The long way around

If travel broadens the mind, the road less-travelled must broaden it further. That's why, as I drive through Melbourne's sleepy Sunday morning streets, I'm aiming the rental car over the sweeping arc of the Westgate Bridge.

My target is not the Princes Highway, the high-speed expressway that cuts an inland route westward through the grey-brown kangaroo fields. My plan is to drive the grandly - and, I will discover, aptly named - Great Ocean Rd which winds along the south Victorian coast peering out at Bass Strait.

When I was living in Sydney, if I wanted to head out of town for the weekend I always went south - for the very good reason that everyone else always headed north. Travelling the Great Ocean Rd makes sense for the same reason. This is a coast without malls and fast-food franchises. Absent are the endless golden strands littered with bronzed sunbathers - although there are plenty of sheltered coves and excellent swimming beaches to break the journey. Rather, lashed by the endless Southern Ocean, it's the kind of spectacular coastline that New Zealanders - Westlanders in particular - would recognise.

I stop briefly at sleepy, tidy Geelong, Victoria's second-largest city, on the other side of Port Phillip Bay from Melbourne, where an A$300 million ($326 million) revamp of the waterfront has cleverly grafted new development on to a refurbishment of the stylish deco. But I'm there just long enough to fill my coffee mug. I long for the sight of the city receding in the rear-view mirror.

So I head due south and hit the coast at Torquay, a seaside settlement regarded as the spiritual home of surfing in Australia. The brands Rip Curl and Quiksilver were born here and the surfing contest that started in 1962 is the longest-running in the world. There's a surf museum charting the history of it all, but, on the search for surfers, I follow the signs out of town to Bells Beach, whose break is renowned as one of the world's best. The sea is mirror-calm and the beach is deserted but in the carpark above, barefoot kids sit in cars under roofracked boards waiting for the onshore breeze to change. Their gloom is as good a testament as any to the quality of the wave.

Here, still less than 100km from Melbourne, it looks like an Australia that time forgot. Lorne, where I stop for lunch, is like Kaikoura before the whale-watching tourists arrived: you can park right outside the cafe, which has a menu on a chalkboard written in groovy purple curlicues and staff who seem genuinely pleased to see a customer. Even larger settlements such as Apollo Bay are barely less sleepy than Opononi.

To drive in Australia is often to be subjected to the tyranny of distance on long, flat sunbaked straights. But the Great Ocean Rd reveals an Australia that New Zealanders would recognise. Frequent signs warn drivers that an average speed of 90 km/h will be impossible to maintain but this is, in any case, a route best driven slowly.

The road belies its name by leaving the coast briefly at times to wind through dense forest that recalls Kiwi bush rather than the grey and blue-green Australian sort.

Tree ferns abound among the more familiar eucalypts and the blousy, larger-leafed Australian version of tea-tree seems, in flower, to be sprinkled with snow. At times it crosses rich dairyland before dipping suddenly to emerge at practically deserted beaches where the inshore water is Pacific-aqua.

I take the short but steep walk down to the Erskine Falls, one of many signposted tracks down side roads. In the absence of our heavy rainfall to wash the dust from leaves and fill streams to clear stagnant backwaters, it lacks the pristine clarity of a New Zealand equivalent but it's a welcome respite from the midday heat.

At Apollo Bay I dine on fish so fresh it practically wriggles on the plate, accompanied by an Australian sauvignon blanc that reminds me how excellent the New Zealand variety is, and the first Greek salad I have encountered with beansprouts in it. Even the graceless sneering of the Australian commentators as the Black Caps are put to the sword at the Adelaide Oval is not enough to dent my good humour.

The next day the Otway National Park provides a spectacular backdrop to the coast. Dinosaurs roamed here 100 million years ago and their fossils are still to be found in the volcanic rocks that are piled in rumpled pancake lines below the high-water mark.

Well-graded and signposted tracks take walkers into the heart of the rainforest, where those seeking a koala-eye view of the myrtle beech, blackwood and mountain ash, can scale the newly opened Otway Fly, a 600m-long walkway that threads through the cool treetops, 25m above the forest floor.

Just past Warnambool, I turn inland and head north for Halls Gap, the small town at the centre of the Grampians National Park. The Grampians mountain range - known as Gariwerd by the Aborigines of the area - was named by the first European to see it, Major Thomas Mitchell. It reminded him of his home in Scotland.

Noel Nicholls, who runs four-wheel-drive tours through the park, is an entertaining and knowledgeable guide as he rides his bucking van across the deeply rutted roads.

The ranges are home to more than 900 plants, two-thirds of all Victorian flora. Wildflowers that bloom at different times according to the altitude mean the park is different every time he drives into it, he explains. The prettiest is an insectivorous bladderwort popularly known as fairies apron, an impossibly delicate survivor in such harsh country. As we reach the valley floor and head for the main road, the emus he had begun to give up on make an appearance. They're a family of a dozen under the eye of a watchful male. They strut slowly, as if they own the place, and only a few give our van a slightly supercilious glance. It's a magic end to a fine day.

* Peter Calder travelled with the assistance of Tourism Victoria.

A visit to Sovereign Hill costs A$14.50 ($15.78) for children, A$29.50 ($32) for adults. Family passes cost A$78 ($84.89). Bookings are necessary for Blood on the Southern Cross. Tickets are A$20 ($21.70) and A$37 ($40.20) with concessions and package discounts available.