South Coast of NSW

Hyams Beach holds a Guinness World Record for whitest sand — an objectively strange achievement, but when you see it, standing against turquoise water in Jervis Bay as a bottlenose dolphin surfaces fifty metres out, the claim is not hard to understand. The South Coast of NSW contains some of the finest beaches in Australia, attached to a coast that still feels like it belongs to fishing villages and national parks rather than to tourism.

Jervis Bay Marine Park is the centrepiece — a large, sheltered bay with exceptional visibility water, reliable dolphin pods, fur seals on the headlands and seasonal whale migration from June to November. The camping at Huskisson, Hyams and Booderee National Park is well-managed and beautiful. From here south, the coast runs as the Sapphire Coast, a name that refers to the blue tones of the water and genuinely earns it.

Tathra, Bermagui, Narooma and Merimbula are the small towns that punctuate the coast south — each with a fishing fleet, good seafood, a main street and a beach that would be famous if it were less remote. The Tilba highlands above Narooma are dairy country reminiscent of rural New Zealand — green hills, Heritage villages and the extraordinary Mimosa Rocks National Park below. Eden, at the very south of the coast, has a whaling history and a working deep-sea fishing industry that makes the town feel more genuinely useful than the tourist south.