Why? For its iconic status in the old town just on the Victorian side of the border with South Australia.
As a stopping point on the Great Ocean Rd linking the southern states, Port Fairy has plenty to commend it.
Perched beside the ocean, breathe in the briny and this is a sea port well worth a stop for a night.
Let's start with the town. It's a mix of old and modern, as if it thinks it should brush itself up, but can't quite go the whole hog at the risk of breaking its ties with the past.
Some of the shops are either distinctly old or derelict and yet stroll the wide streets and there are a handful of gems, such as the five women's fashion shops, all high end and which would not be out of place in the heart of Melbourne's exclusive districts.
The town has retained the charm of the old days with its buildings and is a popular holiday destination - we were there in autumn and it would be bustling in mid-summer.
The other point was a feeling that it catered for the more sophisticated end of the holiday market. From Melbourne, visitors would be in Port Fairy in a couple of hours. There are some popular horse-riding tracks in the area.
The locals are friendly, Rebecca's Cafe served a good range of home-made food and decent coffee. But those fashion shops took the cake. It seemed out of whack with the general feel of the place but at least one credit card took a serious dent on our stay when it might have been expected to have been given a belting in, say, Melbourne.
The food's good and the wine local at the inn. Photo / Supplied
The Merrijig Inn was built in 1842 on the corner of Campbell and Gipps St down by the mouth of the Moyne River. It can host up to 16 people at a time, with eight rooms, four to be found upstairs in the snug attic space.
Atmosphere? Loads of it.
This is a building for which the term "nooks and crannies" could have been designed.
The small but quaint old house bar, with its array of tankards, leaves little to the imagination. Narrow the eyes and it's easy to visualise the returning sailors, home from a day's trawling, full of old yarn, the raucous singing of shanties and perhaps the odd beery bust-up.
Now the inn has two chefs hats and our meal was top class, accompanied by fine local wines.
The owners are justly proud of using locally grown ingredients.
Pre-dinner, a walk was called for. So we followed the mouth of the river out to the old lighthouse and around the Griffiths Island Reserve, which has a sooty shearwater colony inside it (that's good old muttonbirds).
The brisk 50-minute walk was just the ticket. Captain John Griffiths was clearly a man of early influence in Port Fairy, and something of a local legend.
He was the first person to bring white settlers to the town from Launceston, Tasmania to Portland Bay, 35km to the west, and Port Fairy.
Take a ride in Port Fairy. Photo / Supplied
You wonder how Griffiths, blessed with an entrepreneurial streak, found any spare time to put his feet up.
He established the first major whaling station at Portland in 1833, and then added a larger one on the site of the island named for him three years later.
Other strings to his bow included shipbuilder and owner, intercolonial trader, merchant, farmer, whaler, sealer, brewer, flour miller and land owner.
He doubtless also played golf off scratch too.
The Merrijig Inn guestbook shows recent visitors from parts as diverse as Ashford in Kent, Pleasant Point, just outside Timaru, Paris, Cumbria and New Jersey.
Word of mouth, you suspect, does this town, and inn, plenty of favours, all certainly deserved.
So let's join in: anyone planning to drive the Great Ocean Rd - and if you haven't, you most certainly should - would find the Merrijig Inn well worth a stop.
CHECKLIST
Getting there: Air New Zealand flies daily to Melbourne from Auckland. Merrijig is a two-hour drive from Melbourne.
The writer travelled as a guest of Tourism Australia, the South Australia Tourism and Tourism Victoria.
