A DNA barcoding approach shows potential to be advantageous for the identification of taxa for which the use of morphology, or the association of different life stages, is problematic. For these reasons, we tested the efficacy of cytochrome oxidase I (COI) DNA barcodes for the identification of forensically important blowflies of the genus Chrysomya (Diptera: Calliphoridae), collected from the east coast of Australia. The identification of several Chrysomya species is hampered by their similar morphologies, even as adults. A 658 bp fragment of the COI gene was sequenced from 56 specimens, representing all nine Australian Chrysomya and three calliphorid outgroups. The second ribosomal transcribed spacer (ITS2) was sequenced from some species to verify results obtained using COI. The COI Sequences divergences were calculated using the Kimura-two-parameter distance model, and a bootstrap neighbour-joining (NJ) tree was generated to provide a graphic display of the patterns of divergence among the species. We found the COI barcode to be successful for the identification of Australian Chrysomya, with all species resolved as reciprocally monophyletic groups on the NJ tree, with strong bootstrap support. The only exception was a specimen identified as Ch. saffranea, which was recovered with its sister species, Ch. megacephala, on the NJ tree. Further morphological and molecular evidence led to the conclusion that the specimen was a hybrid, and was not included in further analyses. Intraspecific sequence divergences averaged 0.097% (range = 0-0.612%), while interspecific divergences averaged 6.499% (range = 0.458-9.254%). The overlapping sequence divergences for the Chrysomya is attributable to the low sequence divergence (mean = 0.484%) between Ch. megacephala and Ch. saffranea. We found no difference in species delineation when we compared the NJ tree with more complex Bayesian analyses of the dataset.