🇦🇺Roads in Australia
4 roads found in Australia, Oceania
Gibb River Road
🇦🇺 Australia
The Gibb River Road is a legendary 660-kilometer outback track traversing the heart of the Kimberley region in Western Australia, connecting Derby to Kununurra. Originally built as a cattle route in the 1960s, this rugged unsealed road is one of Australia's great 4WD adventures, crossing vast cattle stations, ancient gorge systems, and Aboriginal lands in one of the most remote inhabited regions on Earth. The road passes through a landscape of epic scale: ancient sandstone ranges over two billion years old, wide river crossings that can be impassable after rains, and hidden gorges with crystal-clear swimming holes. Highlights include Windjana Gorge with its colony of freshwater crocodiles basking on the banks, the tiered waterfalls of Mitchell Falls (accessible via a rough side track), and the stunning natural amphitheatre of El Questro Wilderness Park. The night skies along the Gibb are among the darkest and most star-filled in the world.
Great Ocean Road
🇦🇺 Australia
The Great Ocean Road is a 243-kilometer coastal drive in Victoria, Australia, stretching from Torquay to Allansford along the southeastern coast. Built by returned soldiers between 1919 and 1932 as a memorial to those who died in World War I, it is the world's largest war memorial and one of Australia's most popular tourist destinations. The road hugs the rugged coastline of the Southern Ocean, passing through rainforest, alongside towering cliffs, and past iconic rock formations. The most famous landmarks along the route are the Twelve Apostles, a collection of limestone sea stacks rising dramatically from the Southern Ocean. Originally formed from the eroding cliffs over millions of years, only eight stacks remain standing (one collapsed in 2005). Nearby, Loch Ard Gorge, named after a shipwreck in 1878, offers sheltered beaches framed by towering cliff walls, and London Arch (formerly London Bridge) demonstrates the ongoing erosion that shapes this coastline, having lost its connection to the mainland in 1990. Beyond the coastline, the Great Ocean Road passes through the Otway Ranges, a region of ancient temperate rainforest with towering mountain ash trees, fern gullies, and cascading waterfalls. The charming towns of Lorne, Apollo Bay, and Port Campbell offer accommodation, dining, and surfing. The road is open year-round, and while it can be driven in a single day, most visitors recommend at least two days to properly explore the many lookouts, walking trails, and coastal towns along the way.
Lasseter Highway
🇦🇺 Australia
Lasseter Highway is a 245-kilometer sealed road running from the Stuart Highway at Erldunda to Yulara, the resort town serving Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park in Australia's Red Centre. Named after Harold Lasseter, a controversial explorer who claimed to have found a vast gold reef in the Central Australian desert in the 1930s, the highway crosses a stark but beautiful landscape of red sand plains, desert oak woodlands, and distant flat-topped mesa formations. The drive is a gradual immersion into the deep outback. The landscape becomes increasingly red and arid as you head west, with the iconic profiles of Mount Conner (often mistaken for Uluru), Uluru, and Kata Tjuta gradually emerging from the desert haze. The final approach to Uluru is unforgettable: the monolith rises abruptly from the flat desert plain, changing color throughout the day from ochre to deep crimson. Kata Tjuta's 36 domed rock formations, visible from the highway, are equally spectacular and geologically far more complex than Uluru.
Stuart Highway
🇦🇺 Australia
The Stuart Highway runs 2,834 kilometers from Adelaide on Australia's southern coast to Darwin in the tropical north, bisecting the continent through its vast red center. Named after the explorer John McDouall Stuart, who completed the first south-to-north crossing of Australia in 1862, the highway is one of the great transcontinental road journeys in the world. The drive traverses some of Australia's most iconic landscapes: the vineyards of the Barossa Valley, the underground opal mining town of Coober Pedy where residents live in dugouts to escape the heat, the otherworldly monolith of Uluru (accessible via a side road), the frontier town of Alice Springs, and the ancient sandstone domes of the Devils Marbles. The northern section passes through vast tropical savanna before arriving in Darwin's humid tropics. Between towns, the highway is ruler-straight for hundreds of kilometers across empty red desert, testing drivers with monotony and fatigue.