Twist and turns of the Great Ocean Road

It's spectacular and beautiful but Gemma Nisbet discovers the famous Victorian highway is not for the faint-hearted.

We leave Melbourne early under a low, grey sky, driving a car borrowed from a friend. I’ve become unused to driving a manual and battle through the stop-start peak-hour traffic, stalling intermittently, hoping I won’t be required to make any hook turns. From the passenger seat, my boyfriend – holder of an automatic-only license and thus relegated to navigation duties – tries and fails to calm my nerves.

Heading out of the city, the traffic begins to clear. We stop at a service station for sandwiches in lieu of breakfast, and I stall the car a few more times as we head off again. Bypassing Geelong, we follow a fresh-looking highway through half-built suburbs screened by high walls on either side of the road. Then, after the turnoff for Torquay, the clouds finally make good on their threat of rain, cueing frantic efforts to operate the windscreen wipers.

Today we’re driving part of the Great Ocean Road, famed for its beauty and splendour. But things are not off to a promising start.

View over Lorne. Picture: Gemma Nisbet

At Torquay, we watch some hardy souls having surfing lessons on the main beach before driving a little further along the coast to Bell’s Beach, where the wet-suited figures waiting for waves seem considerably more adept. It’s a beautiful spot, yellowish cliffs plunging to the ocean, which is relatively still and glassy-grey this morning, the seaweed-green of the reef exposed. Better still, it has stopped raining.

From here the road weaves inland through bushland, but by the time we re-join the coast at the small town of Anglesea, things are looking up weather-wise. As we pull in to Split Point Lighthouse, just down the coast at Aireys Inlet, blue sky is beginning to break through the clouds. We walk out to the edge of the point, past the old lighthouse keepers’ cottages to the viewing platforms overlooking the cliffs. A group of tourists are huddled together against the blasting wind. Nearby, schoolchildren on an excursion are scattered about, filling in their worksheets, apparently unperturbed by the gale. Something about the place feels oddly familiar, and it’s not until later that I realise why: I recognise it from its starring role in the children’s TV show Round the Twist, about a family that lives in a lighthouse.

A little further on, we pull over to gawk at the Pole House, a simple square of steel and glass suspended 40m above the scrub. Laying claim to being the most photographed house on the Great Ocean Road, this is actually the second Pole House to hover here. The 1970s original was demolished in 2013, in poor condition after nearly 40 years of exposure to the elements, to make way for the new version, which is the same shape and size as the old structure and is accessed via a glass-sided walkway.

View of the Pole House from the Great Ocean Road. Picture: Gemma Nisbet

As impressive as the house is, the road itself has something even more spectacular in store for us. At Eastern View, we pass through the timber Great Ocean Road Memorial Arch – itself the subject of many thousands of photographs – before reaching Devil’s Elbow. It’s here that this famously windy road begins to twist and snake in earnest, curling back in a hairpin bend which is the tightest along the route, set on a sheer cliff face above the sea. If the drive so far has been enjoyable and intriguing, it’s here that it becomes really, really interesting.

Just before Devil’s Bend, we pull over to read the plaque beside the road, which fills us in on some of the history. As it informs us, the Great Ocean Road was built after the First World War as a memorial to the Victorians who had served in the war while also providing returned servicemen with employment and opening up the region to tourism and development. Some 3000 returned servicemen worked on the project, living in camps along the route. The plaque stresses that they were well-paid and lived in good conditions, but the work – done without heavy machinery, using picks, shovels, horses and dynamite – must have been arduous. Some of the men, suffering from shell-shock from combat, apparently found the dynamiting traumatic and I read later that it’s thought some lives were lost during construction, although the records are sketchy as many were destroyed during World War Two.

This section of the road, between Eastern View and Lorne, was the first stretch to open in 1922 (the project would not be finished for another decade). Winding around the coast, we pass a sign marking the site of the road’s last toll gate. Perhaps surprisingly, given its philanthropic aims, the Great Ocean Road was built with private funds and tolls – initially two shillings for motor cars – were charged until the debt was repaid. In 1936, the road was handed over to the State, and the tolls removed.

Coast viewed from the Great Ocean Road between Eastern View and Lorne. Picture: Gemma Nisbet

Back then, the road was considered a pretty dicey drive, and even today the sharp turns and narrow stretches require my full attention, despite the very compelling distraction of the views. We stop regularly, making what you might charitably call gentle progress past lush vegetation and deserted beaches, my foot never straying too far from the break pedal until we arrive in the pretty town of Lorne.

First settled by Europeans in the 1840s, Lorne enjoyed some popularity as a seaside resort in Victorian times – Rudyard Kipling visited in 1891 – but it was the Great Ocean Road which really opened the town up to tourism. Today it’s perhaps best known for its annual Falls Music & Arts Festival on New Years Eve, and it’s an appealing place, with nice boutiques and shops, a couple of attractive historic hotels, pretty houses, and a well-tended beachfront. We stop in at Grandma Shields Bakery for morning tea and, resisting the temptation to linger, press on.

We’re soon glad we did, because the section of road after Lorne is, if anything, even more spectacular than what preceded it, made all the more attractive by the appearance of blue skies overhead. The pace is still – ahem – gentle, and I have to pull over more than a few times to allow more confident drivers to pass. But we arrive in time for lunch at Apollo Bay, which is only the mid point of the Great Ocean Road (it stretches along to Allansford, near Warrnambool) but as far along its route as we’ll travel today.

And so, after eating and taking a fairly lengthy trek around the Apollo Bay Golf Course at the behest of the navigator, we turn back, heading inland this time, through the lush rainforest of the Otway Ranges and beyond, through a pastoral landscape of cows and timber cottages, via Geelong to Melbourne.

By the time we return the car, it’s rush hour once again. But now the skies are clear, the city washed in the glowing light of the late-afternoon. The grey clouds of the morning seem a distant memory.