springs itself sits at the heart of the Yeperenye Dreaming, a creation story in which three great ancestral caterpillars, Yeperenye, Ntyarlke and Utnerrengatye, travelled this country and were struck down in a battle with giant stink bugs, their bodies shaping the ridges and gaps of the surrounding MacDonnell Ranges. Many Arrernte people alive today consider themselves direct descendants of those same caterpillars, and the dry riverbed the regatta is raced along runs directly through country considered one of the most densely sacred in Central Australia. Isla always tells visitors this before the flour bombs start flying, because she wants the laughter that follows to sit on top of real respect rather than replace it.

In over sixty years the regatta has been cancelled only once, in 1993, for the entirely absurd reason that the river actually filled with water. Two teams put their boats in anyway and finished the course purely out of stubbornness, which Isla considers the most Territory thing she has ever heard. The day ends with the Battle of the Gunboats, where teams dressed as pirates, vikings and navy sailors pelt each other with flour bombs and water cannon in the dry riverbed, the crowd howling, red dust and white flour hanging in the hot afternoon air like a strange desert snowstorm.

Afterward, Isla always steers people toward a plate of camp oven damper and a bowl of kangaroo tail stew from one of the stalls near the parade route, because to her a day built entirely around a joke deserves to end with proper bush tucker rather than a hot chip van.

4Hike to a hidden mountain pool on Mount Wellington

On kunanyi, the mountain that watches over Hobart, there is a small alpine pool called the Disappearing Tarn, tucked into a boulder field locals call the Potato Fields, on the long route toward Wellington Falls. Isla lived in Tasmania for a stretch of her twenties, in a cold rented cottage at the mountain's foot, and she chased this tarn three separate times before she finally caught it full. Most of the year it is nothing but a shallow bowl of stacked grey boulders, bone dry and unremarkable. After a real soaking of rain it fills with startling turquoise water, coloured by tannins leaching from the surrounding rock, and holds that colour for a matter of weeks before slowly draining away again, as though the mountain only allows itself to be beautiful in secret, on its own schedule, and never on request.

She describes the walk itself the way you would describe a moody friend. The lower stretch along Pipeline Track moves through cool, dripping rainforest, myrtle and sassafras closing overhead so completely that the light turns green and the temperature drops without warning, the kind of forest that makes you lower your voice without meaning to. Then the track climbs out onto the Potato Fields, an exposed field of ancient dolerite boulders where the wind arrives from nowhere and the weather can turn from clear sky to freezing fog in the time it takes to eat a sandwich. Isla says this is the one hike in the book where she genuinely respects the mountain a little bit, because kunanyi has killed unprepared walkers before, and treats every visitor, local or tourist, with the same complete indifference.

The trick locals use, the one she picked up from a bushwalking forum thread years ago and has trusted ever since, is to check rainfall totals for the previous fortnight before setting out, because turning up on a dry week means a brutal walk across ankle rolling scree to stare at empty rocks. Catch it right, though, after two or three days of proper Tasmanian rain, and she says standing beside that impossible blue water on top of a mountain feels less like reaching a destination and more like being let in on a secret the forest usually keeps to itself.

Afterward, back down in Fern Tree or Hobart proper, Isla always finishes the day with a bowl of Tasmanian mussels or fresh Huon salmon, and a wedge of Tasmanian leatherwood honey on warm bread, the honey made from the blossom of a tree that grows in exactly the kind of wet mountain forest you have just walked through, so that the whole day, walk and meal both, tastes faintly of the same rain.

A Hobart bushwalking forum thread from a few years back put it well. The tarn is less a destination and more a promise the mountain occasionally keeps.

5Snorkel submerged greenhouse sculptures in Townsville

Sixteen metres down on John Brewer Reef off Townsville sits the Coral Greenhouse, a nine metre stainless steel structure holding around twenty sculpted figures of young reef guardians, students and scientists, all of them slowly, patiently being reclaimed by living coral. It is the largest single piece of underwater art on the planet, and unlike almost any museum piece on land, it is designed to be unfinished forever, changing completely as coral colonises every surface over the coming decades.

Isla dove it with a marine biology student who pointed out something most snorkel tours never mention, that individual coral fragments growing on the sculptures are tagged and monitored as part of a genuine citizen science project, meaning every tourist photographing the greenhouse and uploading that photo is quietly, unknowingly contributing real data to reef recovery research. She loves telling people this underwater, through a snorkel, gesturing wildly at a tagged coral fragment while trying not to swallow seawater mid sentence.

Above the surface, at the Strand in Townsville itself, stands the very first piece in the same underwater museum, a glowing sculpture called Ocean Siren, modelled on a young Wulgurukaba woman and wired to change colour in real time with the water temperature out on the reef. Isla always makes people walk to the end of the jetty at dusk to see it before they ever get in a boat, because she says it turns an abstract idea, ocean warming, into something you can actually watch happen in front of you, glowing a little differently depending on how hot the reef is that particular week.

Feed yourself well before the boat trip out, because Townsville does seafood properly. Isla always insists on a plate of local mud crab or barramundi the night before diving, cooked simply, because she says a good Queensland reef trip should be bookended by good Queensland reef food, and there is something fitting about eating from the same water you are about to swim in.

6View a giant oceanic rock spire at Lord Howe Island

Twenty kilometres southeast of Lord Howe Island, a jagged basalt spire called Ball's Pyramid rises 562 metres straight out of the Tasman Sea, the tallest volcanic sea stack on Earth. It is the eroded core of a shield volcano that erupted roughly 6.4 million years ago, everything softer around it long since worn away by wind and endless Pacific swell, leaving only the hardest volcanic plug standing alone in open ocean, looking, from a distance, like something a giant left behind by accident.

The detail that gets Isla every single time, the one she cannot tell without her voice changing slightly, is the stick insect. The Lord Howe Island stick insect, a heavy flightless creature the length of a human hand, was believed extinct for eighty years after rats introduced by a shipwreck wiped out the mainland population, until a small team in 2001 found a tiny surviving colony clinging to a single bush on the impossibly hostile face of Ball's Pyramid. Locals still call the species the tree lobster, and its rediscovery, against every reasonable expectation, is considered one of the great insect conservation stories anywhere in the world. Isla says she thinks about that lone bush more than most travel highlights she has ever seen, a whole species holding on by its fingernails on a rock nobody thought could support life.

Lord Howe Island itself, where you actually stay before or after the boat trip, keeps a strict visitor cap that has protected it for decades, and Isla treats the island's own food traditions with real reverence. Kentia palm groves shade the settlement, and locally caught kingfish, often served raw as a simple ceviche with lime and chilli by island families rather than restaurants, is the meal she orders on her first night every time, because to her it tastes like the ocean the pyramid rises out of, only calmer.

7Ride tidal rapid gorges at Horizontal Falls

In Talbot Bay in the remote Kimberley, two narrow gaps cut through the McLarty Range by ancient erosion become the stage for one of the strangest tidal phenomena anywhere on Earth. As tides of up to ten metres force enormous volumes of water through those narrow gorges, the sea level actually banks up on one side by several metres before pouring through, creating what looks exactly like a waterfall lying on its side, a wall of white water rushing sideways instead of down.

Isla's family took her out here years before the area had proper commercial permits, on a converted fishing boat with her uncle at the wheel, and she says the ride through the wide gap on a strong spring tide sits somewhere between a rollercoaster and a washing machine, the whole boat shuddering and dropping as it crosses the invisible step in the water. She learned, and repeats without fail every time she brings someone here, that the Traditional Owners of this exact stretch of coast, the Dambimangari people, call the site Garaan ngaddim, and hold it as a place of deep cultural significance that long predates any tourist boat, tied into law, ceremony and story that outsiders are not owed access to but should hold in mind all the same, every time the boat lurches through.

The Kimberley coast beyond the falls is its own kind of theatre. Isla describes the surrounding bays as a place where the light does something she has never seen anywhere else in the country, the sandstone cliffs turning from ochre to deep rust to almost black as the sun drops, mangroves along the shoreline home to crocodiles that watch the boats pass with total disinterest. Overnight houseboat stays out here mean falling asleep to absolute silence broken only by the tide itself, and waking to watch it happen all over again, the falls reversing direction as the water pulls back the other way.

Isla always packs barramundi caught that same morning by the boat crew when she can get it, cooked simply over coals on deck, because Kimberley seafood eaten within sight of the water it came from is, in her words, the only proper way to close a day spent riding a tide.

8Explore thousands of forest gnomes in Ferguson Valley

Nobody planned Gnomesville, which is exactly why Isla loves it. Sometime in the early 1990s a local resident tucked a single gnome into the hollow of a redgum tree near a roundabout in the Ferguson Valley south of Perth, and other people simply kept adding to it, one gnome at a time, for over thirty years, until current estimates put the population somewhere north of ten thousand, though Isla insists nobody has ever managed an honest count. The gnomes have organised themselves, unofficially, into suburbs, sports teams and even a fenced off detention centre for the naughty ones, an entire miniature society that grew out of pure collective whimsy rather than any council plan.

She brought her own gnome the last time she visited, something small and slightly chipped that used to sit in her grandmother's vegetable garden, and left it wedged into the fork of a tree near what regulars call the gnome football pitch. She said doing it felt oddly emotional, handing over a small piece of her grandmother's garden to a forest full of strangers' small pieces of their own gardens, thousands of tiny private histories all standing shoulder to shoulder under the same karri and jarrah canopy.

The Ferguson Valley itself, beyond the gnomes, is proper Western Australian wine and dairy country, rolling green hills folded into forest, and Isla treats the region as a full day rather than a quick photo stop. She routes people through a nearby winery for a tasting of local cabernet, past roadside stalls selling honey and jam, and finishes at a farm cafe for a wedge of fresh cheese made a few paddocks away, because to her the gnomes are the strange centrepiece of a valley that is, in every other direction, gently and reliably beautiful.

A long running local joke says nobody has ever managed to count them all, and that the population figure changes depending on who you ask and how recently they last drove past.

9See mystical clay forest figures in the Dandenong Ranges

In the cool fern gullies of the Dandenong Ranges east of Melbourne, sculptor William Ricketts spent decades from the 1930s onward kiln firing clay figures directly into the rocks, tree roots and mossy banks of the forest he called home. Today more than ninety sculptures remain, many modelled on real Pitjantjatjara and Arrernte people Ricketts lived alongside during long stretches in Central Australia, half swallowed by ferns so that visitors walking the winding paths stumble across a carved face in the undergrowth almost without warning, as though the forest itself occasionally grows a human expression.

Isla walked me through slowly, in the late afternoon, when mist tends to sit low in the mountain ash and the whole gully turns a deep cool green, the kind of forest that makes you lower your voice the same way kunanyi's rainforest does further south. She said the sanctuary is not a simple place and never pretends to be, and she mentions this without moralising, just as fact. It reflects one artist's deeply personal, era specific vision of Aboriginal spirituality, shaped by real relationships he built during his years living with Central Australian communities, and contemporary visitors and commentators read it in genuinely different ways depending on what they bring with them into the ferns. She always tells people it is worth knowing this before you go, and worth forming your own view once you are standing among the sculptures rather than borrowing anyone else's secondhand opinion, including hers.

Afterward, the Dandenongs reward you properly for the walk. Isla routes people down into nearby Olinda for scones with jam and cream at one of the old tearooms tucked among the hydrangeas, a very particular kind of gentle mountain village charm that feels almost English transplanted into Australian eucalypt forest, and a strange, pleasant contrast to the raw desert country most of this list otherwise moves through.

10Walk a see through canyon bridge at Cobbold Gorge

Deep in the Gulf Savannah region of outback Queensland, Cobbold Gorge is a young, narrow sandstone canyon carved so tightly in places that the walls barely leave room for a small boat to pass between them. This is Ewamian country, and the tour guides here, many of them Ewamian themselves, weave the region's deep history through every stop on the walk, the sandstone formations, the bush tucker growing along the escarpment, the freshwater crocodiles resting below, all of it explained as living, continuing knowledge rather than a museum plaque.

In 2019 the property added Australia's first fully glass bridge, suspended around seventeen metres above the canyon floor, and Isla, who is not remotely fond of heights, admits it broke her every single time she crossed it. She says the trick is to stop dead in the middle, look straight down through the glass at the water and the crocodiles drifting below, and simply let yourself feel the vertigo rather than fight it, because the entire point of the bridge is that one unbearable, thrilling second of fear before the tour moves on to the calm, silent electric boat cruise through the gorge itself.

Access is by guided tour only, which protects the fragile canyon ecosystem, so you cannot simply wander in alone, and Isla considers this one of the rare cases where a strict booking system genuinely improves the experience rather than getting in its way, because the gorge stays quiet, uncrowded and properly wild even on a busy day. She finishes every visit with a plate from Cobbold Village's own kitchen, usually barramundi again, because in this part of Queensland it is almost impossible to eat badly if you simply order whatever came out of local water that morning.

11Spot glow worms in the abandoned Helensburgh tunnel

An hour south of Sydney, a stretch of disused railway called the Metropolitan Tunnel opened in the 1880s to shuttle coal from a colliery, then closed in 1915 once soot and smoke built up thick enough to be genuinely dangerous for the crews working it. Left dark, damp and completely undisturbed for decades, it became ideal habitat for a native species of glow worm, and today the tunnel glows a soft, otherworldly blue once your eyes fully adjust and every last torch clicks off.

The species living there is Arachnocampa richardsae, a detail almost none of the general travel blogs bother naming, and Isla loves it precisely because it is so specific, so unglamorous on paper and so magical in the actual dark. A local Landcare volunteer once told a hiking group she was part of that the darkness at the centre of the tunnel is the real attraction, not the glow worms themselves, because so few people living in a city ever get to stand somewhere genuinely, completely dark, without a single stray light leaking in from anywhere.

Isla treats the walk in almost reverently, speaking in a near whisper the whole way, partly out of respect for the fragile colony and partly, she admits, because the abandoned platform at the tunnel mouth, the original 1889 Helensburgh station sign still standing among overgrown tracks, gives the whole place the feel of a small ghost town swallowed by rainforest. She says the tunnel rewards patience more than any other place on this list, standing perfectly still for ten full minutes until the tiny blue lights above start to look less like insects and more like an entire upside down sky.

A local Landcare volunteer once told a visiting hiking group that the darkness in the middle of the tunnel is the real attraction, not the glow worms themselves, because so few people in a city ever get to stand somewhere genuinely, completely dark.

12Toss a rubber fish in Port Lincoln

The Tuna Toss began in Port Lincoln in the late 1970s as a cheeky nod to the town's fishing industry, where dockworkers once threw real fish from boat decks up onto waiting trucks, and hiring decisions apparently depended on who could throw one the furthest. Competitors now spin a weighted rubber tuna using proper hammer throw technique, and the standing world record, an astonishing 37.23 metres, has stood since 1998, thrown by an Olympic hammer thrower who happened to grow up in the district and who Isla's uncle still talks about like a local legend rather than a distant athlete.

Her uncle competed twice himself and lost badly both times, blaming his technique with real conviction rather than his enthusiasm, and Isla describes the whole festival weekend with genuine fondness, the smell of fresh seafood stalls drifting across the foreshore, the whole town doubling in size for three days, strangers cheering on strangers mid spin as they hurl a fish across the lawns. Port Lincoln calls itself the Seafood Capital of Australia without much argument from anyone, and the surrounding waters produce some of the finest southern bluefin tuna and oysters in the country, so the festival built around throwing a fish is, fittingly, also the best possible weekend to actually eat one.

Worth knowing before you plan a trip around it, the festival paused entirely after 2023 due to funding pressures, then returned in a refreshed form in January 2026 under new City of Port Lincoln backing, with the next edition currently slated for January 2027. Isla, who grew up expecting this festival every single Australia Day weekend without fail, says the two year gap felt like losing a family tradition, and its return felt like getting it back.

13Tour a hidden historic underground opal home in Coober Pedy

We finished where the trip began, back underground in Coober Pedy. About half the town still lives below the surface, in homes carved into soft sandstone that hold a steady twenty four degrees year round no matter what the desert above is doing. Faye's Underground Home is the one Isla always brings people to first. In the early 1960s it was a small workshop attached to the mail truck run, the very same run this whole story opened with, before a local woman named Faye Nayler and two friends spent years hand carving it into a sprawling residence with a fireplace, a swimming pool cut straight into the rock and long carved hallways, using picks and shovels alone, without a single power tool.

Before the dugout tour, Isla always circles back to the older story underneath the mining town, the Aboriginal legend of the Rainbow Serpent, told across many desert language groups in different forms, in which the great ancestral serpent moved through the land shaping rivers and waterholes, and in the opal country of South Australia is said to have left the colours of the rainbow pressed into the earth wherever it passed, forming the gemstone itself. She tells it carefully, aware the story belongs to communities rather than to any blog, but she says it changes how the opal in your hand feels afterward, less like a rock and more like something the land actually remembers.

Standing in a room dug entirely by hand, with no power tools, is a very different experience from reading about it. Isla says most visitors arrive expecting a cave and leave describing it as a proper home, which is closer to the truth, since real families genuinely raised children down there, celebrated birthdays down there, slept through forty five degree afternoons in perfect cool silence down there, while the desert above them shimmered and cracked.

She ends every Coober Pedy visit the same way, with a plate of kangaroo or camel steak at a small underground restaurant, eaten in a dining room carved from rock, the temperature never once shifting no matter the hour, and she says there is something quietly moving about a meal that stays exactly the same while the world outside changes completely, which is, in the end, more or less what this entire town has learned to do.

Trip planner at a glance

Isla is not a spreadsheet person, but even she agreed this trip needed one table pulled together in one place, for anyone trying to actually plot a route across a country this size rather than flipping back through thirteen separate sections.

Isla's honest final word

None of these places will show up on a postcard rack, and that is rather the point. Isla's advice, repeated more than once across the whole trip, over campfires and front seats and one memorable glass bridge, was always the same. Slow down enough to ask a local one extra question, because the extra question is usually where the actual story lives, in the season, in the food, in the story someone's grandmother told them, in the small private history of a chipped garden gnome. Australia's big name landmarks earn their fame fairly. Its stranger, quieter corners are where you actually get to know it, and where, if you let it, the country starts to feel less like a destination and more like a whole life you happened to visit for a while.