“The road was all corners. The tree ferns were lush and hovered above the gravel road, like driving into Jurassic Park, darker and deeper. The green understory and fern fronds dripping water onto the windscreen. One lucky ray of sunlight streaked down to reach the forest floor after dodging through the thick rainforest canopy a hundred feet above us.
Giant trees of Mountain Ash, Myrtle Beech and Blackwood towered overhead, some shedding their skinny strands of bark, up to 8m long, hanging vertically down over branches, draping the forest like cream and tan tinsel.
The topography was steeply dissected so the road climbed and dropped as well as the tight turns. Corners of loose gravel, wet and slippery from the water running down the gullies.”
This is the Great Otway National Park on the Great Ocean Road as I remember it from one of my first road trips along the Victorian coastline over 35 years ago.
Before arriving at the Great Ocean Road on that road trip, I had been to the 7th Port Fairy Folk Festival.
In 2020 Port Fairy are celebrating their 44th Folk Festival.
Even as early as the 7th Folk Festival it was hard to find accommodation. The town was bustling with the folkies of the day. I was lucky enough to have a very good friend that lived in Port Fairy to stay with and she knew what musicians to see and what time they played. On dusk we headed out to the Golf Club a few kms out the road and got into some great music played by happy heads of dreadlocks and headbands as we danced around in our long swaying skirts as the sun went down.
Port Fairy was to become a regular stomping ground over the summer of ‘83. My girlfriend from Port Fairy and l did our nursing training together in South Australia and we did many trips across the border visiting each other’s communities, coastlines and pubs.
Summer in Southern Australia
We visited Bells Beach further up the coast a few times as lots of my friends were surfers back then. We lived on the rugged Limestone Coast of South Australia, about 5 hour’s drive from Bells Beach. My boyfriend at that time didn’t surf but was an avid photographer and where we lived in South Australia we could still drive our cars on the beach. We spent endless weekends down the beach, surfing, fishing or camping with friends, covered in salt and sand and smiles.
Life in the late 70’s and early 80’s was all about bonfires on the beach, “On a hot Summers night”. We’d watch our mate scream past on his TL 125 with the front wheel in the air. We’d sit on the beach in our EK Holden’s, panel vans or Valiant hemi pacers and listened to Fleetwood Mac, The Steve Miller Band, Fischer Z, Jethro Tull, Credence and Hendrix. We wore faded blue flares and bare feet, Golden Breed windcheaters and hand spun, hand knitted brown sheep’s wool beanies on our heads to keep us warm along with the odd bottle of Stonies.
We religiously read the surfing magazine “Tracks ” and in the late 70’s my bedroom walls and school books were adorned with posters and cuttings of Rabbit Bartholomew and Mark Richards.
Finchy had spent time in Port Fairy around the same era. I learnt this when I met him four years later in Western Australia. He’d probably served me in the take away shop he was working in at Port Fairy at the time, who knows?
We’ve “done” the Great Ocean Road many times, including a classic trip on a motorbike with “A dog on the Tank“.
Over thirty years later we notice the changes as we spend summer working and exploring The Great Ocean Road from Apollo Bay.
- The London Bridge is now the London Arch.
- The “pole house” was iconic and isolated. Today it has many neighbours.
- The roads are all sealed but not necessarily in better condition.
- Rip Curl was just a shed in a paddock
- Tourists are visiting here all year round with 245,000 international visitors to the GOR in the 12 months to March 2019
- The traffic is constant.
- The coffee is better
The road still has a powerful awe about it and many are drawn to the steep ocean views, some forgetting which side of the road they should be driving on. There are many signs to remind them, plus arrows painted on the road and street signs with diagrams showing which side to drive in Australia.
This season, many visitors came from other states as well as the international visitors choosing to spend their holidays in the cool temperate rainforest micro climate the region offers while the rest of Australia seemed to be on fire. Not that this area hadn’t had its share of bush fires with the Wye River fire on Christmas Day a few years ago burning almost 100 homes. It burnt right down the cliffs to the sea. The burnt scrub is still visible five years later.
Finchy fought the Ash Wednesday fires with the CFS in the Adelaide Hills and I was on call as a nurse at the Mount Gambier hospital in 1983. We both hoped we would never see fires of that scale again but this season, sadly, has been much worse with more of our country on fire.
We have been blessed to spend summer in this region, a beautiful micro climate from the forests and mountains down to the ocean. Another fabulous small community hidden underneath the volumes of tourists in buses and vans that arrive daily.
