The Great Ocean Road is a 243-kilometre coastal highway in Victoria, Australia, running from Torquay to Allansford, west of Melbourne. It was carved into the cliffs by about 3,000 returned First World War soldiers between 1919 and 1932 as a memorial to their fallen comrades, which makes it the largest war memorial in the world, and it passes the Twelve Apostles, Bells Beach, the Otway rainforest and the Shipwreck Coast on the way.
A Memorial Carved by Hand, 1919 to 1932
Before the road existed, the fishing and timber towns of Victoria's southwest coast were reached by sea or by rough tracks through the Otway Ranges. In 1918 Howard Hitchcock, the mayor of Geelong, formed the Great Ocean Road Trust to build a coastal road that would open the region to tourists and give work to soldiers coming home from the Western Front. Construction began on 19 September 1919. The men lived in tented camps, were paid about 10 shillings a day, and worked with picks, shovels, wheelbarrows and explosives on cliffs that dropped straight into the Southern Ocean; bulldozers did not arrive until the final years. Several were killed by falls and premature blasts.
The first section, from Eastern View to Lorne, opened in March 1922, and the Trust charged a toll of two shillings a car to pay back its loans. The full route to Apollo Bay was finished and formally opened on 26 November 1932. Hitchcock had died three months earlier; his car was driven in the opening procession with his seat left empty. The Trust handed the road to the state in October 1936 and the tolls ended. The Memorial Arch at Eastern View, rebuilt several times after fires and a truck strike, still carries the dedication to the soldiers, and the road was added to Australia's National Heritage List on 7 April 2011.
Reading the Route: Surf Coast, Otways and Shipwreck Coast
Signposted as the B100, the road falls into three distinct landscapes.
Surf Coast: Torquay to Apollo Bay
Torquay, 100 kilometres from Melbourne, is the home of the Rip Curl and Quiksilver surf brands and of Bells Beach, where a contest has run every Easter since 1962 and the Rip Curl Pro, the longest-running event on the professional surfing tour, since 1973. From there the road passes Anglesea, the red-and-white Split Point lighthouse at Aireys Inlet, built in 1891, and the resort town of Lorne, before the most spectacular stretch of cliff-hugging bends between Lorne and Apollo Bay.
The Otways: Apollo Bay to Princetown
West of Apollo Bay the road turns inland through Great Otway National Park, a cool temperate rainforest of myrtle beech, tree ferns and some of the tallest flowering trees on Earth, mountain ash that exceed 80 metres. The Otways are the wettest part of Victoria, with Weeaproinah recording close to 2,000 millimetres a year. A side road leads to Cape Otway lighthouse, built in 1848 and the oldest surviving lighthouse on the Australian mainland, and the Otway Fly, a 600-metre walkway up to 25 metres above the forest floor.
Shipwreck Coast: Princetown to Allansford
The final third runs along the limestone cliffs of Port Campbell National Park, past the Twelve Apostles, Loch Ard Gorge, London Arch and the Bay of Islands, to end where it meets the Princes Highway at Allansford, just short of Warrnambool. Around 640 ships are known to have been wrecked on this stretch between Cape Otway and Port Fairy, which earned it its name.
The Twelve Apostles and How the Coast Falls Apart
The cliffs of the Shipwreck Coast are made of Port Campbell Limestone, laid down on a shallow sea floor 10 to 20 million years ago and so soft that waves cut it back by an average of around 2 centimetres a year. The Southern Ocean attacks weak points first, carving caves that join up into arches, and when an arch collapses it leaves an isolated pillar, or sea stack. The Twelve Apostles are a row of such stacks up to about 45 metres tall. There were never twelve; the group was known as the Sow and Piglets until the 1920s, when it was renamed for the tourist trade, and nine stacks stood when the name caught on. One 50-metre stack collapsed in seconds on 3 July 2005, leaving eight. The process that made them is explained in our post on what a sea stack is.
Other landmarks have changed within living memory. London Bridge was a double-arched promontory joined to the mainland until 15 January 1990, when the inner arch fell into the sea, stranding two tourists on the newly created island until a helicopter lifted them off; it is now called London Arch. The Island Archway in Loch Ard Gorge collapsed in June 2009. The gorge itself is named for the clipper Loch Ard, wrecked on Mutton Bird Island on 1 June 1878 with 54 people aboard; the only survivors were an 18-year-old apprentice, Tom Pearce, and a passenger, Eva Carmichael, whom he dragged into the gorge. Coastal retreat is also eating the road: sections near the Twelve Apostles and at Mount Defiance have been moved inland, and engineers expect more relocations this century. The types of wave attack at work along the cliffs are set out in types of erosion.
Wildlife and Weather Along the Way
The Great Ocean Road is one of the easiest places in Australia to see koalas in the wild; the manna gums along the Kennett River road and around Cape Otway often hold several per tree. Kangaroos graze the golf course at Anglesea, and Australian fur seals haul out on rocks below the Otways. From June to September southern right whales calve in the shallows off Logans Beach at Warrnambool, where a viewing platform looks straight down on mothers and calves. Short-tailed shearwaters, called mutton birds, return to Mutton Bird Island each September after a 15,000-kilometre migration from the Bering Sea.
Weather on the coast is changeable all year. Summer, from December to February, is warm and dry with Melbourne-area highs in the mid-20s Celsius but crowded; autumn brings calmer seas and the Rip Curl Pro; winter is wet, windy and the best season for whales and for photographing storm surf against the stacks. Bushfire is the standing risk. On Christmas Day 2015 the Wye River fire, started by lightning in the Otways, destroyed 116 homes in Wye River and Separation Creek, and in 1983 the Ash Wednesday fires burned through Lorne, Aireys Inlet and Anglesea.
Great Ocean Road Versus California's Pacific Coast Highway
The closest counterpart is California's Highway 1, and the two were built in the same era for similar reasons.
- Length: the Great Ocean Road is 243 kilometres; Highway 1 is about 1,055 kilometres end to end, though its famous Big Sur section, from Carmel to San Simeon, is about 145 kilometres.
- Builders: returned soldiers in Victoria; in Big Sur, much of the labour came from convicts at San Quentin and other state prisons, paid 35 cents a day with time off their sentences.
- Dates: 1919 to 1932 in Australia; 1919 to 1937 in California, with the Bixby Creek Bridge opening in 1932, the same year the Australian road was finished.
- Landscape: both are cliff roads above a cold ocean with redwood or eucalypt forest behind, and both are among the most photographed drives on Earth. Big Sur's cliffs are granite and sandstone and far higher; the Victorian coast is lower limestone, which is why it has stacks and arches rather than sheer walls.
- Closures: both are regularly cut by landslips. Big Sur has been severed for months at a time, most recently after slides in 2017, 2023 and 2024; the Great Ocean Road closes for days rather than months, usually after heavy rain between Lorne and Apollo Bay.
The difference that matters to a visitor is pace. Highway 1 is a long-distance route that most people drive in a day or two; the Great Ocean Road is short enough to do as a day trip from Melbourne but rewards two or three days.
Driving It Today: Timings, Direction and Rules
Torquay is about 90 minutes from Melbourne by freeway. Driving the full road without stopping takes around four hours, and most visitors return to Melbourne via the inland Princes Highway, making a loop of roughly 600 kilometres. Two or three days with nights in Lorne, Apollo Bay or Port Campbell is the usual recommendation. Drive it east to west if you can: Australians drive on the left, so heading west puts your car on the ocean side of the road with uninterrupted views and the lookouts on your side. The speed limit is 80 kilometres per hour on open sections and 50 or lower through towns and on the tighter bends, and the Lorne to Apollo Bay stretch is slow going behind caravans in summer.
The Twelve Apostles visitor centre, 275 kilometres from Melbourne, is the busiest point on the route, with sunrise and sunset the most popular times and helicopter flights from a pad beside it. Before the pandemic the region drew more than 5 million visitors a year, and the Great Ocean Road Coast and Parks Authority, created in 2020, now manages the coast and its car parks as a single unit. Fuel and food are available in every town, but mobile coverage drops out in the Otways. For the wider setting of the coast within Victoria's geography, see our Melbourne city geography guide, and for the surf culture that starts the road, the geography of surfing.