13 of the best outback pools in Australia worth soaking in

Melissa Mason Melissa Mason
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Travelling in outback Australia often involves lengthy drives in soaring temperatures. What better way to wind down than by plunging yourself into one of the region’s many refreshing swimming spots? 

Whether you prefer a cool dip and trip down memory lane at a nostalgic community pool or soothing aching muscles in warm, spa-like water sourced from Australia’s Great Artesian Basin, the outback swimming pool options may not be endless, but they’re definitely worth seeking out. 

Planning your next Australian road trip based around outback pools and swimming holes is a great way to explore the country. Many of the best baths, gorges and community favourites are either in or directly on the way to the most popular tourist regions.  

It was a tough job but we’ve whittled down the list of our favourite outback pools around Australia to 13 of the best. 

Northern Territory 

1. Longitude 131, Yulara 

If luxury in the outback is what you’re after, Longitude 131 is a must-visit.  

At the most prestigious accommodation in Australia’s Red Centre, you’ll experience Uluru every night from the complete privacy of your own deck. 

a luxurious lodge with an outdoor pool and landscape views on the background
Capture unobstructed scenic views upon dipping in the lodge pool. (Image: Tourism NT/George Apostolidis)

In terms of swimming, the lodge’s pool is architecturally striking and worth lounging at, but it’s the Dune Pavilion that’s worth booking for a truly once-in-a-lifetime experience.  

You’ll absolutely have seen Instagram pictures of its circular plunge pool, complete with uninterrupted views of the Uluru sunset. 

a bottle of wine on the table beside the lodge pool in Uluru
Sip a glass of wine by the pool. (Image: Tourism NT/Julian Kingma)

2. Mataranka Thermal Pool, Mataranka 

Just off the Stuart Highway you’ll find Mataranka, a small town famous for its thermal waters and swimming holes.  

The Mataranka Thermal Pool is a refreshing stop-off on your way through to the Katherine region with its expansive gorges and waterfalls.  

Start at Mataranka Homestead and take a short 100-metre walk through a canopy of Livistona palms filled with red flying foxes (you’ll either love or hate their deafening squeals and chirps) to the pool.

an aerial shot of a girl floating and two girls sitting on the edge of Mataranka Thermal Pool
Soak in the tranquil waters of the Mataranka Thermal Pool. (Image: Tourism NT/Natalie Sum)

3. Ellery Creek Big Hole 

While it’s not technically a pool, this swimming hole in the West MacDonnell Ranges, just 80 kilometres outside of Alice Springs is filled with water year-round, so it’s a guaranteed good time no matter the season.

Take a float with you and relax on the calm waters, then lounge under gum trees on the sandy shores.

swimming in the calm waters of the Ellery Creek Big Hole between rugged cliffs in Uluru
Rugged cliffs surround the Ellery Creek Big Hole. (Image: Tourism NT/Daniel Tran)

4. Katherine Hot Springs 

Another easily accessible, well-managed natural swimming pool, Katherine Hot Springs gets a mention due to its proximity to town. 

Popular with locals and tourists alike, the regularly maintained pools are warm, surrounded by foliage natural shade and (most importantly) croc-free. 

couple relaxing at Katherine Hot Springs
Dip in the clear waters of Katherine Hot Springs. (Image: Tourism NT/Kyle Hunter & Hayley Anderson)

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Queensland 

5. Cunnamulla Pool, Cunnamulla 

The best community pools in outback Australia are the ones that retain their heritage while meeting modern needs.  

Cunnamulla’s local pool is easily one of the best – originally built in the 1960s, it still has its nostalgic facade and cheap entry prices (a $2 coin is all you’ll need) but offers lush, shaded grassy areas and a pristine 50-metre pool with seven lanes.  

6. Innot Hot Springs, Atherton Tablelands 

If you’re heading out to the Undara Lava Tubes along the Savannah Way in outback Queensland, make sure to stop in at Innot Hot Springs.  

A small leisure park with two man-made pools fed by the spring waters, and a natural creek nearby, this is a perfect place to break up the long drive.

a natural spring the flows into the creek
Drop by the Innot Hot Springs for a relaxing dip.

Western Australia 

7. Python Pool, Millstream Chichester National Park 

At the base of a seasonal waterfall in Millstream Chichester National Park, you’ll find the deep, cooling waters of Python Pool.  

Contrary to its name, you won’t find pythons here (thankfully), but instead a picturesque swimming hole at the base of jagged red rocks.  

Several walking trails lead from the pool, and there is a picnic area and barbecue facilities if you’re planning on spending the day. It’s worth noting that the dry season can lead to algae blooms and the area can be dangerous after rain. 

a girl floating on the calm waters surrounded by jagged rock cliffs
Enjoy some alone time beneath the rugged landscape. (Image: Karratha City Council)

8. Fern Pool, Karijini National Park 

Karijini National Park is a must-do in the Pilbara region of Western Australia, and while there are many beautiful gorges worth visiting for some wild swimming, Fern Pool is one of the most easily accessible and serene swimming holes for a quiet afternoon dip.  

Fed by a natural spring, expect rainforest-like ferns and a cascading waterfall for a real-life relaxation soundtrack. Stay a few nights at Karijini Eco Retreat for easy access to the various gorges and swimming holes in the park. 

a portrait shot of the waterfalls and natural pool in Karijini National Park
A natural spring feeds the waterfall at Jubura (Fern Pool), Karijini National Park. (Image: Tourism WA)

New South Wales 

9. Lightning Ridge Bore Bath, Lightning Ridge 

The Great Artesian Basin runs from the tip of Queensland’s Cape York right down to the middle of New South Wales and South Australia, making it one of the largest underground water resources in the world.  

It has provided water to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people for over 60,000 years and continues to do so today.  

The naturally warm waters under Lightning Ridge maintain a 41.5C temperature year-round, making this bore bath a spa-like experience, and one you can enjoy even during the winter months. Facilities include changing rooms and free entry.

woman enjoying a relaxing day in a naturally heated thermal pool at the Artesian Bore Baths, Lightning Ridge
Have a relaxing warm dip in the Artesian Bore Baths. (Image: Destination NSW)

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10. Charles McCarron Baths, Canowindra 

Just outside of the historical centre of Canowindra in the state’s Central West, and with slightly sloped shady spots to set up on your beach towels, this local pool is a lovely place to cool off in summer.  

There are three pools – a main pool, a program pool and a lovely splash pad for the little ones – meaning everyone can enjoy some time in the sun. 

11. Artesian Aquatic Centre, Moree 

Moree is another town right on top of the Great Artesian Basin, so naturally, they’ve utilised those warm waters to fill a state-of-the-art aquatic centre. 

the entrance of Moree Artesian Aquatic Centre
Moree Artesian Aquatic Centre is a private wellness oasis. (Image: Destination NSW)

The kids will love the splash park, with its fountains and cool waters, and for those looking for a reprieve from aching muscles, there are in-water loungers you can settle into with a good book. 

children enjoying the waterpark at Moree Artesian Aquatic Centre
The waterpark caters to children and kids at heart. (Image: Destination NSW)

South Australia 

12. Coward Springs 

Along the famous Oodnadatta Track, you’ll find a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it turnoff for Coward Springs.  

More of a plunge pool than somewhere for laps, it’s well worth the pit stop. For $2, you can relax in a small, wood-edged pool you’ll almost certainly have to yourself, surrounded by palm fronds and rustic wooden panelling.

a mother with her kids enjoying their time together while dipping in a small bore bath
Spend time with your kids while dipping in a small bore bath. (Image: Carly Kruger)

13. Dalhousie Springs 

Way out on the edge of the Simpson Desert within Witjira National Park, you’ll find Dalhousie Springs, a remote series of pools fed by artesian waters.  

There are actually 60 springs, but it’s the main pool that attracts the most attention, given its 38 degrees year-round and visually, looks like a shockingly blue oasis in the middle of outback SA. 

an aerial view of Dalhousie Springs
Dalhousie Springs is filled with hot thermal water. (Image: South Australian Tourism Commission)

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Melissa Mason
Melissa Mason is a freelance journalist who loves road tripping and car snacks. Previously holding Editor roles at ELLE, marie claire, Broadsheet and Pedestrian.TV, she now writes travel and lifestyle content for a wealth of Australian titles like SMH, Mamamia and Urban List, as well as copywriting for international brands. Outside of writing, she loves walks with her dog Ted, a great Sunday afternoon with friends, and op shopping. If she could be anywhere right now it would be lounging on a hammock at a tropical resort with a great romantic fantasy book.
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This scenic Victorian region is the perfect antidote to city life

    Craig Tansley Craig Tansley
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    Video credit: Visit Victoria/Tourism Australia

    The Grampians just might be the ultimate antidote for the metropolis, writes one returning Aussie ready to disconnect from the modern world and reconnect to the Great outdoors.

    There are no kangaroos back in Chicago: they’re all here in the Grampians/Gariwerd. In the heart of the Grampians National Park’s main gateway town, Halls Gap, pods of eastern greys are eating grass beside my parked rental car beneath the stars. Next morning, when I see the backyard of my rented villa on the edge of town for the first time, there are kangaroos feeding beside a slow-moving creek, lined with river red gums.

    Five hundred metres up the road, 50 or so of them are eating by the side of the road in a paddock. I pull over to watch and spot three emus. Yellow-tailed black cockatoos fly overhead towards the tall green mountains just beyond town.

    ‘Kee-ow, keee-oww’… their calls fuse with the maniacal cackle of a kookaburra (or 10). Gawd, how I’ve missed the sound of them. Far above, a wedge-tailed eagle watches, and there you go: the ‘great birds of Australia’ trifecta, all half a kay from the town limits.

    Exchanging city chaos for country calm

    kangaroos near Halls Gap, Grampians National Park
    The park is renowned for its significant diversity of native fauna species. (Image: Visit Victoria/Robert Blackburn)

    I’ve come to the Grampians to disconnect, but the bush offers a connection of its own. This isn’t just any bush, mind you. The Grampians National Park is iconic for many reasons, mostly for its striking sandstone mountains – five ridges run north to south, with abrupt, orange slopes which tumble right into Halls Gap – and for the fact there’s 20,000 years of traditional rock art. Across these mountains there are more than 200 recorded sites to see, created by the Djab Wurrung, Jardwadjali and Gunditjmara peoples. It’s just like our outback… but three hours from Melbourne.

    I’ve come here for a chance at renewal after the chaos of my life in America’s third-largest city, Chicago, where I live for now, at the whim of a relative’s cancer journey. Flying into Melbourne’s airport, it only takes an hour’s drive to feel far away from any concept of suburbia. When I arrive in Halls Gap two hours later, the restaurant I’m eating at clears out entirely by 7:45pm; Chicago already feels a lifetime ago.

    The trails and treasures of the Grampians

    sunrise at Grampians National Park /Gariwerd
    Grampians National Park /Gariwerd covers almost 2000 square kilometres. (Image: Ben Savage)

    Though the national park covers almost 2000 square kilometres, its best-known landmarks are remarkably easy to access. From my carpark here, among the cockatoos and kangaroos on the fringe of Halls Gap, it only takes 60 seconds’ driving time before I’m winding my way up a steep road through rainforest, deep into the mountains.

    Then it’s five minutes more to a carpark that serves as a trailhead for a hike to one of the park’s best vantage points, The Pinnacles. I walk for an hour or so, reacquainting myself with the smells and the sounds of the Aussie bush, before I reach it: a sheer cliff’s edge lookout 500 metres up above Halls Gap.

    walking through a cave, Hollow Mountain
    Overlooking the vast Grampians landscape from Hollow Mountain. (Image: Robert Blackburn)

    There are hikes and there are lookouts and waterfalls all across this part of the park near town. Some are a short stroll from a carpark; others involve long, arduous hikes through forest. The longest is the Grampians Peaks Trail, Victoria’s newest and longest iconic walk, which runs 160 kilometres – the entire length of Grampians National Park.

    Local activities operator Absolute Outdoors shows me glimpses of the trail. The company’s owner, Adrian Manikas, says it’s the best walk he’s done in Australia. He says he’s worked in national parks across the world, but this was the one he wanted to bring his children up in.

    “There’s something about the Grampians,” he says, as he leads me up a path to where there’s wooden platforms for tents, beside a hut looking straight out across western Victoria from a kilometre up in the sky (these are part of the guided hiking options for the trail). “There are things out here that you won’t see anywhere else in Australia.” Last summer, 80 per cent of the park was damaged by bushfire, but Manikas shows me its regrowth, and tells me of the manic effort put in by volunteers from town – with firefighters from all over Australia – to help save Halls Gap.

    wildflowers in Grampians National Park
    Spot wildflowers. (Image: Visit Victoria)

    We drive back down to Halls Gap at dusk to abseil down a mountain under the stars, a few minutes’ walk off the main road into town. We have headlamps, but a full moon is enough to light my way down. It takes blind faith to walk backwards down a mountain into a black void, though the upside is I can’t see the extent of my descent.

    Grampians National Park at sunset
    Grampians National Park at sunset. (Image: Wine Australian)

    The stargazing is ruined by the moon, of course, but you should see how its glow lights up the orange of the sandstone, like in a theme park. When I’m done, I stand on a rocky plateau drinking hot chocolate and listening to the Aussie animals who prefer nighttime. I can see the streets of Halls Gap off in the distance on this Friday night. The restaurants may stay open until 8pm tonight.

    What else is on offer in The Grampians?

    a boat travelling along the Wimmera River inDimboola
    Travelling along the Wimmera River in Dimboola. (Image: Chris McConville)

    You’ll find all sorts of adventures out here – from rock climbing to canoeing to hiking – but there’s more to the Grampians than a couple of thousand square kilometres of trees and mountains. Halls Gap may be known to most people, but what of Pomonal, and Dimboola, and Horsham? Here in the shadow of those big sandstone mountains there are towns and communities most of us don’t know to visit.

    And who knew that the Grampians is home to Victoria’s most underrated wine region? My disconnection this morning comes not in a forest, but in the tasting rooms and winery restaurants of the district. Like Pomonal Estate, barely 10 minutes’ drive east of Halls Gap, where UK-born chef Dean Sibthorp prepares a locally caught barramundi with lentil, pumpkin and finger lime in a restaurant beside the vines at the base of the Grampians. Husband-and-wife team Pep and Adam Atchison tell me stories as they pour their prize wines (shiraz is the hero in these parts).

    dining at Pomonal Estate
    Dine in a restaurant beside vines at Pomonal Estate. (Image: Tourism Australia)

    Three minutes’ drive back down the road, long-time mates Hadyn Black and Darcy Naunton run an eclectic cellar door out of a corrugated iron shed, near downtown Pomonal. The Christmas before last, half the houses in Pomonal burnt down in a bushfire, but these locals are a resilient lot.

    The fires also didn’t stop the construction of the first art centre in Australia dedicated to environmental art in a nature-based precinct a little further down the road (that’s Wama – the National Centre for Environmental Arts), which opened in July. And some of the world’s oldest and rarest grape vines have survived 160 years at Best’s Wines, outside the heritage town of Great Western. There’s plantings here from the year 1868, and there’s wines stored in century-old barrels within 150-year-old tunnels beneath the tasting room. On the other side of town, Seppelt Wines’ roots go back to 1865. They’re both only a 30-minute drive from Halls Gap.

    Salingers of Great Western
    Great Western is a charming heritage town. (Image: Griffin Simm)

    There’s more to explore yet; I drive through tiny historic towns that barely make the map. Still part of the Grampians, they’re as pretty as the mountains behind them: full of late 19th-century/early 20th-century post offices, government offices and bank buildings, converted now to all manner of bric-a-brac stores and cafes.

    The Imaginarium is one, in quirky Dimboola, where I sleep in the manager’s residence of an old National Australia Bank after a gourmet dinner at the local golf club, run by noted chef and teacher, Cat Clarke – a pioneer of modern Indigenous Australian cooking. Just south, I spend an entire afternoon at a winery, Norton Estate Wines, set on rolling calico-coloured hills that make me think of Tuscany, chit-chatting with owners Chris and Sam Spence.

    Being here takes me back two decades, when I lived here for a time. It had all seemed as foreign as if I’d driven to another planet back then (from Sydney/Warrane), but there seemed something inherently and immediately good about this place, like I’d lived here before.

    And it’s the Australian small-town familiarity of the Grampians that offers me connection back to my own country. Even in the better-known Halls Gap, Liz from Kerrie’s Creations knows I like my lattes with soy milk and one sugar. And while I never do get the name of the lady at the local Ampol station, I sure know a lot about her life.

    Kookaburras on a tree
    Kookaburras are one of some 230 bird species. (Image: Darren Donlen)

    You can be a local here in a day; how good is that? In Chicago, I don’t even know who my neighbour is. Though each day at dusk – when the kangaroos gather outside my villa, and the kookaburras and the black cockatoos shout out loud before settling in to sleep – I prefer the quieter connection I get out there in the bush, beneath these orange mountains.

    A traveller’s checklist

    Staying there

    Sleep beside the wildlife on the edge of Halls Gap at Serenity.

    Playing there

    abseiling down Hollow Mountain
    Hollow Mountain is a popular abseiling site.

    Go abseiling under the stars or join a guided hike with Absolute Outdoors. Visit Wama, Australia’s first environmental art centre. Check out Dimboola’s eccentric Imaginarium.

    Eating there

    steak, naan bread and beer at Paper Scissors Rock in Halls Gap
    Paper Scissors Rock in Halls Gap serves a great steak on naan bread.

    Eat world-class cuisine at Pomonal Estate. Dine and stay at much-revered icon Royal Mail Hotel in Dunkeld. The ‘steak on naan’ at Halls Gap brewhouse Paper Scissors Rock, can’t be beat.

    Dunkeld Arboretum in Grampians National Park
    The serene Dunkeld Arboretum.

    For Halls Gap’s best breakfasts head to Livefast Cafe. Sip local wines at Great Western’s historic wineries, Best’s Wines, Seppelt Wines and Norton Estate Wines.

    two glasses of beer at Paper Scissors Rock in Halls Gap
    Sink a cold one at Paper Scissors Rock.