Whitsundays

With over 90 islands stretching from Bowen in the north to the Repulse Islands in the south, the Whitsunday group is part of Australia’s largest offshore island chain, known as the Cumberland group. All the islands and their surrounding waters (collectively known as 'the Whitsundays') have international protection as part of the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area. In addition, some islands have been declared national parks by the Queensland Government.

Portuguese explorers may have been the first Europeans to visit this part of the Australian coast, but for the record it was Captain Cook, then a lieutenant in the Royal Navy, who passed through these islands on his first voyage around the world in the Endeavour. On the night of 1 June 1770 he anchored off what today is Mackay, and two days later sailed through a blue stretch of water dotted with islands.

'Indeed the whole passage is one continued safe harbour,' he noted on the morning of Sunday, 3 June. It was Whitsun, the seventh Sunday after Easter and the feast of Pentecost, so Cook named it the Whitsunday Passage and one of what he called the Cumberland Islands -- Pentecost Island.

With over 90 islands stretching from Bowen in the north to the Repulse Islands in the south, the Whitsunday group is part of Australia’s largest offshore island chain, known as the Cumberland group. All the islands and their surrounding waters (collectively known as 'the Whitsundays') have international protection as part of the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area. In addition, some islands hav…  (read more)

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