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Lonely Planet Australia
Golden beaches, baked red deserts and glamorous cities. An ancient indigenous history and a young, vibrant culture: welcome to Australia! Stick around, hang out with us a while. With this bestselling guide to the Land Down Under tucked under one arm, let us show you why Lonely Planet calls Australia home.
Relax and let us take care of it: planning your holiday Down Under has never been so easy.
Get Around with the help of 193 maps to town and country, beach and mountain—and everywhere in between.
Treat Yourself to the best wining and dining that Australia has to offer, served on a platter by our expert food and drink author.
Meet The Locals—Bouncing 'roos, half-stoned koalas and sleepy wombats: Australia's fascinating wildlife is demystified in our full-color Environment chapter.
Put Your Feet Up at Australia's best and best-value accommodation, handpicked by our troupe of roaming authors.
Who We Are
At Lonely Planet, we see our job as inspiring and enabling travelers to connect with the world for their own benefit and for the benefit of the world at large.
What We Do
We offer travelers the world's richest travel advice, informed by the collective wisdom of over 350 Lonely Planet authors living in 37 countries and fluent in 70 languages.
We are relentless in finding the special, the unique and the different for travellers wherever they are.
When we update our guidebooks, we check every listing, in person, every time.
We always offer the trusted filter for those who are curious, open minded and independent.
We challenge our growing community of travelers; leading debate and discussion abouttravel and the world.
We tell it like it is without fear or favor in service of the travelers; not clouded by any other motive.
What We Believe
We believe that travel leads to a deeper cultural understanding and compassion and therefore a better world.
1116 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1994
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 30 reviews
May 19, 2021
2707 pages. An X-ray examination, not a simple travel guide.
October 12, 2019
Lonely Planet guides used to be much more useful in the pre internet era.
June 16, 2024
Very helpful on our trip
January 1, 2017
I used this book in 2012 my first time Down Under and again this year as I returned to a country that is so far away that I didn't know when I would be back. The book, and frankly, any book from Lonely Planet, provides an invaluable complement to the staggering amount of information online. Unlike online information, this is organized systematically, written by professionals, and updated constantly. You'll find that it will give you a good orientation to a state, region, and city, and point you in directions that will help you make the most of your travels. Don't leave home without one, especially if you are going for more than two weeks anywhere.
May 5, 2023
Nothing beats Rick Steves.
Lots of great recommendations, but nothing you wouldn’t find online. Quite lengthy and not very well organized…a sea of recommendations I will never have enough time to visit.
A great book if you’re moving to Australia!
Lots of great recommendations, but nothing you wouldn’t find online. Quite lengthy and not very well organized…a sea of recommendations I will never have enough time to visit.
A great book if you’re moving to Australia!
March 29, 2018
I bought this book because I was curious what it'd be like to read a guidebook to my own country, as well as because I'd like to travel more within Australia. I'm a long-time user of Lonely Planet guides, but since I discovered that you can buy them chapter-by-chapter (for just $5), I rarely buy the full books.
I don't like how this book includes so many places that I can't imagine many people wanting to go - it'd be better if they gave more detail on the best places and left the others out (Rick Steves -style - his guidebooks are the gold standard, it's such a pity he only writes Europe guides). However, I do like that this book covers a few dangerous places (like outback tracks), I do like reading (a bit) about places I'll never be brave enough to go!
I think the coverage of hotels/restaurants/bars is a bit excessive but I do think that, even though this information is better (and free) online, it's good to have some such information within your primary planning source as a price indicator, and the hotel prices in this book are good indicators (they generally line up with the prices that are actually charged when you find a decent online deal - note that this means that if you don't bother to search for a decent deal you will have to pay much more than the prices listed in this book, particularly if you're unwise enough to travel at peak times).
In this book I found a few destinations I'd like to visit that I hadn't already put on my wishlist. I also found a few attractions I'd like to visit in Melbourne (a city I've been to quite a few times) that I'd never heard of before, but that wasn't the case for any of the other cities I'm fairly familiar with.
The hotel recommendations in cities I'm familiar with often line up with those I'd make, except that they generally exclude chains (chains can be a good deal in Australia, esp. at the budget end where they give a more consistent experience than indies). The restaurant recommendations also often line up with mine, particularity in my home city - I'm not sure if this means that I know about most of the good places, or if it means that the writers didn't bother to look beyond the popular places!
Books like this take time to put together so there's necessarily some out of date information here (one listed place in my home city closed before this book's publication date, and many listed places will surely close before the next edition of this book) but I don't think that will cause readers too many problems if they supplement this book with information from tripadvisor and google maps.
I don't like how this book includes so many places that I can't imagine many people wanting to go - it'd be better if they gave more detail on the best places and left the others out (Rick Steves -style - his guidebooks are the gold standard, it's such a pity he only writes Europe guides). However, I do like that this book covers a few dangerous places (like outback tracks), I do like reading (a bit) about places I'll never be brave enough to go!
I think the coverage of hotels/restaurants/bars is a bit excessive but I do think that, even though this information is better (and free) online, it's good to have some such information within your primary planning source as a price indicator, and the hotel prices in this book are good indicators (they generally line up with the prices that are actually charged when you find a decent online deal - note that this means that if you don't bother to search for a decent deal you will have to pay much more than the prices listed in this book, particularly if you're unwise enough to travel at peak times).
In this book I found a few destinations I'd like to visit that I hadn't already put on my wishlist. I also found a few attractions I'd like to visit in Melbourne (a city I've been to quite a few times) that I'd never heard of before, but that wasn't the case for any of the other cities I'm fairly familiar with.
The hotel recommendations in cities I'm familiar with often line up with those I'd make, except that they generally exclude chains (chains can be a good deal in Australia, esp. at the budget end where they give a more consistent experience than indies). The restaurant recommendations also often line up with mine, particularity in my home city - I'm not sure if this means that I know about most of the good places, or if it means that the writers didn't bother to look beyond the popular places!
Books like this take time to put together so there's necessarily some out of date information here (one listed place in my home city closed before this book's publication date, and many listed places will surely close before the next edition of this book) but I don't think that will cause readers too many problems if they supplement this book with information from tripadvisor and google maps.
January 8, 2019
4 - 4 ½ stars
May 17, 2019
Better for those a little further along in their planning than I am when I usually pick up a guidebook. A more detailed and useful section on Tasmania than the Eyewitness guide.
April 10, 2021
Good overview of Australia but lacking in photographs of animals, and culture.
July 22, 2024
A very comprehensive travel guide. A must for travellers to Australia. Highly recommended.
April 25, 2026
Read the sections pertinent to my travel plans. Lonely Planet publishes my favorite travel guides.
March 23, 2021
I love this series and I am desperate to use the information in it! The practicality of the information can't be beat.
November 23, 2016
I only wish Rick Steves did travel books for Australia.
I used Lonely Planet Australia as a guide for my recent trip down under, and overall I was disappointed. While it was helpful in deciding what I wanted to see beforehand, I could have found all that information online (on tripadvisor.com, for example). For me the most important function of travel books is to be my on-site tour guide. This book didn't have enough information on any individual place to be worth carrying along. Of the 14 days of my visit, I only packed it in my purse for 2 of them, and even then I didn't find it of much use. I am accustomed to Rick Steves' wonderful tips -- things like "buy your tickets at this little shop and avoid the line" and "if you go to the very back of the market you'll find this fascinating statue" and so forth. There was none of that here. I also found the few suggested itineraries to be very slow-moving and incomplete. But maybe my type of traveller is not the target audience for Lonely Planet.
The main source of the problem is that this book covers all of Australia in depth. Even though I flew all over the continent, visiting Sydney, Melbourne, the Great Barrier Reef, and the central Outback, I only used a small fraction of the guide's content. Any book trying to cover so many sites is limited on what details it can include, but the compromises made to keep the page number reasonable didn't work for me.
Another big complaint -- the index was terrible and never had an entry for anything I tried to look up! So I'd find myself paging through 30 pages on Melbourne, for example, trying to find the one paragraph that talked about Birrarung Marr. It was very frustrating.
Barely 3 stars, because I'm recognizing it has a lot of content I didn't use that probably added value. I wish I had just bought several smaller books on the cities I was visiting.
I used Lonely Planet Australia as a guide for my recent trip down under, and overall I was disappointed. While it was helpful in deciding what I wanted to see beforehand, I could have found all that information online (on tripadvisor.com, for example). For me the most important function of travel books is to be my on-site tour guide. This book didn't have enough information on any individual place to be worth carrying along. Of the 14 days of my visit, I only packed it in my purse for 2 of them, and even then I didn't find it of much use. I am accustomed to Rick Steves' wonderful tips -- things like "buy your tickets at this little shop and avoid the line" and "if you go to the very back of the market you'll find this fascinating statue" and so forth. There was none of that here. I also found the few suggested itineraries to be very slow-moving and incomplete. But maybe my type of traveller is not the target audience for Lonely Planet.
The main source of the problem is that this book covers all of Australia in depth. Even though I flew all over the continent, visiting Sydney, Melbourne, the Great Barrier Reef, and the central Outback, I only used a small fraction of the guide's content. Any book trying to cover so many sites is limited on what details it can include, but the compromises made to keep the page number reasonable didn't work for me.
Another big complaint -- the index was terrible and never had an entry for anything I tried to look up! So I'd find myself paging through 30 pages on Melbourne, for example, trying to find the one paragraph that talked about Birrarung Marr. It was very frustrating.
Barely 3 stars, because I'm recognizing it has a lot of content I didn't use that probably added value. I wish I had just bought several smaller books on the cities I was visiting.
March 5, 2011
As usual, with lonely planet guides, we found this to be super-helpful while planning our trip and while traveling around. At the end of our trip we left this our aussie friends we were visiting, as they had been looking at it and were interested in planning some trips of their own.
It does a good job of going into detail for all parts of the country, including Tasmania and Victoria. The main downside to the guide is that the book is heavy and rather bulky to carry around. This is particularly frustrating if you are only going to a few parts of the country, like we were. Lonely Planet is now selling their guides as e-books through their website, with the option to buy the entire guide or just the chapters you need. We plan to go that route on our next overseas trip.
It does a good job of going into detail for all parts of the country, including Tasmania and Victoria. The main downside to the guide is that the book is heavy and rather bulky to carry around. This is particularly frustrating if you are only going to a few parts of the country, like we were. Lonely Planet is now selling their guides as e-books through their website, with the option to buy the entire guide or just the chapters you need. We plan to go that route on our next overseas trip.
July 28, 2007
i LOVED this lonely planet. it was a huge help when travelling throughout australia. great descriptions of hostels once you figure out the system. not all hostels are in it, especially the smaller mom and pop places, so do not be afraid to veer off the pages. if you are planning on travelling throughout oz, this is a great book to have, even though it is heavy.
August 5, 2009
This guide came with my 4-month working holiday visa, otherwise I probably wouldn't have bought it. It's useful enough for general information and I'm sure it would be great for planning a tourist trip around Australia, particularly if you didn't know anyone in or anything about Australia. For someone living in Sydney, however, it's not especially informative.
Read
July 26, 2024I got this book because my son was going to Brisbane however there is not a scrap of information on the entire city of Brisbane — which is one of the largest cities in Australia. I am disgusted and found this was a complete waste for me and for my son. He left the book sitting at home in South Carolina as a useless paper weight.
August 23, 2007
Lonely Planet guides are great. I've used them in Australia and Ireland. They give you the basics on a place, but still leave room for you to discovery things on your own. My only complaint is that the street maps can be pretty unreliable, so keep that in mind when navigating somewhere new.
February 26, 2022
I have just finished a month travelling up and down the east coast of Australia. While this book might be a little too general for some people's liking (it covers the whole country), I was always refering to it when I was looking for ideas about what to do next, which is a good sign I think.
March 20, 2010
Love all Lonely Planet's books!!!
This one is really special because Australia is a dream about to come true...
This one is really special because Australia is a dream about to come true...
January 12, 2010
I wish that more of the book was applicable! Just not enough time to see all of it in two weeks!
April 25, 2011
tribes exists
September 6, 2011
As with all lonely planet books, you got to take what you need out of it. Over 1000 pages of things to do and see in Australia!
Read
October 27, 2012[2011.11.19] Used 2011 16th Edition to plan the Australia portion of our Nov-Dec 2011 trip (approx 9 days in Australia). Sections used: Sydney & New South Wales, Queensland & Great Barrier Reef.
January 9, 2015
Great help in planning my trip.
Read
August 20, 2015Location: ND6 IRC
Accession No: DL027455
Accession No: DL027455
December 31, 2015
Bought this in readiness for a month-long trip to Australia with the 5 and 7 year-old - it was an invaluable travel companion.
November 26, 2023
My first journey to Australia! Beautiful sophisticated Sydney and then on to Tropical North Queensland to experience the magnificent Great Barrier Reef.
Currently Reading
December 30, 2008good well
May 13, 2011
This Lonely Planet's book is great as others.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 30 reviews