Australia

11 records across two seas, 1 of them here, and the country where the regulator shapes the product more than the operator does. Most of these islands sit inside the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park or a national park, and the zoning decides where a jetty may go, how many moorings exist and what may be built on the land at all.

That produces an arrangement rare elsewhere: islands shared with science instead of with settlements. Lizard has an Australian Museum research station, Orpheus one from James Cook University, Heron a station older than the resort. The register files these as shared islands and treats the sharing as an improvement — the briefing is better when someone on the island is measuring.

The Tasmanian entry is the counterweight and belongs to a different idea entirely: granite, eleven-degree water, a timber house for ten, and oysters instead of coral. It makes the point that exclusivity is not a temperature.

Cyclones are the region's clock. Several properties here have been rebuilt, in one case twice, and the current buildings meet a standard the originals did not.

This country is filed under more than one water region. 1 record of its 11 is here; the rest are in Coral Sea (10).