Surf Coast Walk, Australia

Back in March, when our knowledge of pandemics was, at best, naive, we picked up a map for the Surf Coast Walk, thinking to do it before winter closed in. But even as we cycled towards home, a tempest was whirling around us and uprooting normality. Borders were closing and Melbourne was going into lockdown. In July, a ‘ring of steel’ was imposed, prohibiting travel out of the city.

Melburnians, steadfast in adhering to the lockdown restrictions, were rewarded for their forbearance. In November 2020, with no COVID-19 cases for weeks, the ‘ring of steel’ that held us to within a few kilometres of home came down. Soon afterwards, we caught a train and bus to the coast, southwest of Melbourne, and breathed in deep draughts of wildness.

The Surf Coast Walk traverses the clifftops, beaches and Moonah woodlands that hug the coast between Fairhaven and Point Impossible. For almost 50 kilometres, over two days, we wandered along the edge of the continent, absorbing the intense blue of the sea and sky, the dusky green of the trees and the red and yellow ochres of the crumbling cliffs.

Day 1: Fairhaven to Anglesea (17 km)

A storm breaks over Cape Otway as we alight the bus at Fairhaven, the Surf Coast Walk’s westernmost trailhead. We expect to be engulfed by rain but apart from the occasional clearing shower, the sky holds. 

Crimson rosellas, beautiful firetails, a Santa in a boat adrift in Painkalac Creek, an ancient tribal boundary. Fluted cliffs emanating an ethereal coral pink glow. 

The red cap of Split Point Lighthouse, our lodestar. Climbing its spiral staircase to the balcony we summit the Surf Coast Walk, 66 metres above sea level. Views through to Point Addis in the east and Cape Otway in the west. Reefs and rock formations; Eagle Rock, Sentinel Rock, Table Rock. The ‘white queen’ as the lighthouse is known is still used for navigation by ships trawling the perilous waters of Bass Strait and still attracts fans of the delightfully subversive children’s television show, Round the Twist, two decades after the last episode was filmed.  

Ink blue seas. Turquoise seas. Long, clean rolling waves. Water cascading off rock shelves. A rufous bristlebird, scampering across the track and into the heathland.

Meandering through the tea-tree to Sunnymeade Cove we walk along its narrowing stretch of sand, keeping an eagle-eye on the breaking waves and rising tide. The majestic ochre cliffs are under assault; rising sea levels undermining their base and increasing storm activity eroding their craggy crowns. 

We hear a bark and realise we’ve startled a seal resting in a hollow in the dunes. It lumbers across the sand and disappears into the sea. We scramble around Urquhart Bluff, dodging waves crashing against the headland, and walk along the beach to Point Roadknight. 

After-work surfers take to the ocean. The wind drives the sand along the beach in ripples. The same wind, at our back, is an Irish blessing. Sandpipers reflected in the molten sand by the water’s edge. Two people swimming parallel to the shore for the entire length of the four and a half kilometre beach. We ask a local the name of this beach. ‘It’s complicated’ she says. ‘It’s called Urquhuats, Guvvos, Spout, Back Beach, Roadknight, Middle or Main Beach, depending on your point of arrival and where you place yourself.’ 

A glimpse of an echidna burrowing into the dark red soil to camouflage itself. Fantastically twisted moonah trees, bitter bush and beard-health. Although this coastal moonah woodland stabilises the sand dunes and prevents erosion, most of it has been cleared and is now a threatened plant community. 

Towards day’s end, we leave the beach and follow the milk-green Anglesea River, past children paddling in the shallows and on towards the early 20th-century boat sheds, still picturesque with their white walls and red doors but sinking slowly into the river. 

There’s a saying that ‘one swallow a summer does not make, nor does one fine day’ but on this fine, first day of December, after such an unsettling year, we see a swallow and declare the summer arrived. Soon after checking into our accommodation, we find an open bar and toast the exhilaration of being out on the Surf Coast Walk, salt spray making the air hazy, the setting sun burnishing the world. 

Day 2: Anglesea to Point Impossible (30 km)

A walk alongside the river, the water as blue as the sky, the light low and golden. Past Fairyland nature reserve, all moss green with twisted trees, sun orchids and pink fairy orchids. Frogs pobble-blonking in the marshlands. The sun warm. The early morning air cool.

Pale fluted cliffs. The sea like silk. The waves rolling in from eternity and scattering silver baubles as they break. Out across the cliffs tops, past wind-sculpted trees up to a lookout. Views back across bays, beaches and headlands to Split Point, its lighthouse a white sentinel against the forested hills. 

Walking through coastal woodlands of sheoaks, banksias, grass trees and eucalypts, yellow-tailed black cockatoos noisily declaring themselves as they forage for seeds. An abandoned wooden shack, half-hidden in the trees. Its corrugated iron roof peeled back by a coastal storm, two of its walls painted with strange figures, the other walls almost gone. Perhaps the hut’s conspirator was inspired by William Buckley, an escaped convict who lived along the Surf Coast with the Wathaurung for 32 years before walking into a European camp in 1835. 

Hooded plovers scurrying along the sand at Red Rock beach, the plaintive sounds of their young coming from the shallow nests just above the high tide mark. 

We stop to talk to three women also walking the Surf Coast Walk. They are as delighted as we are to be free to wander once more, taking in the rugged red cliffs, the flowering tea-tree with its honey-sweet scent, the lull of the waves. 

A long sweep of beach, the craggy headlands softened by salt spray and mist, the ocean glistening, the sky dark with storms breaking out to sea. At Point Addis, we stop at the lookout to take in the vastness and the offshore reefs, habitat for the weedy seadragon. Surfers gather in the turquoise, sea-green water waiting for the perfect wave. 

We drop down to the ‘clothing optional’ Addiscot Beach (where everyone is wearing full wetsuits) before veering inland. The beach is a stunningly beautiful two-kilometre arc of sandy bay, foregrounded by she-oaks and bordered by towering sandstone cliffs. 

Through the sheltered forests of the Ironbark Basin via a Koorie Cultural Walk detailing how the Wathaurung people lived here for millennia. Grasstrees, stringy barks and old jarosite (red pigment) mines. Tree trunks carved with intricate patterns, arborglyphs made by grubs tunnelling between old and new bark. Then up through coastal scrub to look out over the sea and the perilously thin strip of Great Otway National Park, abutted by farmland and new housing estates. 

The car parks at Southside and Bells Beach are almost empty, the ‘golden mile’ bereft of surfers. The surf is messy today and the international travellers who normally undertake pilgrimages to the surf coast are hunkered down in far off countries, facing second and third waves of coronavirus. 

From Bells, the Surf Coast Walk keeps the beach close all the way to Point Impossible. Bird Rock, Rocky Point, Point Danger; all swirling foam, rugged headlands and iconic surf breaks. Then through the gentler landscape of the estuarine wetlands of Spring Creek, its water edged with grasses, sedges and saltbush. A darter spreading its wings in the sun, the staccato call of a hidden dusky moorhen. 

We follow the winding, wooden boardwalk to the well-trodden Torquay promenade. Wind sculptured cypress. Tall, tatty, Norfolk Island pines, their stateliness ravaged by marauding cockatoos. A proud ship’s figurehead carved from an 80-year-old cypress, a replica of the one on the barque Inverlochy, shipwrecked near Anglesea in 1902.  

We’re staying in Torquay tonight so we deposit our packs before continuing on around Zeally Bay and along Whites Beach to Point Impossible. Wide stretches of golden sand and a calm sea. A paraglider practising flight. Windswept grasses wavering in the sand dunes. A stretch of coastal middens, layers of shells striated with dark, ashy sediment exposed in the side of the dune, the remains of shellfish once gathered and eaten by the Wathaurung people. The oldest verified Aboriginal midden on the Victorian coast is nearly 12,000 years old; research is underway to determine if there is evidence of human occupation at a site now known to be 120,000 years old.  

Before we declare our Surf Coast Walk over, we wander the Esplanade at Torquay as the golden hour merges into the blue hour and the earth’s shadow lays dusky above the sea. On the darkening foreshore, Year 12 students mark the end of one phase of their life with what passes for schoolies during a pandemic; a beatbox and a dozen friends dancing to the music of the times.   

In 2020, a year of coronavirus lockdowns, the Surf Coast Walk was the furthest we ventured from home. In August when we couldn’t travel more than 5 km from home we created an adventure: Walking into the Light. In July we walked the 42 km boundary of our local council area in Walking in the Winter of Our Discontent and early in the lockdown when all overseas travel became impossible we walked Our Isolation Camino.