Port Campbell

Port Campbell National Park was declared in 1964 and protects a narrow strip of coast in south-western Victoria, along the Great Ocean Road. At barely 17 km² it is a small park, but it contains one of the most photographed stretches of coast in Australia.

The rock is Miocene limestone laid down on an ancient sea floor, soft and homogeneous, and the swell arriving unobstructed from the Southern Ocean attacks it relentlessly. The process is always the same: the sea cuts caves at the base of the cliff, the caves become arches, the arches collapse and leave isolated stacks that in turn eventually fall. The Twelve Apostles are the most famous result of that sequence, although there were never twelve of them and their number keeps falling: one collapsed in 2005 and the London Arch lost its central span in 1990, stranding two visitors who had to be rescued by helicopter.

The stretch is known as the Shipwreck Coast for the number of vessels that were wrecked here in the nineteenth century, when it was the final approach to Melbourne for sailing ships arriving from Europe. The best remembered is the Loch Ard, sunk in 1878 with only two survivors, which gives its name to the gorge where they came ashore. The park's wildlife includes a colony of little penguins on Muttonbird Island, seabirds nesting on the stacks and, in winter, southern right whales off the coast.