Whitsunday Coast

Whilst Whitsunday Islands is not an officially approved place name, it is a label applied to a collection of continental islands of various sizes off the central coast of Queensland, Australia, situated between just south of Bowen and to the north of Mackay, some 900 kilometres (560 mi) north of Brisbane.

The term is a mis-nomer, based as it is on Captain Cook’s naming of what is now known as the Whitsunday Passage (in Cook’s Journal, Whitsunday’s Passage) in the belief that the passage was discovered on Whitsunday whereas, because of an error in time-keeping, it was actually Whit-Monday.