Australia’s Victoria coast along the Great Ocean Road is advertised as one of the world’s most scenic drives. Instead, we found fierce winds, ship-devouring waves, and a hefty dose of humility.
This is part 2 in a series. Read part 1 here.
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My wife and I stood at the edge of the world—or at least what felt like it—squinting through the murk and sea spray to snap photos of a decommissioned lighthouse. Less like some beacon of hope, its white tower loomed like a ghost, haunting the craggy cliffs of coastal Victoria and my vacation prospects. We’d arrived at the sleepy Victorian coastal town of Port Fairy expecting sunshine, a pleasant breeze—and if not asking too much—maybe a kangaroo or two bounding in silhouette against the sunset. Instead, a spectrum of misery lay before us: wind that could strip the paint from a car and rain in erratic, bipolar bursts.
I suspect if you’re American, like me, you think Australia is perpetually slathered in golden sunshine. Hell, after our initial sun-drenched Sydney days, I had no reason to doubt my preconceptions. Yet, here in coastal Victoria, on this dismal shore, we found ourselves far from Bondi’s tanned and flossed butts. One man in a restaurant remarked, shaking his head, “This is September,” while a British ex-pat assured us it never stops.
We walked further along Griffiths Island and nearby beaches, observing other lonely relics of human settler ambition: an abandoned quarry, a munitions bunker, and other such things standing guard over these ship-devouring seas. The waves were not just big; they were aggressive. They beat against basalt boulders and crumbling cliffs like a middle school boy seeking his father’s approval. The Roaring Forties—fierce westerly winds—lashed the beaches, sending spray skyward. Shivering, I pulled my hood tight.
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I found myself obsessed with the 1878 wreck of the Loch Ard, an iron clipper that ran aground in dense fog, claiming 52 of the 54 souls onboard. Only two survivors crawled blue-lipped and dripping from the winter seas, neither puckering nor extending selfie sticks. What would they think, 146 years later, of today’s people and their disinterest in whale products?
When I later picked up The Wager, a true-story horror show of shipwreck, survival, and how human suffering can go from bad to worse, it all came full circle. Reflecting on centuries-old seafaring hardship, a little self-loathing over missed climbing days or bad weather seemed trivial by comparison. As writer Xochitl Gonzalez aptly put it, we live “soft lives with hard absolutism.” Grievances feel petty when weighed against the prospect of eating your mate’s scurvy-ridden calf.
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Maybe the fierce weather stirred the ghosts of long-dead whalers and seafarers lingering on this far-flung coast. In summer, Port Fairy blossoms into a tourist haven reminiscent of Nantucket. But emerging from Australia’s winter, with its quiet shorelines and even quieter streets, history seemed to carry the weight of one too many handfuls of peanuts—like a bygone era preserved in amber amid a rapidly changing world.
It was lonely at first. Maybe it was the dim light in our rented house. Even the restaurants seemed intentionally dark, as though they were trying to match the grim weather. Everything felt dark—almost metaphysical. Yet, I grew to love it. There was something hauntingly beautiful about the isolation.
With rain lashing against the bay windows, I wrote at the far end of a massive dining table, shared with only my wife. Tea and coffee sustained me as I slowly regained strength from the previous week’s immune system beatdown. On long walks to the lighthouse, we felt like characters in a Wes Anderson film. Kangaroos—or wallabies? Who can tell the difference—appeared like meerkats, their heads tilted and oversized ears twitching with curiosity before darting into the shrubs.
We ventured to the tourist overlooks of the Twelve Apostles, sharing views with the selfie-stick-wielding hoards disembarking from Melbourne-based buses. Making my way to the viewing platform, I held my hat against the driving wind like one of Her Majesty’s naval officers in a storm.
After a week of coastal gloom, we finally headed east toward Melbourne, hoping to escape the wind and drizzle.
Melbourne
After a mildly awkward night being 40 years old in a hostel, we drove the final segment of the Great Ocean Road. The next day, we threw in the towel and abandoned our rental car in favor of public transit, which, it turns out, is more exhausting than driving in a major city.
There we were, schlepping our bags for what we (mistakenly) believed would be “only” three blocks. We passed hipsters who tossed back their bangs and looked down their noses. Through gnashed teeth, we cursed each other for the varying and understandable reasons that lovers do as we trudged up the stairs into an apartment that could only be described as “compact.” It was more of a prison cell, really, with zero natural light. The kind of cell a well-connected cartel leader might secure while awaiting extradition.
The first thing you should know about Melbourne is that it is not Sydney. If Sydney is Australia’s sunny, glamorous, and beautiful Los Angeles, Melbourne is its moodier, paler, edgier cousin. The city prides itself on art, coffee, tattoos, and closed-toed shoes. The locals, mostly dressed in black as we’d been warned, appear to love coffee and adding art to anything that doesn’t move.
Sometimes we’d settle for a coffee, but if we couldn’t find coffee we’d walk a block to find coffee. Between the coffee shops were alleys, or lanes, with art. The city was alive with noise and the kind of eccentricity highly correlative with abundant disposable income. It’s the kind of town where a climbing gym might have still and sparkling water…on tap. And if you don’t get it, that’s your problem, not Melbourne’s.
Three days later, we were done. Overwhelmed by shrieking horns, flashing lights, and the crushing burden of glutenous pastry indulgence, we wrestled the zippers closed on our duffel bags. Loaded like pack mules, we stepped out into the driving rain and boarded our plane back to Sydney.
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As we headed to the Blue Mountains, I couldn’t shake those gray coastal skies, the wind, and what lurked below the crashing waves. While Sydney and Melbourne offered a fun and perhaps conventional version of Australia, those cities felt too normal compared to the haunted quiet of the shipwreck coast. With its ghosts and history, that place reminded me of something more important: that life is fragile and fleeting. In a world where modern inconveniences like rainy days or carbohydrates are cast as crises, maybe I’d sought the isolation and gloom all along. Maybe what I needed was something to endure. After all, coffee tastes best on cloudy days, and life’s best moments often follow the storms we weather.
