Great Barrier Reef: British tourists declared dead after drowning

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April 14, 2025
3 min read

Great Barrier Reef: British tourists declared dead after drowning

A pair of British tourists have drowned near the coast of a town on the southern tip of the Great Barrier Reef. A 17 year old boy and 46 year old man were “swept out to sea,” the BBC reported, while swimming at a beach of popular tourist town, Seventeen Seventy in Queensland town, named for the year Captain James Cook landed in Australia.

The pair were declared dead after being pulled from the water by a police rescue helicopter. An Australian man is in a life-threatening condition after also being swept out to sea. He was airlifted to hospital, suffering from serious head injuries.

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The pair who died at the scene were from the UK, police revealed. Their names however have not yet been made public. Only one beach is patrolled by lifeguards within a 50km radius of the town near the Great Barrier Reef.

“Sunday’s mission was a difficult one,” a social media post from CapRescue, the emergency rescue service that found all three men said. The deaths, it added, had happened “despite the best efforts of all involved.”

The injured Australian man was from Monto, a town 150km inland from Seventeen Seventy, police revealed.

“We’re not sure whether the third person jumped into the water trying to perform a rescue,” according to Surf Life Saving Queensland’s Darren Everard who spoke with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).

The drownings are all being treated as non-suspicious by the police who are preparing a report for the coroner.

Australia saw around 170 people drown in 2024. Around a quarter of them were born overseas, Royal Life Saving Australia says. Coastal fatalities there are mostly around creeks and headlands at high tide when “it’s chaos in the water,” according to Everard. He encouraged tourists to “seek local knowledge,” and swim between the flags to stay safe.

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