The Best Places to Drink and Stay in Australia

Sixty thousand acres of South Australian outback and six rooms to share it with, which is the kind of ratio that makes the Flinders Ranges feel genuinely yours. Arkaba Homestead is an all-inclusive safari-style stay inside a private wildlife sanctuary, with the old stone homestead doing its antique-meets-contemporary thing while the team handles the drives, the guided walks, the cooking, and the South Australian wine.

Tented bungalows perch at the edge of Kakadu National Park, where the Mary River floodplain stretches far enough that you stop looking for the fence. Bamurru Plains is a wilderness lodge in the safari mold, Australian chapter, trading the Big Five for saltwater crocs and magpie geese. Wildlife excursions are the whole point, but the central lodge and communal table, stocked with local cooking and serious Australian wine, make coming back inside feel less like a compromise.

Tented camps, the argument goes, are what eco-lodges become once someone decides comfort shouldn't be optional. Near Binalong Bay on Tasmania's northeast coast, Bay of Fires Bush Retreat offers beautifully fitted safari-style tents alongside a bunk house and a king room for those who prefer walls. The outdoor draw is serious, with surfing, diving, and mountain biking close at hand, and the chef-owner who runs dinner came out of the local restaurant world.

The cattle still outnumber the guests by a considerable margin at this working Northern Territory station turned remote outback stay. Stone-walled rooms replace the tents you'd expect from a place this far off the grid, and activities range from a pool dip to a helicopter sweep over the bush. The off-grid life here is less performance than plain fact, which is precisely what makes it feel different from a resort playing dress-up.

Seven hundred thousand acres of Kimberley wilderness, and the adults-only Homestead is tucked inside all of it. This all-inclusive resort does the thinking for you: guided hikes, boat cruises, and nature drives fill the days, while evenings gather everyone around a communal table for seasonal Australian cooking and local wine. Rooms have the big windows to match the scenery, and private terraces for when you'd rather not share the view.

A working cattle station the size of a small country sits behind this remote all-inclusive lodge, about 100 miles northwest of Cairns. Accommodation runs from safari tents to two-bedroom pavilions, and the property is small enough that it never feels like a resort. Helicopter tours, river fishing, and sunset cocktails fill the days, and the night sky out here is the kind that makes you feel the universe has been withholding information.

Tucked into a laneway between downtown Sydney and Surry Hills, Alberto's Lounge is a late-night wine bar that has made a home in a stretch of city the city forgot, all carparks and gloomy office blocks. The room fills fast, queues forming by six on Fridays, so a booking is less optional than it sounds. Walk-ins aren't turned away, but patience helps. The kind of place you stay longer than planned.

The centrepiece is a long juniper-blue bar that keeps your eyes on the bartenders and nowhere else, which is exactly the point. Eileen's is the Sydney cocktail bar from Australian gin brand Four Pillars, and it sidesteps the usual branded-venue trap of feeling like a pop-up in disguise. The room is minimal and deliberate, the drinks list built around their own spirits. Expect gin in most of its forms, done with more care than novelty.

A bar built around a bottling operation is an unusual anchor, but PS40 commits: the house sodas, made from local ingredients with no preservatives, drive the whole menu. The bush tonic alone runs through Peruvian cinchona bark, lemon myrtle, and native lemongrass. Cocktails pair those sodas with equally niche spirits, and the list reads like a festival lineup. Find the entrance down Skittle Lane, which feels about right.

A basement at the end of an alley off Clarence Street, the kind of door you'd walk past twice before finding. Inside, 456 bottles of mostly single malts climb a seven-tier back-bar that basically functions as wallpaper. It's a whisky-forward cocktail bar, serious without being solemn, and the queue outside on any given night suggests the city has quietly figured out where the door is.

There's no menu at The Everleigh, just a bartender who asks what you're drinking and means it. This upstairs cocktail bar on Gertrude Street runs on hand-cracked ice, fresh juice, and the kind of unhurried service that makes you feel like someone's actually paying attention. The team came up through Milk & Honey in New York, and the influence shows, with the rigidity quietly left behind on another continent.

Scarlet velvet curtains frame the main bar like a stage set, which is either a bold choice or a perfectly accurate one, given the theatrics of serious cocktail-making. This is a cocktail bar spread over three floors, with the ground level doing most of the heavy lifting. The name nods to the year the word cocktail was first defined in print, so the whole room is a love letter to the form. Vintage shakers, period details, but no stuffiness.

A cocktail bar in Darlinghurst where the drinks arrive with a bit of performance baked in, not just poured. The menu moves between classics and quietly tweaked versions of classics, the kind of place where the bartender knows why a recipe changed in 1947 and will tell you if you ask. A devoted local crowd has kept it busy for years, which is its own kind of argument.

Dark red banquettes, ceiling fans, black-and-white photos on the walls, and a vintage football table set the tone at this elegantly retro cocktail bar above Porteño in Surry Hills. Named for tango legend Carlos Gardel, it leans hard into its Argentine identity with a six-page all-Argentine wine list, more than twenty available by the glass. Bar snacks keep things light if the asado downstairs feels like a commitment.

Velvet in every direction and a semi-covered terrace that lets you smoke while pretending you're in Manhattan: Hemmesphere is a cocktail bar that has been setting the Sydney standard since before most of its regulars knew what a coupe glass was. It started as a members-only room, dropped the velvet rope without dropping the velvet, and now just lets anyone in to enjoy well-made drinks and the kind of room that makes you order a second.

A spiral staircase drops you into a basement rum bar done up with faded wallpaper, plantation chairs, and tropical plants, all of it named for Julio Lobo, the sugar king of Havana who lost everything to Castro. The CBD address is quietly absurd, tucked next to an unassuming Chinese restaurant on Clarence Street, but downstairs the Caribbean fantasy holds. The list leans deep into rum, and the room rewards lingering.

Red velvet curtains and Victorian mahogany panelling inside what was once a Greek restaurant: LOW 302 is a Darlinghurst neighbourhood bar that layers its charm on thick without feeling like it's trying. Local bands play a few nights a week, craft beers and a short cocktail list cover the classics, and the scavenged furniture gives the whole room the feeling of a very well-curated skip.

A 4am license is already reason enough, but Palmer and Co earns it. Tucked into an arched brick basement down a back alley, this Prohibition-era cocktail bar from the Merivale group goes all-in on the speakeasy concept: floor mosaics, period glassware, aged mirrors, and enough taxidermy to make the late Mr. Palmer feel at home. The kind of place where staying until closing time is less a decision than a natural consequence.

A cocktail bar in Potts Point where the menu leans on classic riffs and the room leans on black leather, cabinets of cocktail ephemera, and a rock 'n' roll soundtrack. Liquid nitrogen turns up in a few of the drinks, including a martini shaken with the cold stuff. The nitrogen trolley that once made tableside rounds now sits marooned in the middle of the room, a victim of local legislation, which is perhaps the most interesting piece of bar furniture in Sydney.

A cocktail bar on level three of a Bourke Street building, reached by a creaky elevator that fits seven at a push and opens onto a room dressed in full garden-party drag: wicker, pastel, and waitstaff in tennis whites. The drinks lean fruity and come in jugs, which is either charming or a warning depending on your afternoon. Melbourne's day-drinking set has been making the ascent for a long time.