The untamed beauty beyond Australia’s Great Ocean Road

Situated on Australia’s southern coast almost halfway between Melbourne and Adelaide, Portland, the so-called ‘Birthplace of Victoria’, is largely overlooked by road trippers and weekend warriors.

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The Great Ocean Road­–a huge drawcard for tourists from Melbourne–ends roughly 100 kilometers (62 miles) before Portland begins. So where the Great Ocean Road is overrun with tourists on any given day of the week, Portland largely escapes the crowds (or rather, the crowds escape Portland).

Rare birds, strange turns

“D’ya want to go and see the gannets?” asks Gordon when we arrive, soggy, back at the lighthouse café post-tour. Point Danger, a ten-minute drive from Portland proper, is home to the only mainland gannet colony in Australia. If that doesn’t impress you, you might be intrigued to discover that they’re close relatives of the blue and red-footed boobies that travelers pay thousands of dollars to visit in the Galapagos Islands (in fact, paint their feet blue or red and you’d hardly tell the difference).

And if that doesn’t impress you, I’m not sure what else to say.

I take my rental car and follow Gordon’s Saab through the fog and drizzle (The Fog and Drizzle would be an apt name for a local pub, I reckon). We pass Portland’s enormous, ominous aluminium smelter on the way–the one that employs 2,000 of the town’s 10,000 inhabitants. “It pollutes like all fuck, but it’s been good for the community,” Gordon tells me later.

It’s still pissing rain at Point Danger. Gordon and I stand and observe the gannets. One of them is in full flight, circling the flock. Round and round and round she goes. Gordon suspects it’s a juvenile that doesn’t know how to land. He’s having a lot of fun mimicking the amateur bird.

As I stand in the rain with a 60-something-year-old man I’ve just met and laugh as he flaps his imaginary wings and coos out of his imaginary beak, I take a moment to appreciate the strange turns life sometimes takes.

Anyone could arrive in Portland for a weekend and feel as though they were one of the first to ever visit as a tourist.

Gordon is wiry, bearded, eccentric and knowledgeable in equal parts; like the endlessly interesting uncle you wish you had. He was born in Portland, moved away for 30 years and has since returned. We leave the gannets and return to the car park, where Gordon, who’s essentially Portland’s unofficial tourist information centre (he’s even the point of contact for the town’s National Trust branch), draws a map for me in the gravel.

“This is my health food shop,” he says, marking an X in the dirt with his heel. “We make wraps and things. Here’s Mac’s—it’s a good pub and hotel. This is the main street, this is a good restaurant and here’s another pub…” Confident I have the lay of the land, Gordon and I part ways, but not before making plans to catch up tomorrow for a beer.

The portal to the deep?

Read the marketing spiel from Tourism Victoria and they’ll tell you that Portland is at once ‘the final frontier’, ‘the portal to the deep’, ‘the gift of ancient mariners’ and ‘not for the faint of heart’ (interestingly, nowhere do they mention the fact that ‘it doesn’t have a beach’).

Where I’d usually be the first to poke holes in such romanticized descriptions, it’s hard to deny Portland a beguiling grumpiness, particularly compared to the merry and much-visited Great Ocean Road towns like Anglesea, Lorne and Apollo Bay.

You see, I could get back to Melbourne (where I live) and rave about Portland until the pies go cold (life-changing pies from the bakery in nearby Heywood, by the way), and I know hardly anybody would think to visit. It’s at once just a smidge too far for the convenience-driven weekender and a smidge too Victorian for those with more time up their sleeves. But that’s half the appeal.

Anyone could arrive in Portland for a weekend and feel as though they were one of the first to ever visit as a tourist. And that’s not meant as a slight–the town is simply understated and unfussy. Take a long weekend anywhere else in Victoria and you’ll be hard pressed to find the locals among the visitors. But in Portland, make no mistake, you’re outnumbered.

That said, Portland town is a typical Victorian coastal affair, plus some handsome heritage buildings. Within two or three blocks, you’ll find a handful of pubs, pokies (slot machines), the high street, a supermarket, cafes, charity shops, and fish and chipperies. One thing Gordon can’t wrap his head around is the amount of new restaurants opening up. “There’s a new one, Paris Marrakech,” he says. “Half French, half Moroccan. What’s that about?”

Cape crusading

I take the rental car out to Cape Bridgewater, 20 kilometers (12.4 miles) out of town. The hilly, coastal landscape is speckled with hundreds more wind turbines.

And like at Cape Nelson, rather than detracting from the scene, they add to it, making it all feel a bit like some strange, extra-terrestrial world (a world in which—thankfully—there’s a beachfront café serving up peanut butter ice creams).

There’s even a cage in which you can snorkel with the seals—the only seal diving cage in the world… Again, it all feels a bit more Galapagonian than Australian.

If, like me, you count yourself as a moderate fan of wild and coastal landscapes, Cape Bridgewater is a hoot. There’s a sprawling, sandy cliff-flanked beach that, on a sunny day, would likely be world-class (but, of course, it’s still pissing rain the day I visit).

Around the corner from the beach are blowholes, a petrified forest, limestone caves, platforms on which you can ponder the gigantic ocean and your relative insignificance, and, would you believe it, the only mainland fur seal colony in Australia.

I take a narrow coastal footpath and pay a man named Richard (or perhaps it was Roger?) $40 to take me out in his dinghy and visit these criminally unknown seals.

After a dash and splash around the coast, we find hundreds of Australian and New Zealand fur seals (1,200, officially) frolicking in the shadow of some of the most brain-bending cliffs I’ve ever seen (and some of the highest in Victoria). There’s even a cage in which you can snorkel with the seals—the only seal diving cage in the world, don’t you know. _­Again, it all feels a bit more Galapagonian than Australian.

As I leave Cape Bridgewater and head back to Portland, the rain starts again. My time here has been very much defined by the weather; haunted by drizzle, cloud and fog. As a visitor, Portland and the surrounding coast asks more of you. It’s a testament–like the ones you sometimes find when traveling–to the benefits of putting your foot down when everyone else is pulling over, of going beyond the habitual, of seeing what lurks up around the next bend.

“Portland’s got it all,” Gordon beams over a pot of beer at Mac’s that night. “Portland’s got it all.”

Learn more

Fancy a quieter, wilder taste of the Great Ocean Road? Put your foot down when you hit the 12 Apostles and stick to the B100 into Warnambool, then onto the A1, and you’ll eventually come up on Portland. Alternatively you can get straight to Portland via the inland B140 from Melbourne. Visit Victoria and Great Ocean Road have some tips to help you on your way. Be sure to look up Gordon Stokes when you’re in town, too.