Australian Marine Parks
Marine parks are one of the best ways to protect our marine environment. They are key to supporting the resilience of the marine environment against pressures such as climate change, marine pests, overuse of resources, and pollution.
Australia has about 2 per cent of the world’s oceans, but more than 14 per cent of the world’s marine parks. Australia is a world leader in marine park management and one of the world’s leading countries for establishing marine parks, with 48% of Australian waters protected. That’s equivalent to a little over half of Australia’s land area.
The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park is known globally and is the jewel in Australia’s marine conservation ‘crown’. Less known is that the Australian Government also manages 61 marine parks, protecting an enormous number of species and habitats, from the tropics to sub-Antarctic waters. Our Australian Marine Parks span 76 degrees of longitude (over 20% of the Earth’s longitude), six time zones, and three of the world’s five oceans.
A striped trumpeter (front right: Latris lineata) and a barber perch (front left: Caesioperca lepidoptera) photobombing a baited remote underwater stereo video system in the Tasman Fracture Marine Park in the Australian South-east Network of Marine Parks. Photograph by IMAS. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
About the Author
With thanks to
Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies (IMAS), the Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS), and Deakin University.
South-east Network of Marine Parks
There are 14 Australian Marine Parks off the coast of Victoria, South Australia and Lutruwita/Tasmania, covering 702,033 square kilometres. Together they make up the South-east Network. The Network was the first temperate deep-sea network of marine parks in the world.
In these parks off Australia’s South-east coast, migratory whales journey to and from Antarctica twice a year. Iconic species such as southern bluefin tuna and blue whales roam. Extraordinary underwater canyons and cone-shaped submerged mountains provide unique habitats. In the deep sea, there’s a diverse range of fishes and other creatures, such as crabs, coral, sea urchins and sponges that have bizarre and fascinating adaptations to survive in their deep, dark homes. Many of these creatures are found nowhere else in the world.
Some of the flora and fauna are hundreds and possibly thousands of years old, making them some of the longest-lived animals on Earth.
The Australian Marine Parks South-east Network. Map courtesy of Parks Australia. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Large school of butterfly perch in the Huon Marine Park in the Australian South-east Network of Marine Parks. Photograph by IMAS. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Jackass morwong and butterfly perch in the Beagle Marine Park in the Australian South-east Network of Marine Parks. Photograph by IMAS. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Diverse marine life in the Huon Marine Park. Photograph by IMAS. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Technical diver Andreas Klocker next to a black coral on Joe’s Reef, Freycinet Marine Park in the Australian South-east Network of Marine Parks. Photograph by James Parkinson. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Hand like laminar sponges in the Apollo Marine Park in the Australian South-east Network of Marine Parks. Photograph by Deakin University. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Seven gill shark and Pink snapper investigate bait from a stereo BRUV in the Apollo Marine Park . Photograph by Deakin University. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Important cultural values and Beagle Marine Park
Port Jackson sharks in Beagle Marine Park. Photograph by IMAS and IMOS. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Colourful sponges in the Beagle Marine Park. Photograph by IMAS and IMOS. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Doughboy scallops on seafloor sediments in Beagle Marine Park. Photograph by IMAS and IMOS. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
The islands of the Bass Strait are important breeding strongholds for seabirds such as fairy prions. Photograph by Ed Dunens. CC BY 2.0.
The Palawa (Tasmanian Aboriginal community) maintain strong cultural collections to the Sea Country of the Bass Strait. Shell necklace making knowledge has been passed down to Palawa women for generations. Photograph by Jillian Mundy. All rights reserved.
Many of Australia’s marine parks provide protection to culturally unique values. In the South-east Network, this includes seascapes associated with the land bridge that most recently between about 40,000 and about 15,000 years ago joined Lutruwita/Tasmania to the mainland.
Beagle Marine Park lies in the Bass Strait between Victoria’s Wilsons Promontory and Tasmania’s Flinders Island in Tayaritja/the Furneaux Group of Islands. It surrounds Tasmania’s Hogan and Curtis Island Groups, and the Tasmanian Kent Group Marine Reserve and Kent Group National Park. The marine park covers an area of the sea floor that was once dry land and that formed the longest lasting part of a land bridge connecting Lutruwita/Tasmania to Victoria during the last ice age, when sea levels were much lower. As the ice age ended, glaciers melted and sea levels rose, isolating Tasmania between about 14,000 and 11,000 years ago. The higher parts of that land bridge are now Bass Strait islands, including Deal, Erith, Hogan, Flinders and Babel islands. The waters of Beagle Marine Park are quite shallow, ranging from 15 metres to 100 metres – unsurprising given its past as a land bridge. Its waters are influenced by the tidal currents of Bass Strait and by three major ocean flows: the East Australian Current bringing warmer water from New South Wales, the South Australian Current bringing warmer water from the west, and cooler temperate Tasmanian waters coming from the south.
Beagle Marine Park in the Bass Strait. Map courtesy of Parks Australia. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Beagle Marine Park protects a shallow continental shelf ecosystem with habitats representative of central Bass Strait. The park features an extensive area of soft sediment with some outcropping of rocky ridges, which are likely to be a sand dune field prior to inundation of the land bridge. These rocky reefs support diverse, colourful sponge garden communities, which provide food for other species by concentrating the nutrients sweeping past in the currents.
Fish life is also diverse, with dozens of species recorded. In 2017, a research team studying rocky reefs in Beagle Marine Park filmed hundreds of Port Jackson sharks resting on the seafloor among the sponges – the largest gathering of these sharks they had ever seen. Giant cuttlefish, which reach up to 80cm in length and are one of the largest cuttlefish species in the world, are also seen in the park.
Like the other marine parks in Bass Strait, Beagle is a valuable foraging area for the many bird species that breed on the small islands nearby. The islands of Bass Strait hold the largest colonies (up to 6 million birds) of Australia’s most abundant seabird, the migratory short-tailed shearwater (known as yula or muttonbird). They are also Australian breeding strongholds for species such as the fairy prion, shy albatross, silver gull, black-faced cormorant, Australasian gannet, common diving-petrel and little penguin. Beagle Marine Park is a feeding area for the Australian fur seal which, while common in the waters of South-eastern Australia, only breeds on small isolated rocks in Bass Strait.
Beagle Marine Park is an important migratory pathway for whales. Southern right whales migrate through Bass Strait during October and November. While here they feed and nurse their young. The Park also provides important foraging grounds for pygmy blue whales and humpback whales.
First Nations People lived and hunted in this area for tens of thousands of years before rising sea levels cut them off from the Australian mainland at the end of the last Ice Age. The waters and values of the marine park continue to be culturally significant for Bass Strait First Nations and Aboriginal communities.
Copyright information
Released under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial No Derivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license.
This story is subject to disclaimers, copyright restrictions, and cultural clearances. Copyright © Parks Australia, 2024.
Further Reading
Parks Australia, Australian Marine Parks, accessed 5 June 2024.
