outdoor AUSTRALIA

eyewitness

WALKING INTO VICTORIA’S SHIPWRECK PAST

A multi-day trek along the Great Ocean Walk uncovers intriguing tales from Victoria’s maritime history and ends at one of its most iconic natural features

After inspecting the steep staircase, which tumbles down the golden cliff in fits and starts then disappears out of view, our small band of hikers is faced with a dilemma. Do we dare go down or do we commit to the narrow forest trail we’re already on?

Since striking out from Blanket Bay, a trailhead campground outside the town of Apollo Bay on Victoria’s southwest coast, our journey along the Great Ocean Walk has been uncomplicated. We’ve walked beneath crooked eucalypt forests where we’ve searched for koalas dozing in the canopy, listened to the flurry of crimson rosellas flitting between the trees and found shy wallabies munching on mushrooms. Now the winding trail has led to a dramatic fork above Wreck Beach. Below us, a century’s worth of tides have buried and exposed two shipwrecks, offering a tantalising glimpse into Victoria’s maritime past. But seeing the wrecks comes with a gamble.

“It’s 366 wooden steps down to Wreck Beach. We could get down there and find the tide has come too far in, which means a hard climb back to where we started with nothing to show for it,” says Joe Lionnet, while rubbing his salt and pepper beard. Despite our guide’s words of caution, the wry smile on his face and the glint in his bespectacled eyes hints that he hopes we’ll choose the steps.

Our group splits and just a handful of us descend, plunging down with no idea what lies ahead. But our gamble pays off and we’re soon standing on a wide sandy beach as the wind whistles along the imperious cliffs looming overhead.

Ordinarily it takes a week to complete the 68-mile Great Ocean Walk, one of the Australia’s best multi-day hikes, which starts in Apollo Bay and winds its way through two of Victoria’s coastal national parks before culminating at the Twelve Apostles — a series of serrated limestone spires staggered along the cliffs near Port Campbell.

With only a weekend to spare, I’ve instead joined Australian Walking Company’s new guided trek, which offers a more condensed experience, traversing nearly 19 miles over three days. Our group has spent time navigating quiet mushroom-studded gullies and exposed clifftop tracks, before retiring to the company’s lodgings in Johanna, near the trail’s midway point, in time for sundowners and meals of wild venison and grilled crayfish.

The next day we do it all again, using the company’s van to travel to the next trailhead on the route. Driving to these starting points means travelling along sections of the walk’s more famous counterpart, the Great Ocean Road, which runs alongside us for stretches before disappearing inland and coming back again. Ranked as one of the world’s most scenic driving routes, the 151-mile road ducks and weaves between sleepy coastal towns, passing epic surf breaks and waterfalls, en route to our shared destination, the Twelve Apostles.

Before it was either a great walk or a great road, this same section of coastline was known by a far more ominous moniker: the Shipwreck Coast. This treacherous strip, with its hidden reefs and changeable conditions, claimed an estimated 660 ships in the mid-19th century, when Victoria’s Gold Rush was in full swing.

It’s not that these waters are more perilous than those elsewhere. Melbourne’s sudden wealth in the 1850s made it one of the richest cities in the world, and thousands of ships set sail to it in search of wealth. Many found only disaster — their tales of tragedy, survival, loss and even love washing up on the shore with the survivors. “More ships mean more accidents,” as Joe puts it bluntly, while standing at the edge of a rockpool where the rusted anchor of the juts out of the