Hinchinbrook Island

Hinchinbrook Island, also known as Pouandai to the Biyaygiri people, is a location in Australia's Queensland.

It is located in the Cassowary Coast Region, east of Cardwell and north of Lucinda. The island is separated from the northeastern coast of Queensland by the narrow Hinchinbrook Channel. The entire island is encapsulated within the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park and is protected as the Hinchinbrook Island National Park, except for a small abandoned resort.

The island's landscape is rugged and wild, with steep rainforest-covered Cardwell Range Escarpment to the west. The island is thought to have had dry land connections to the mainland for most of the past few million years. To the north of Hinchinbrook Island, Rockingham Bay hosts continental islands densely covered in vegetation. South of the island, the Cardwell Range gives way to the Herbert River floodplain and delta.

Hinchinbrook Island is known for its natural heritage. The island covers late Palaeozoic igneous rocks, with the main pluton being the 16-kilometer-long Hinchinbrook Granite. The island's landscape includes mangrove-fringed estuaries, a result of the Valley of the Herbert River flooding after the Last Glacial Period. The island and coastal ranges are believed to have been thrust as blocks with subsidence between them forming the coastal plain. The summit level of the island is an older dissected surface that has been uplifted to approximately 1 kilometer or more above sea level.

The island is home to diverse terrestrial vegetation types, including shrubs, heath, bushland, and forest. It is also a refuge for numerous endangered species, such as the