Subscribe 
The Dreamiest Rainforests in Australia for a Tropical Traverse
From the ancient Daintree to Tasmania’s takayna/Tarkine, the Otways, Blue Mountains and Kimberley, these are the best rainforests in Australia to walk, wander and marvel at.
Australia’s rainforests hold a different kind of drama to the red earth and open road. They gather at the country’s green edges and in its cool, hidden gullies: ancient canopies, mossed stone, giant ferns, river mist and walking tracks that draw you into older, wilder country. From the Daintree in Far North Queensland to Tasmania’s takayna/Tarkine and Victoria’s fern-laced ranges, the best rainforests in Australia are places to slow down, look closer and let the landscape take the lead.
Here, we’ve rounded up the Australian rainforests worth travelling for, from World Heritage-listed icons to weekend-ready forest escapes.
Best Rainforests in Australia: Queensland
Daintree Rainforest
The Daintree Rainforest is Australia at its most ancient: a green, dripping, light-filtered world of fan palms, strangler figs, cassowaries and river mist. Part of the Wet Tropics of Queensland, this extraordinary rainforest has been growing for more than 180 million years, making it the oldest tropical rainforest on Earth. It is also one of the rare places where reef and rainforest meet, with Cape Tribulation bringing the Wet Tropics and Great Barrier Reef into one astonishing frame.
Walking tracks range from easy boardwalks to deeper forest trails, while the Daintree River adds crocodile-spotting cruises, mangroves and that strange, prehistoric hush the region does so well. Come for the scale of it, stay for the detail: luminous insects, ancient ferns, tangled vines, birdsong, and the sense that the country here is older than language. UNESCO describes the Wet Tropics as stretching along Queensland’s north-east coast for around 450 kilometres, with rare and threatened species woven through its tropical rainforest.
Sitchu tip: Base yourself in Port Douglas or Cairns, and don’t miss Mossman Gorge, Cape Tribulation and a Daintree River cruise.
The Gondwana Rainforests
The Gondwana Rainforests are where Australia’s ancient green memory still feels close to the surface. Spanning south-east Queensland and north-east New South Wales, this World Heritage-listed network gathers the major remaining rainforests of the region into one extraordinary living archive, with Lamington, Springbrook, Main Range and Mount Barney forming the Queensland chapter.
These forests carry the trace of the ancient supercontinent Gondwana, with subtropical rainforest, Antarctic beech, mossy stone, fern-lined gullies and volcanic ranges giving the landscape its deep-time drama. This is walking country with scale and atmosphere: Lamington for canopy trails and birdlife, Main Range for mountain air, Mount Barney for serious bushwalkers and Springbrook for waterfalls, lookouts and the glowworm-lit wonder of Natural Bridge.
Sitchu Tip: Make Springbrook National Park your first stop if you’re chasing an accessible hit of Gondwana drama, with winding tracks, waterfall walks and Natural Bridge all within reach of the Gold Coast hinterland.
Best Rainforests in Australia: Victoria
Dandenong Ranges National Park
An hour from Melbourne, Dandenong Ranges National Park performs a neat little trick: one minute you are near tramlines and takeaway coffee, the next you are standing under mountain ash trees that make human ambition look rather silly. Fern gullies fold down into damp green shade, Sherbrooke Falls slips through the forest, and superb lyrebirds scratch and fuss about like tiny woodland aristocrats. Take the 1000 Steps if you want a civic rite of passage, or follow Sherbrooke Forest into the cooler, mossier parts of the park. It is not a tropical rainforest, and that is the point. This is Victoria’s version: tall, ferny, mist-prone and wonderfully close to home.
Enjoying Reading About the Best Rainforests in Australia? We Think You’ll Love…
Dreamy Destinations: The Best Island Holidays in Australia & Fiji
A Dazzling Meteor Moment Is Coming To Australian Skies
Great Otway National Park
Great Otway National Park is where the Great Ocean Road suddenly stops showing off to the sea and disappears inland under ferns, rain and very tall trees. One minute there is surf and salt on the wind; the next, you are in cool temperate rainforest, where tree ferns hold their fronds like parasols and waterfalls drop with an almost comic abundance.
The Otways are made for people who like their nature with a little damp in its bones. Erskine Falls is the famous one, but Hopetoun, Triplet, Beauchamp, Sheoak and Kalimna Falls give the park its real rhythm: track, fern, spray, repeat. Melba Gully brings the after-dark flourish, with glow worms lighting the mossy banks like a secret the forest has been keeping. For wildlife, point yourself towards Lake Elizabeth at dawn or dusk, when platypus sometimes break the surface among the drowned tree trunks. Beautiful by day, peculiar by night and never short of a waterfall, this is Victoria at its greenest and most gothic.
Tarra-Bulga National Park
Tarra-Bulga National Park is a Gippsland rainforest with old bones and a terrific sense of occasion. Deep in the Strzelecki Ranges, tracks pass mountain ash, ancient myrtle beech, tree ferns and gullies green enough to make the rest of Victoria look underdressed. Corrigan’s Suspension Bridge is the set-piece, slung above the fern floor with a pleasing wobble, while Tarra Valley’s rainforest walk and Cyathea Falls reward anyone wise enough to pack lunch and dawdle a little.
Best Rainforests in Australia: New South Wales
Minnamurra Rainforest
Minnamurra Rainforest is the Illawarra doing its best green-room trick: one turn off the road and the world becomes ferns, figs, palms and dripping shade. Set within Budderoo National Park, the Lyrebird Loop starts at Minnamurra Rainforest Centre and carries you along raised walkways, suspension bridges and viewing platforms above a busy, ancient floor. Listen for lyrebirds, watch for eastern water dragons sunning themselves, and save extra legs for the Minnamurra Falls walk.
Grand Canyon Track in Blue Mountains
Grand Canyon Track is the Blue Mountains at close quarters: damp, ferny, sandstone-walled and wonderfully unreasonable on the calves. Starting near Blackheath, the 6.3km loop drops from open bush into a cool green cleft of waterfalls, creek crossings, wet rock and fern banks, where Greaves Creek seems to pull the whole walk deeper underground. People have been making the descent since 1907, and the track still carries that old thrill of entering somewhere that would rather not be disturbed. Netflix clearly picked up on the mood, too, with the recent thriller Apex (read: Taron Egerton at his most terrifying) using the Grand Canyon Walking Track as one of its Blue Mountains filming locations.
Cinematic credentials aside, the real drama is already there: the hush of the canyon floor, the climb back out, and the sweet relief of reaching daylight. Just check the forecast first: canyons and heavy rain are a terrible pairing.
Sitchu Tip: Save energy for the climb back out towards Evans Lookout. The canyon does the drama on the way down; the exit asks for your calves in return.
Best Rainforests in Australia: Western Australia
Mitchell Plateau Rainforest
Mitchell Plateau is Kimberley rainforest in its wildest register: not one great green canopy, but pockets of monsoon forest, fan palms and wet-season abundance set against red rock, escarpment and distance. The prize is Mitchell Falls, or Punamii-unpuu, where four tiers of water drop through sandstone into dark pools with almost indecent drama. Getting there is part of the draw: take the Mitchell Falls walk, a six-kilometre return track across sandstone, palms and creek crossings, or see it from above by scenic flight when the scale demands altitude. Watch for Livistona palms, black grasswrens and, with luck, the tiny monjon rock-wallaby. Remote, ancient and stubbornly uninterested in ease, this is the Kimberley turned all the way up.
Valley of the Giants
The Valley of the Giants is one of Western Australia’s great forest encounters, set along the southern coast between Denmark and Walpole and known for its ancient red tingle trees. Some of these eucalypts reach immense proportions, with trunks measuring up to 20 metres in circumference, their hollow bases and fluted bark giving the forest an almost prehistoric charge.
The iconic Tree Top Walk rises 40 metres above the ground, carrying visitors through the canopy for a rare look at the forest from above. Back on the floor, the Ancient Empire boardwalk winds between centuries-old trunks, where the scale turns personal: bark, buttresses, shadow and the strange thrill of standing beside trees that have outlasted almost everything around them.
Warren National Park
Warren National Park brings Western Australia’s karri country into thrilling vertical scale. About 15 kilometres south of Pemberton, this 3000-hectare park is less classic rainforest than towering old-growth forest, with karri trees rising up to 90 metres above ferns, river banksias, peppermints and the dark, winding Warren River. Walk the trails, paddle by canoe or follow the Karri Forest Explorer drive, then stop at the Dave Evans Bicentennial Tree, currently open to its first 20-metre platform.
Best Rainforests in Australia: Tasmania
The Tarkine Rainforest
Tarkine / takayna is Tasmania’s north-west in its oldest, greenest mood: myrtle beech, celery top pine, blackwood, Huon pine and moss doing more heavy lifting than any scenic lookout ever could. This is Australia’s largest stretch of cool-temperate rainforest, but the drama does not stop at the tree line. Buttongrass plains run towards the wild coast, rivers move dark and slow through the forest, and places like Julius River, Trowutta Arch, Philosopher Falls and Corinna give you ways in without pretending the place belongs to you. Cruise the Pieman, follow the Tarkine Drive, walk under fern-thick canopies and keep half an eye out for Tasmanian devils, orange-bellied parrots and all the small ancient business happening underfoot. It feels less like a day trip than a glimpse of the island before humans got clever.
Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area
The Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area is too large and unruly to behave like a single rainforest. Covering more than 1.5 million hectares, it pulls together cool-temperate rainforest, glacial lakes, wild rivers, alpine moorland, karst caves and some of the deepest Aboriginal cultural history on the continent. Across its seven national parks, from Cradle Mountain-Lake St Clair to Franklin-Gordon Wild Rivers and Hartz Mountains, the landscape changes mood with almost indecent beauty.
For the rainforest hit, head south-west. Southwest National Park feels ancient in a Jurassic way that makes most adjectives look underqualified: Huon pine, sassafras, celery top pine, myrtle, wet forest air and quartzite ranges cut into hard, jagged silhouettes. At Melaleuca, the critically endangered orange-bellied parrot returns to breed in summer, adding one tiny, high-stakes flash of colour to a place built on scale, weather and deep time.
Feeling more excited than ever to book a plane ticket and start travelling to the best rainforests in Australia? Check out the latest travel sales to score a cheaper flight or book your accommodation at one of these stunning new hotels.
