Qualla: Coral Sea Islands

Coral Sea Islands: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit mariemon, CC BY 3.0. It is a territory of Australia that is almost entirely sea. The Coral Sea Islands Territory sprawls across 780,000 square kilometres east of the Great Barrier Reef, an area larger than many nations, and yet if you gathered every scrap of dry land within it into one place, it would amount to roughly seven square kilometres of sand. Most of those specks have no name a sailor would recognise and no human ever sets foot on them. On exactly one island do people live at all. The rest belong to the birds and the turtles.

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Image: mariemon | CC BY 3.0

Coral Sea Islands: An Ocean With Footnotes of Land

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gsh1967, Public domain. Scattered across this vast blue expanse are about 30 reefs and atolls, most of them wholly submerged or breaking the surface only at low tide. Where land does rise above the waves, it does so barely. The cays are low, flat and small; the territory's high point, on Cato Island, st...

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Image: Gsh1967 | Public domain

Coral Sea Islands: The One Inhabited Island

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit mariemon, CC BY-SA 3.0. The single exception sits about 450 kilometres east of Cairns: Willis Island, a sliver of sand roughly 500 metres long. Since 1921 it has carried a weather station, established for one urgent reason, to give the Queensland coast advance warning of the cyclones that spin in from t...

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Image: mariemon | CC BY-SA 3.0

Coral Sea Islands: A Nursery for Birds and Turtles

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit mariemon, CC BY-SA 3.0. What the islands lack in people they make up for in wings and flippers. The forested cays of the Coringa-Herald and Lihou groups are among the most important seabird rookeries in the Coral Sea, home to breeding colonies of more than a dozen species, terns and boobies and tropicbi...

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Image: mariemon | CC BY-SA 3.0

Coral Sea Islands: The Reefs That Keep Their Dead

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gsh1967, Public domain. These same beautiful, low-lying reefs have always been deadly to ships. The territory was first charted in 1803, the very year HMS Porpoise drove onto its coral and gave Wreck Reefs its name, stranding Matthew Flinders and ninety-odd others on a sandbank within these waters. In t...

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Image: Gsh1967 | Public domain