On 23 Feb 2016, at 5:51 am, Clive D.W. Feather <clive@davros.org> wrote:
He says that everyone calls them "The Whitsundays" and he's never heard the term "the Holiday Islands".
Adding my 2 cents as someone who’s lived in either New South Wales or Victoria my whole life. I’ve also only ever heard of those islands being referred to as the Whitsundays or Whitsunday Islands. When people on the east coast of Australia go holidaying there, they either use the group term of “the Whitsundays” or mention the specific island they’re going to (e.g. “a holiday on Hamilton Island”). To the point about local vs global names, it’s the term used in official tourist guides: http://www.australia.com/en/places/qld/whitsundays-islands.html https://www.lonelyplanet.com/australia/queensland/whitsunday-islands
More to the point, he's from Brisbane and so knows the area (unlike, say, someone from Cairns).
Minor nitpick here, but the islands are around 400km closer to Cairns than they are to Brisbane.