Great Ocean Road

Where it goes. The Great Ocean Road runs 240 kilometres along Victoria's south-west coast, beginning at Torquay outside Geelong and ending at Allansford near Warrnambool. The eastern half is a cliff-edge corniche: the carriageway is cut into the hillside barely above the surf, threading through Anglesea, Aireys Inlet, Lorne and Apollo Bay with the Southern Ocean on one side and the Otway Ranges rising immediately on the other. Past Apollo Bay it turns inland through cool-temperate rainforest before dropping back to the coast at Princetown and running west along the limestone Shipwreck Coast to Port Campbell and Peterborough.

The story behind it. It is a war memorial — officially the largest in the world. Construction began on 19 September 1919 and ran to November 1932, and roughly 3,000 returned servicemen did the work, largely by hand: picks, shovels, wheelbarrows and explosives, on cliff faces reached from the sea because there was no land access. Men lived in tent camps along the route, were paid modest wages, and built the road as both a memorial to the dead of the First World War and a jobs programme for the men who came back. Sections opened progressively; the completion ceremony in November 1932 was led by Victoria's lieutenant-governor Sir William Irvine. The road was added to the Australian National Heritage List in 2011 and given further statutory protection under the Great Ocean Road and Environs Protection Act 2020.

The Memorial Arch. At Eastern View, between Aireys Inlet and Lorne, a timber arch spans the carriageway carrying the road's dedication. The original was erected in 1939 in memory of W. T. B. McCormick, the Country Roads Board chairman who drove the project; it has been rebuilt several times since — for road widening, after bushfire, and after storm damage — most recently in 1990. A sculpture of two diggers with a wheelbarrow stands beside it. It is the single best place to understand that this road is a monument first and a scenic drive second.

What you actually see along it. Torquay is the commercial birthplace of Australian surfing and the home of Rip Curl and Quiksilver; four kilometres on, Bells Beach hosts the Rip Curl Pro at Easter, the longest continuously running professional surfing contest in the world. Aireys Inlet has the 1891 Split Point Lighthouse, known to a generation of viewers as the lighthouse from the children's series Round the Twist, which was filmed there. Lorne is the road's resort town, with Erskine Falls in the hills behind it. Cape Otway carries the mainland's oldest surviving lighthouse, lit in 1848, and the sealed road in is lined with wild koalas. West of Princetown come the Twelve Apostles, Loch Ard Gorge, the Bay of Islands and London Bridge, whose outer span collapsed in January 1990 leaving two tourists stranded on the far side to be lifted off by helicopter.

On screen. The road is a staple of Australian screen work as landscape rather than as setting: aerial passes along the Otway cliffs and the Apostles appear in tourism campaigns, car commercials and documentary series constantly, and the coastal stretch between Lorne and Apollo Bay is one of the most heavily permitted driving-plate locations in the country. Round the Twist (1989 onward) put Split Point Lighthouse into the memory of every Australian schoolchild of the period. Productions shooting the Shipwreck Coast usually base themselves in Port Campbell, where the accommodation is, and shoot the cliffs at first light before the coach traffic arrives.

Getting there and timing. From Melbourne, drive to Torquay in about ninety minutes via the Princes Freeway and Geelong, then east to west along the coast. Doing the road properly takes two days; a single-day return from Melbourne means five to six hours behind the wheel and produces little more than a car-park tour. Traffic runs anticlockwise for a reason — westbound puts the ocean on the passenger side and every lookout on the near side of the road. The carriageway is narrow, winding and unlit, with an eighty limit dropping frequently to sixty; overtaking bays are few and log trucks use it. Whales are visible off Logans Beach at Warrnambool between June and September. Summer weekends and the Easter surf contest are the busiest periods by a wide margin.