Ancient Wonder
Australia’s newest UNESCO World Heritage site is within tantalising reach of the Great Ocean Road. Sandy Guy checks it out.
VICTORIA’S south-west coast is a place of incredible natural beauty, and the
Great Ocean Road, the iconic coastal highway winding between Torquay and Warrnambool, is one of Australia’s foremost travel destinations. But there are plenty of reasons to venture beyond it: less than 100km further west are historic coastal towns such as Port Fairy and Portland; venture a little inland and you’ll come to the rising star of Australian tourism, Budj Bim Cultural Landscape.
One of Australia’s most significant historic sites, it was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List in July, joining the likes of Kakadu National Park and the Great Barrier Reef. Budj Bim is home to an ancient aquaculture system and the foundations of around 200 stone dwellings that are evidence of a settled community of villages dating back 6600 years. Here, local Gunditjmara people used volcanic rock to build a complex system of fish traps, weirs and ponds to manage water flows from nearby Lake Condah more than a thousand years before Stonehenge and the Pyramids of Egypt were raised.
The landscape is timeless, surreal and very peaceful – you know it hasn’t changed much over the millennia, and it’s incredible to think about the untold generations of people who lived here, with the same species of birds squawking overhead (more than 250 species have been recorded); koalas rustling in the trees, as they still do, wombats ambling across the scrub, wallabies darting through the bush. It’s important to do a guided tour, as guides bring the story of Budj Bim to life. Contact Budj Bim Tours, budjbimtours.net