Out past the headlands, where state waters end, Australia keeps 44 marine parks most of us will never see, and this month brought a glimpse of what they hold. A voyage through the Coral Sea Marine Park found sooty tern, booby and frigatebird colonies thriving across eleven cays, every bird flu test clear, and the reefs at Mellish and Moore standing out as bright spots of coral and fish, while others are still recovering from heat, with James Cook University, Queensland Parks and Mandubarra Indigenous Land and Sea rangers alongside Parks Australia. In August the agency and the Minderoo Foundation published a white paper on reading the sea with environmental DNA, the technique that finds a species from the traces it leaves in the water, and a fifth round of Our Marine Parks Grants opened with 5.6 million dollars for community projects, closing on 27 October. On Sunday we told you about the 149 new species found off Christmas Island. This is the network those discoveries come from.

Now it is being replanned. Management plans written in 2018 run out in 2028, and Parks Australia is preparing six new ones to replace them: for the Temperate East, North, North west and South west networks, for the Coral Sea, and for the first time a plan of its own for Norfolk Island. A second proposal alongside it would expand the Norfolk and Lord Howe marine parks and fold the small Gifford park into Lord Howe, adding about 671,500 square kilometres of high protection, which the government says takes Australia to 30 per cent of its ocean highly protected before 2030. Both island communities asked for it. Anyone can comment until 4pm AEST on Wednesday 30 September through the Have Your Say portal or by post, and the draft plans come back for a second round in 2027. Conservation groups, dive operators, recreational fishers and tourism businesses are all putting their views in, and they do not all agree, which is rather the point of asking. Our own view is a simple one: the parks offshore do vital work almost nobody sees, and the places people can reach from the shore are where a country learns to love them.

Our short take: the review, the six plans and the island proposal are set out by Parks Australia and the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water; the Coral Sea voyage, the eDNA white paper and the grants round are Parks Australia's own news, August and September 2026; the Minister's announcement of 31 July 2026 is linked below. Photograph: Unsplash.