Queensland Holidays - Southern Queensland -

Diving in Queensland is more than just the Great Barrier Reef. Where one underwater world ends, another dive landscape begins.

Southern Queensland's dive region stretches from the Roy Rufus Artificial Reef, off the Fraser Coast, south through the Sunshine Coast and Brisbane to Cook Island on Queensland's Gold Coast.

In its waters you'll see pods of surfing dolphins, grazing dugong, Loggerhead turtles and an endemic edible marine crustacean (the Moreton Bay Bug) as well as an array of colourful reef fish and corals.

It is a world of wreck-based artificial reefs teaming with giant pelagic fish (Curtain Artificial Reef) or rock shelf havens for the rare Grey Nurse Shark (Flat Rock). There are natural coral reefs home to shallow swim-throughs, bommies and caves (Flinders Reef) and lazy snorkel sites that are literally a few flipper kicks from the shore of the world's second largest sand island, Moreton Island (Tangalooma Wrecks).

The scuttled former HMAS Brisbane, off Maroochydore, is the Sunshine Coast's newest dive treasure day-trip. Sunk to a depth of 27m in 2005, it sits on a sandy floor less than 10km offshore and has already welcomed yellow-tailed king fish, squid, octopus, shovel-nosed rays and a variety of other marine life.

The waters of Southern Queensland are warm (though a couple of degrees less than the tropics), the "vis" is good and the friendly locals are waiting to greet you.

Apart from spectacular diving, you can also undertake a range of unique animal interactions in this region. Land-based marine theme parks and aquariums offer interactions with dolphins, seals and sharks or go you can go whale watching between July and November from Hervey Bay, renowned as the Whale Watching Capital of Australia. Whale Watching tours also operate from Brisbane and the Gold Coast into Moreton Bay.