Port Campbell National Park, Great Ocean Road, Victoria

The tourist brochures like to say that the Great Ocean Road runs along the southern coast of Australia for about 400km, from Geelong in Victoria to the South Australian border.

More precisely, the Road is about 150km long, running from Torquay to Warrnambool on what is nearly the most southern coast of the Australian mainland.

View Great Ocean Road in a larger map

Port Campbell National Park, Great Ocean Road, Victoria, Australia. 27 February 2000.

Limestone cliffs

In this part of southern Victoria, sheer rock cliffs of soft limestone run along the coast.

The coast itself is rugged. The road was built under considerable difficulty in the 1920s. It was a major employer of returned servicemen after World War I and was built as a memorial to those killed in that war.

Even today, after widening and straightening of the road, it involves severe sharp turns, steep descents and some very narrow sections.

To get a sense of the scale of these cliffs, consider that these two specks are two people walking along the beach at the base of the cliffs.

Great Ocean Road, Victoria, Australia. 27 February 2000.

Water digging out caves

The coast faces the Southern Ocean: there’s nothing between here and Antarctica. The effect of pounding waves and strong winds is to dig out holes in the cliffs.

Great Ocean Road, Victoria, Australia. 27 February 2000.

Arch at Port Campbell

Holes driven into the rock face develop into caves; the caves into arches; and eventually as arches collapse, islands of rock are stranded in the sea.

This large arch is near Port Campbell. Eventually, this arch will be further eroded leaving the seaward section stranded as a rock tower.

Arch at Port Campbell, Great Ocean Road, Victoria, Australia. 27 February 2000.

Grotto

This grotto is reached by a staircase leading from the car park at the top of the rock cliff down to the sea’s edge.

I especially liked this spot because of the many different blues visible in the water and the sky.

Grotto at Great Ocean Road, Victoria, Australia. 27 February 2000.

Rock stacks

There are dozens of these rock stacks, some over 40m high, slowly being ground down by the sea.

Great Ocean Road, Victoria, Australia. 27 February 2000.

12 Apostles

The most well-known part of the coast is perhaps the series of rock stacks known as the Twelves Apostles, here in the classic pose of the cliched photo, silhouetted in the afternoon sun.

However, if you go there today, you won’t see the large ‘apostle’ in the foreground. It collapsed in 2005.

Links to related sites:

• Port Campbell National Park – this includes a before and after photo when the ‘apostle’ in the foreground fell over in 2005
• Great Ocean Road organization

12 Apostles, Great Ocean Road, Victoria, Australia. 27 February 2000.