Kangaroo Island has garnered a worldwide reputation as a wildlife destination of note, a place where Australia’s marsupials have flourished in the wild owing to the absence of foxes and rabbits.

What KI is all about: the beauty of nature and the simplicity of life on one of Australia’s largest islands.

And yes, it’s large. Smart visitors start by getting their head around the size of Kangaroo Island: from east to west it measures 95mi long and 35mi at its widest.

With that size comes diverse landscapes, including sandy estuaries, towering cliffs, thick native forests and low-lying wetlands, all circled by 280mi of coastline and the wild waters of the Southern Ocean. There’s also a string of must-see natural attractions including Flinders Chase, Remarkable Rocks, Little Sahara and Seal Bay.

The trick is to give yourself at least four days.

Kangaroo Island life

At the last count, KI had 4500 residents, half of them living in the capital Kingscote. The next largest town is Penneshaw, where the mainland car ferry lands from Cape Jervis. Its population is less than 300.

Kingscote is the point of arrival by air, the place for most service providers and headquarters for many fishing charters and tour operators. Don’t be in a hurry to leave: this charming town has a lively vibe in summer, a great pub (The Ozone), an interesting museum, and of course, nightly pelican feeding.

The island’s history is quite dramatic. Aboriginal middens suggest people lived on KI until some 2,000 years ago when they disappeared.

Today, mainland indigenous peoples still know the island as “Karta, meaning “the Land of the Dead”, hinting that something didn’t go well.

Over the ensuing decades the island became a place of fishing, whaling, subsistence agriculture and salvage: some 60 ships were wrecked on the fierce shorelines, leading to the construction of three lighthouses, all still standing and attractions in their own right.

Today, tourism plays a big part in the life of the island, as does grain and livestock farming. It’s also home to valuable fishing operations (exports include lobster, oysters and green lipped abalone) and a large fraternity of artists whose work you’ll encounter at cafes and studios right across KI.

Protected environment

You may have heard KI being called ‘zoo without fences’ for the fact of its large populations of Australian animals.

It’s certainly not difficult to see wildlife in the wild: the KI kangaroo (an endemic sub-species) and Tammar wallabies feed widely at dusk and dawn; koalas frequent a few celebrated forests of eucalypt, and even sand goannas and echidnas can be seen with some regularity.

If isolation served to protect these populations, they’re now sustained by vast tracts of national park which cover a full third of the island. This includes magnificent Flinders Chase which protects 205 square mi of forest, creeks and coast.

Flinders Chase is home to two of the island’s most striking sights, Remarkable Rocks (weird house-sized boulders perched high on a wind-lashed cliff) and Admiral’s Arch (more rock formations, only this time sculpted by waves, and home to a colony of fur seals).

Both formations are seen on a spectacular new walking experience called the Kangaroo Island Wilderness Trail.

The five-day walk starts at the Flinders Visitors Centre, taking in gorges, lagoons, cliffs, rivers, beaches, bays and Cape du Couedic, home to one of the historic lighthouses. It offers almost uninterrupted wilderness; at time of writing, there are plans to feature four dedicated overnight camping areas.

One of the island’s most famous attractions is Seal Bay, a stunning, if badly named rocky cove that’s home to a major breeding colony of Australian sea lions.

You can view the basking animals from a timber boardwalk that descends from an interpretive centre down through dunes onto the beach. If you want to get closer to the animals, park rangers lead regular walking tours on the white sands.

Still with sand, don’t miss Little Sahara close to Seal Bay: this series of stupendous dunes is so large that you can happily toboggan down them for hours.

At the bigger end of things, southern right whales and humpbacks show up in KI waters from May to October.

Super-keen naturalists are also drawn to tick-and-click the endemic Glossy Black Cockatoo and an endemic grass tree found in the rugged northwest corner; the prickly Kangaroo Island conestick (as well as 60 different species of orchid) keep wildflower lovers happy.

If you haven’t the time to scout for wild wildlife, there are native animals at Kangaroo Island Wildlife Park, and Raptor Domain is home to rescued birds of prey and puts on a surprisingly good show every day.