Forget train-spotters: this is the curious new obsession among travel lovers

Meet the devoted Australians who head to the coast for an unlikely hobby.

Surrounded by city-lights, Sydney Harbour is one of the best locations in Australia for ship-spotting. Picture by Getty Images

By Mark Dapin

September 24, 2026

It's a plane-spotter who explains to me that cruise-ship spotting is a thing. I'm chatting with camera-toting flightseer Kevin Alexopoulos outside Melbourne Airport when he mentions that he also likes to spot and photograph cruise ships coming into Port Melbourne.

I enjoy watching cruise ships, too. I live on Sydney Harbour and when a liner leaves its anchorage, it's a spectacular sight - as if a city block has become detached from the CBD and floated off to sea.

There are more than 300 cruise ship visits to NSW annually, and in Sydney "the iconic backdrop only adds to the awe and spectacle", says Rob Rybanic of the Port Authority of NSW.

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Public interest in the ships is reflected in the "almost one million webpage views our online cruise ship schedule received in 12 months", says Rybanic, "and it's why we have a dedicated page for the best locations around the harbour for ship spotting".

So on one slow Wednesday, I take an afternoon to check out the cruise-ship spotters' scene for myself.

According to the Port Authority's Sydney Harbour Cruise Schedule, the Sydney-based Carnival Splendor is in Circular Quay, and the authority's guide to Sydney's Best Ship-Spotting Locations advises that it's best seen from the Rotunda Observation Deck at the Overseas Passenger Terminal: "An epic vantage point to capture all the action as expert marine pilots and powerful tugboats carefully guide the ships into berth."

The colossal Carnival Splendor carries 3012 passengers and 1150 crew, which gives it a larger population than Berry in NSW or Beechworth in the Victorian High Country.

Seen up close from the observation deck, Carnival Splendor looks hyperreal, like a Jeffrey Smart painting of a Jeff Koons installation - but I'm the only person who has turned up to spot it.

I phone Alexopoulos, who explains that it is no longer the cruise season. Most ocean liners visit Australia between October and April, and those months tend to be when the spotters mobilise.

Not that cruise-ship spotting (which is a niche subsidiary of the broader hobby of ship spotting) is a huge pastime. Trevor Powell, the Adelaide-based founder of the Aussie Ship Spotters Facebook group, says, "In Port Adelaide there is a coterie of keen ship spotters. Generally, there's a good four of us. In cruise-ship season, our numbers grow somewhat; we can have as many as 10."

I ask which ships are the best to spot.

"We desperately like to see a new one," he says, "but we're not fussed really."

Powell says he is looking for a photograph of "something slightly out of the norm" - interesting weather conditions, sunset arrivals and dawn departures, dramatic skies ...

"Others just go down there to record the ship," he says. Powell is fond of Radiance of the Seas and has a soft spot for Celebrity Edge and some of the smaller ships of the Silversea line.

Port Melbourne attracts cruise-ship-spotters, too. Picture by Visit Victoria

Alexopoulos likes to take photographs at night "because if I do some long exposures, I can get some really nice pictures of the lights of the ship bouncing off the water", he says.

He photographs the overall ship, but also "things like where the anchor drops", and the moments when "on a beautiful Melbourne night before the ship departs, there're a lot of passengers up on deck, walking around with their wine glasses".

Cruise-ship spotting from Station Pier in Port Melbourne generally attracts at most 20 people, including "two or three who take photos with drones", says Alexopoulos.

"You can fly drones out into the bay, looking back into the ship, and get the city as a background.

"But it's mostly people who are 50-70 years old who appreciate that," he says. "It's not something the youth chase down and put on their TikTok or Instagram or whatever." In search of a historical perspective, I contact Jeffrey Mellefont, honorary research associate at the Australian National Maritime Museum.

Mellefont says spotting is "a distinct behaviour pattern where people (numerically more likely to be male than female) fixate on some category of thing and become compelled to compile, collate, compare and often collect or capture them (photographically or otherwise)".

Mellefont confesses to distinct ship-spotting tendencies of his own, but remains a little puzzled by some cruise aficionados.

"In the olden days of sailing, ships tended to be more organic, rounded and even voluptuous in their forms and hence their aesthetic appeal," he says.

"Many of us considered them to be beautiful. They were often characterised in the feminine, using the pronouns 'she' and 'her'.

"The last generation of passenger ships, which also worked as cruise ships, were still graceful and pleasing to the eye. Look up S.S. Canberra, or the Queen Elizabeth II. Nicely proportioned; 20th-century marine architecture in its classical period.

"Then look at pictures of any of the most recent large cruise ships. Most of them are absolutely hideous, ill-proportioned, vast floating apartment blocks towering above their waterlines."

But even Mellefont finds some of the smaller modern vessels aesthetically pleasing, particularly the ships of local specialist Coral Expeditions, which cruise the Australian coastline.

There seems to be no limits to men's interest in transport, and what they will do to use up their spare time.

It was a plane spotter who put me onto cruise-ship spotters, but "I've got lots of mates who are train spotters", says Powell. "I know truck spotters, and I've got one bus-spotter friend ..."

A bus-spotter?

"He does moonlight on ships during the season," says Powell.

Words byMark Dapin

Mark is a travel writer, historian, novelist and filmmaker. His most recent book is Lest: Australian War Myths (2024).

My all-time favourite destination is ... It changes. For a long time, it was Nepal. Now it's Italy. Strangely, I didn't like momos when I was in Nepal, but now I love them. In contrast, I didn't think much of pizza until I made my third trip to Italy recently, but now I crave it.

Next on my bucket list is … Sicily, at the moment, but that changes, too. I'd also like to go back to Crete and visit Bhutan.

My top travel tip is … sell your children if it means you can avoid an overnight flight in economy class.