It could be the backdrop to an epic film. Taking in the view of the Twelve Apostles – perhaps Australia’s most famous rock formation – it’s easy to imagine that only minutes earlier set builders had been busy, perched precariously on ladders, sculpting these works of art in the midst of the churning Southern Ocean.
It’s dusk, and the sun is setting into the waves behind the limestone pinnacles, the sky ablaze with crimson-tinted clouds. Below, waves rasp the beach and, as daylight fades, small figures appear amid the frothy surf. These are fairy penguins, just over a foot tall, hurrying for land before dark.
It’s towards the end of our second day driving the Great Ocean Road, west of Melbourne, that we reach the route’s most familiar landmark, but there have been many spectacular sights along the way.
The route begins in Torquay, south-west of the host city for the Boxing Day Ashes Test. It’s an attractive seaside town, where rolling seas and ocean breezes conspire to form the “surf coast”, globally renowned among boardriders for exciting breaks like those at nearby Bells Beach.
It’s on this early section of the drive, particularly between the holiday resorts of Anglesea and Apollo Bay, that the Great Ocean Road earns its name. It threads along the shoreline, rising and dipping to follow the contours of the cliffs and running close to Bass Strait. The way the drive curls along the coastline – and the perspective it gives of travelling at the edge of the vast Australian landmass – is one of the things that makes this route unforgettable.
On a rare flat section, we pause at a wooden memorial arch that commemorates the work of the 2,000-plus ex-servicemen who constructed the Great Ocean Road as a tribute to their fallen first-world-war colleagues. Built largely by hand, using picks and shovels, the 151-mile route was completed in 1932.
The road continues to wind along the coastline to Lorne, set beside the mouth of the Erskine river and behind Louttit Bay, where we gaze over the sea from behind our fish and chip lunch at the Beachside pavilion. Further west, we pass through towns like Separation Creek and Kennett River, the road hugging the shore all the way to our overnight stop at Apollo Bay.
Driving up into the hills above the seaside town, we check into Chris’s Beacon Point, with its villas built into the cliffs and restaurant offering impeccable Greek cuisine, presided over by septuagenarian owner Chris, who grew up in Thessaloniki.
The next morning we forge further west, skirting inland through pastures and into the Otway Ranges and the Great Otway national park, a 103,000-hectare (255,000-acre) swathe of coastal rainforest, gullies and waterfalls that provides a habitat for koalas, echidnas and rarely seen duck-billed platypuses. Much of the 64-mile Great Ocean Walk hiking trail runs through the Otways, providing an intimate experience of the remote coastline between Apollo Bay and the Twelve Apostles.
The Otways are also where Victoria’s “shipwreck coast” begins, stretching along the remainder of the Great Ocean Road and beyond. Here, formidable headlands and sandstone cliffs rear up against the pounding Southern Ocean, creating treacherous conditions for ships, hundreds of which foundered offshore during the 19th century.
In some places, the ocean has hollowed out coves in the coastline and bludgeoned it into isolated formations similar to the Twelve Apostles. London Arch – formerly known as London Bridge before it collapsed in 1990 – and the Grotto, with its glimmering, rock-framed pool are some of the finest examples of this.
We visit these dramatic sites from our overnight base in the village of Port Campbell before continuing on to Warrnambool, where we spend hours investigating local shipwreck history at the Flagstaff Hill Maritime Museum. At our next stop, Port Fairy – a delightful seaside enclave full of well-preserved 19th-century buildings – we stay overnight at the Merrijig Inn, one of Victoria’s oldest hotels, before beginning the return leg.
Having learned more at Flagstaff Hill about the 1878 wreck of the British ship the Loch Ard, we feel duty-bound, on our return journey, to revisit the scene of its demise – a place now known as Loch Ard Gorge, near the Twelve Apostles.
The survival story of teenagers Eva Carmichael and Tom Pearce, the ship’s apprentice, is among the most compelling in Australia’s colonial history. Of the 54 passengers and crew on board, they were the only two to reach the shore alive. When they were then forced to sleep the night in a cave together, the Australian press desperately searched for a romantic link between the 18-year-olds.
It has all the ingredients of a film script, along with the perfect setting in the backdrops that line the Great Ocean Road.
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