Four Seasons in One Day: Welcome to Melbourne (Part II)

In January 1990, there was a bit of an incident involving a limestone formation on the coastline of the Port Campbell National Park in the very south of Victoria. Called London Bridge - named after its rocky resemblance to the English landmark - an eroded section connecting the faraway point of the stack to the shoreline dramatically collapsed into the sea. This is pretty much academic to anyone with even a basic grasp of how the world is formed, but here’s the interesting bit: two people were on it at the time.

To come so close to death’s squelchy grasp and survive is one thing, but to pray witness to such a shape shifting event is quite another; the moment when an area of Victoria just disappeared into the ocean. Of course, land patterns aren’t permanent no matter where we draw the line, and more limestone will be chipped away and eroded to equally dramatic effect in the ensuing years, transforming cliffs into caves, caves into arcs, arcs into stacks, and stacks into the inevitable absorption of the sea. Nowadays, London Bridge is known as London Arc. Pretty soon, it will just be ‘London’. Then ‘Lon’. Then nothing.

Which makes the lauded Twelve Apostles even more dramatic, especially if coastal morphodynamics is your thing. These are a series of limestone stumps dotted along the Victoria coastline, although there seems to be some contention as to where the name comes from, because no matter how many times you count them, there is still clearly seven of them. There were eight, apparently, although one of them gave up somewhere in 2005.

Nowadays, you can choose to pay a healthy sum to take a ten minute helicopter ride over the Twelve Apostles and see the diminishing attributes of Mother Nature in all her tempestuous, foamy glory. It’s worth doing, because you get views like the ones I have attached. We also check out the structures at ground level from the designated viewing plinth, but after a ride in the chopper, that’s basically the equivalent of starting a meal with your pudding.

Anyway, back to those stranded souls who found themselves, quite literally, on the precipice of an earth-shattering event. This is where I will introduce Matt, our tour guide, who makes no qualms regarding the volume of the music in his minibus. “The speakers are right at the back so I have to have it on pretty loud,” which is at least some form of an excuse. He sports a porkpie hat in the manner of a singer from a ska band: Buster Bloodvessel, without the cholesterol. It’s not the volume of the music that’s striking, but rather his choice of songs. Matt makes a habit of accompanying his storytelling with tactful musical referencing. Which explains why our descent from London Arc is accompanied by the apt sounds of Fontella Bass singing ‘Rescue Me’. (This is quite a fun game for anyone with time to spare on a shuttle bus: we decide that he could just as easily opted for ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’, ‘Stuck in the Middle with You’ and, of course, ‘Help!’).

The dramatic beaches near Port Campbell are also infamous as the residual resting place of 19th century shipwrecks which still pot mark the treacherous landscape of Wreck Beach. The Victoria gold rush of the industrial age brought as many as 100 ships a day from Britain to Melbourne full of eager prospectors, and up to 200 ships would meet their end in these waters, trickily navigating the 80km channel between the Bass Strait islands and the limestone sea stacks. One sea weary captain at the time described navigating this passage as being like "threading a needle".

This is where you can still find the rusted anchor of the Marie Gabrielle, a French vessel which ran aground in 1869, and the British steamer Fiji which hit the rocks in 1891 killing its entire crew. “For the impoverished coastal farmers, any wreck was a tragedy, but it could also be like Christmas,” writes Tony Perrottet in The Weekend Australian. “The locals descended in droves to pillage the Fiji for its wood and cargo: liquor, European clothes, porcelain, toys, even a couple of grand pianos.” We do manage to get down and see Loch Ard Gorge, a violent swell of tortuous sea and shaggy rock which would prove fatalistic to a British ship leaving Gravesend in 1878 with its sight set on Melbourne. Only two would survive the famous Loch Ard crash out of the 54-strong crew, including a boy, Tom Pearce, who miraculously managed to land on the only patch of sand in the gorge.

Pearce heard the screams of another passenger, Eva Carmichael, clinging to a chicken coop. She was rescued, and Pearce somehow managed to scale the high cliffs to alert the villages of the disaster (there are some stairs there now, including a handrail). Despite calls from the press for the two to be engaged, Pearce returned to a life at sea where he later found himself the victim of two more shipwrecks before deciding that enough was, indeed, enough.

The reason you can’t just walk down to the fabled Shipwreck Coast is because it’s officially outside of the Great Ocean Road tourist trail. In fact, the cliff tops would prove so overbearing for even the road’s builders that they were forced to make an inland detour around Cape Otway just to avoid it. The Great Ocean Road, Australia’s most scenic route, is some 270km long (nearly 170 miles) and every inch of it was constructed by hand without the aide of explosives or machinery. The Memorial Arch in the town of Anglesea explains how the road was eventually completed in 1932 by some 3,000 soldiers returning from the First World War, a war in which Australia would suffer the highest casualty rate out of all the allied forces: somewhere around the 64% mark. Returning soldiers seeking employment in 1918 were put to work building the road and paid well for the trouble. Matt plays Sheryl Crow singing ‘Every Day is a Winding Road’ as the bus shimmies through a breathtaking, industrial masterpiece.

Matt does three driving tours a week and he’s been up since 5am this morning. “I’ve done this tour so many times I can do it in my sleep,” he says encouragingly, adding, “that’s why I wear the sunglasses.” He drives us through Geelong, which could have been the equivalent of what Melbourne is today if the city's bay was big enough to accommodate larger ships, and then onto Torquay, which is officially where the Great Ocean Road starts.

Australia’s Torquay has a proud heritage to rival that of England’s Torquay, which is now destined to forever be associated with Helen Chamberlain and ‘Faulty Towers’. Torquay is the surf capital of Australia, not only the home of the Quiksilver and Rip Curl brands, but also Bells Beach, which even I had heard of; probably something quite rare for someone with a complete aversion to swimming in the ocean. Quite coincidentally, I can pinpoint the blame for this to a holiday in Torquay, England; braving the bitterly cold, litter-strewn sea while dodging a spare jellyfish. In hindsight, it is unlikely that this was a jellyfish, and was probably a plastic bag of some kind, submerged amongst the dank swell, but still the fear remains.

Bells Beach is mentioned in the film Point Break, you see, which had Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze cast as quite believable surfies, and is now probably old enough to be deemed ironic. “I watched it again recently,” Matt says over his microphone, “I thought it was better in the 90s.” Matt’s derision doesn’t end there: the climax of the film sees the two central actors go to Bells Beach to tackle a once in a lifetime killer wave, dude, but the scene was actually filmed in Portland, Oregon. Bells is still the only certified surfing recreational site in the world, with rights in place to protect the area from damage to the environment. I’m guessing this must have been before that big car park was built, with space to accommodate a daily turnover of ogling tourists, which is certainly something to dwell on as we hit the road again and Matt blares out the greatest hits of The Beach Boys.

The Great Ocean Road is a thing of such sweeping, epic and romantic splendour that it rightly resides as one of Australia’s Top Things To See. It is a dramatic achievement as both a memorial for the country’s fallen soldiers and as a testament to the majestic landscape of which they would never return, sacrificed in the murder of Gallipoli and beyond. Through their commemorations, the road has opened a once remote expanse of coastline to celebration from people all over the world, and that is a splendid thing.

The iconic images of the Apostles may end the trail, but there is much wonder to explore along the way; from the beach town of Lorne, home of the Lorne Pier to Pub Swim (surely only in Australia could a sporting event end in a pub?), to the Kennett River Holiday Park where rosellas and koalas abound, and the Maits Rest Rainforest Walk where slender mountain ash trees stretch to their astronomical heights - the tallest recorded at just under 100 metres. Matt’s whistle-stop tour makes an orchestrated stab at catching a glimpse at all of this wonder in a single day, which is no mean feat, and we return to the hotel exhausted.

“Thank you Matt,” we offer, “and get some rest.”
“Can’t mate,” he says, “I’m up at 5am tomorrow to get to Phillip Island.”
Poor guy. He’s had a hard day’s night.