Read again Bushranger;
tinydancer on 14th April said;

"Cairns is nice, but Port Douglas is less developed and more special because of that. It is lovely. There is a drop dead gorgeous beach that you can look at, even if you are not really beach people, and the trip to the Barrier Reef is much shorter from Port Douglas than it is from Cairns. Maybe 1.5 hrs vs 3 - 3.5 hrs each way".

Aha, yes the lengthy post, nothing like a short one!

Bushranger - That's a really good point about Darwin/Kakadu and the weather. I looked at several sites and they said that November is really bad but September is okay. Has anyone been there in October? Otherwise, we'll skip Darwin and tack on a little more time to Sydney and Cairns area.

Webboe - Thanks for the info on the GBR. We're not exactly sure how we're going to divy up the time, but we might spend two or three days in Cairns, then a week in Port Douglas, and then three or four days in the Daintree area to get a feel for the different areas.

Akila

We're doing a 5 week tour in November and after reading various views on here and the Lonely Planets guide I realise we need 12 months to do everything so we compromised.

Rightly or wrongly we start in Perth 3 nights, Margaret River 3 nights back to Perth fly to Cairns (4 nights)drive Cairns to Brisbane over 1 week with stops in Townsville, Airlie Beach (2) Rockhampton Hervey Bay (2) and Caloundra then fly to Melbourne from Brisbane. We spend 4 nights in Melbourne then drive the GOR to Adelaide with stops in Lorne, Warnambool, Robe and Adelaide before flying to Sydney for our final 4 nights.

Got all our accommodation booked now so really looking forward to the trip.

It's not just the weather for Darwin/Kakadu akila and though you could get some answers that it is not too bad, it is commonly refeered to by territoreans as the commencement of the build-up to the wet season, and by build up they mean temperatures which have probably started to rise in September from a nominal base of near 30C will start edging higher and there'll be nor relief of cooling afternoon rains and storms/cyclones that come with the wet season.

By not just the weather, I mean that Kakadu will be extremely dry and I was there last July and even then not long after commencement of the dry season it was already dry enough and yet temperature was high enough and some unusually high humidity still about to make you feel you were in summer and you sure sweated the liquid out if doing any strenuous hiking.
Kakadu itself is quite a large national park and so you drive a couple of hundred kilometres or so to get to main attractions in eastern area of the park and then still do quite a bit of driving between them when in that area, all that driving being through scrubby less than interesting after a while bushland, but then I'm an aussie who has spent most of his life living close to bush areas, some of it much more lush than Kakadu - it is certainly not what I would call lush vegetation that one might associate with a national park, some great areas around gorges but that very limited and even in July I found some gorges to be like a heat trap that would make you feel you were being cooked quick time.

Some people do go there in October but they can have it to themselves as far as I am concerned.

Thank you all for your very helpful advice on this topic. Though this post is several months old, I wanted to let you know what we finally decided:

Sydney/Blue Mountains: 10 days
Whitsundays and then driving to Cairns, Port Douglas, Daintree, Atherton Tablelands, etc.: 14 days
Alice Springs/Uluru: 6 days
Adelaide to Melbourne via the Great Ocean Road and wineries and a possible stop in Kangaroo Island: 8 days
Then, on to New Zealand!

In short, we decided to cut back a lot of our proposed plans because we realized how BIG Australia is. We think that this should give us enough time to see things at a fairly leisurely pace. I truly appreciate all of your help and can't wait for the trip. We leave on Sept. 19th (less than 1 month away) and will be posting about our trip at least 2 to 3 times a week on our blog so you can check out our trip report there: www.theroadforks.com

akila: Looks pretty good to me, though I would have traded some of the time in the Sydney area for extra time around Adelaide, e.g., to allow a trip north to the Flinders Ranges. Two weeks in North Queensland will be great. Besides the coastal attractions, don't miss out on some of great inland destinations like Eungella Nat'l Park (near Mackay), Wallaman Falls (near Ingham), Undara, and the Atherton Tablelands....