David Kippen travels Australia’s Great Ocean Road
David Kippen takes us on the trail of a unique memorial built by veterans.
MUCH of Australia’s iconic National Heritage listed Great Ocean Road was built by World War I veterans.
It is both the world’s longest war memorial and a major attraction for domestic and international tourists.
From Torquay on the Surf Coast, 21 kilometres south of Victoria’s second largest city, Geelong, it stretches 243 km west to Allansford on the Shipwreck Coast.
That’s 151 miles.
In 1916, the Country Roads Board proposed building the road to employ returned diggers and improve access to coastal towns like Lorne and Apollo Bay.
Previously the only access was by sea or over the Otway Range via tracks through dense forest. High rainfall often made these tracks impassable.
The first 36 km, through Anglesea and Aireys Inlet to the Eastern View memorial arch, crosses undulating coastal heathland.
In 1939 an arch was built at the former tollgate site to honour the veterans who laboured between 1919 and 1932 to build the road to Apollo Bay.
The current simple timber arch, supported by stone and cement pillars, replaced the arch damaged in a 1983 bushfire.
A 1970s government proposal to remove the arch, deeming it a traffic hazard, was quickly ditched following public protests.
On the road’s 75th anniversary a sculpture showing two returned soldiers working on the road was added beside the arch.
Much of the 57 km from the arch to Apollo Bay is cut into steep hillsides which drop directly into Bass Strait.
Driving this section east to west provides the best views from the many scenic lookouts.
The Great Ocean Road Heritage Centre, located in the Lorne Visitor Centre,
has a comprehensive display honouring the diggers who built the road.
Some 3,000 returned servicemen undertook the dangerous and difficult work to build a road through the dense wilderness and along steep hillsides that dropped into the ocean.
They earned 10/6, plus keep, for an eight-hour day, and lived communally in bush camps.
Most work was done by pick and shovel and wheelbarrow.
Holes for explosives were bored by hand using a hammer and tap. The blasting upset some workers by reminding them of the trenches.
The Eastern View to
Lorne toll road opened in 1922. In the 1930s tolls were: car and driver, 2/6; passengers, 1/6.
Given the Australian tendency to challenge authority, toll collectors had to watch for passengers who alighted and walked along the beach before rejoining their cars once past the tollgate.
Tolls were abolished when the road was given to the Victorian government in October 1936.
Mount Defiance lookout, a few kilometres past
Lorne, has memorial plaques to the roadbuilding diggers and to Howard Hitchcock, the Father of the Road.
This philanthropist organised the road’s funding and construction.
The escaped convict William Buckley, the Wild White Man, who lived nearby in 1803/4, is also remembered here.
The cliff-hugging Lorne to Apollo Bay section of the road was completed in 1932 and was officially opened by Victoria’s Lieutenant-Governor, Sir William Irvine.
“It may be the key that will unlock to thousands the majesty of our rockbound coast.”
From Apollo Bay the road cuts across Cape Otway. A detour to visit mainland Australia’s oldest-surviving lighthouse at Cape Otway is worthwhile.
For 19th-century travellers, the Beacon of Hope, sitting 90 metres above the point where Bass Strait and the Southern Ocean meet, was often their first glimpse of Australia.
Whale-watching is popular here during winter and spring (from May to October).
From Cape Otway the road climbs inland for
15 km through the Great Otway National Park’s tall eucalyptus forest to Lavers Hill.
At 450 metres, this small agricultural and tourist town is the highest point on the road.
The road then drops down to the Shipwreck Coast and continues westward through the coastal heathland of Port Campbell National Park to end at Allansford.
The prevailing strong south-westerly winds drove many 19th-century ships on to this rocky coast as they attempted to enter Bass Strait.
Loch Ard Gorge is a narrow inlet where, in 1878, the only two survivors of one wreck were washed ashore.
The coastal Marine National Park includes a number of spectacular sandstone stacks, including the Twelve Apostles and London Bridge, formerly a double-span natural bridge connected to the mainland.
When the first arch collapsed in 1990, two stranded tourists had to be rescued by helicopter.