Victor Harbor

The Town That Waits for Whales

Victor Harbor has the character of a place that knows its best season and doesn’t apologise for the quietness of the others. From June through September, southern right whales come into Encounter Bay to calve and nurse their young in the sheltered water, and the town swells with people who have come specifically to stand at the cliff walk or on the causeway and watch. Outside of those months, Victor Harbor is a pleasant Fleurieu Peninsula town with a good beach, solid coffee, and the kind of pace that reminds you that not everything needs to be relentlessly eventful.

I was there in July, whale season, and found myself waking early each morning to walk the cliff path before breakfast. This is not normally something I do.

The Horse-Drawn Tram

The causeway connecting the mainland to Granite Island is crossed by a horse-drawn tram — a single carriage pulled by a horse at the pace a horse chooses to go. This has been operating in some form since 1894. The tram is not fast; the horse is large and calm and doesn’t respond to schedule pressure. The crossing takes about six minutes and the view — Encounter Bay on one side, the mainland coast curving away on the other — is best appreciated from the open sides of the carriage.

Granite Island itself is small and granite and home to the smallest penguin species in the world, the little penguin, who comes ashore at dusk from burrows in the rocks. The population is not what it was — introduced predators have reduced it significantly — but guided penguin tours at nightfall still operate, and watching a bird the size of a wine bottle waddle up a beach in the dark is an oddly touching experience.

Watching the Whales

The whale watching at Victor Harbor works differently from what I’d experienced elsewhere, which mostly involved boats and distances. Here, the whales come into the bay itself — into shallow, sheltered water — and can be observed from shore. I stood on the cliff walk three mornings in a row, and each morning there were whales.

What strikes you first is the size relative to expectation. Southern right whales grow to seventeen metres and can weigh sixty tonnes, and seeing that in water that appears too shallow for it is genuinely startling. They move with a kind of slow deliberate ease that communicates that the water is entirely their element and you are extremely adjacent to that element. On the third morning a mother and calf were very close to the beach and the calf was doing something playful — rolling, slapping its flipper — while the mother floated with the patience of something that has never needed to be elsewhere.

The Fleurieu Beyond Town

Victor Harbor is a useful base for the southern Fleurieu Peninsula. The drive along the coast to Waitpinga Beach takes you past cliffs above Southern Ocean swell that comes all the way from Antarctica. Deep Creek Conservation Park, further east, has walking trails through native scrub above coastal gorges that were, when I visited on a midwinter weekday, completely empty.

I ate fish and chips on the foreshore at Victor Harbor on my last evening, watching the causeway light come on and the penguins beginning their nightly commute from the sea, and felt that specific satisfaction that comes from a place exceeding what you’d prepared yourself for.

When to go: June through September for southern right whales — peak is July and August when calf numbers are highest. The town is genuinely quieter outside whale season and still worthwhile for the coast and hiking. Winter is mild on the Fleurieu; pack a layer for the cliff walk.