Queenscliff
"Queenscliff built forts to defend a bay entrance so narrow you could nearly swim across it, and then built grand hotels right alongside them."
A Victorian-era seaside resort at the tip of the Bellarine Peninsula, guarding the narrow gap where Port Phillip Bay meets the open sea.
Queenscliff sits at the tip of the Bellarine Peninsula, on the narrow gap known as “the Rip” where Port Phillip Bay funnels out into Bass Strait — one of the most treacherous stretches of navigable water in Australia, which is exactly why the Victorian colonial government built Fort Queenscliff here in the 1860s, worried about a Russian invasion that never came. The fort still stands, still garrisoned in a ceremonial capacity, and the guided tours through its tunnels and gun emplacements are more engaging than the fear of Tsarist gunboats really deserved.
What struck me more than the military history, though, was how completely intact Queenscliff’s Victorian resort character is. The Queenscliff Hotel, all wraparound verandas and lace ironwork, has been receiving guests since 1887, and half the town’s main street looks like a film set for a period drama nobody bothered to build for the cameras — it was simply never knocked down.
I caught the car ferry across to Sorrento on the Mornington Peninsula, a forty-minute crossing over the Rip itself, and watched container ships queue at the bay’s mouth waiting for a pilot boat to guide them through the shifting sandbars — a genuinely dangerous piece of water that the ferry crosses with a casualness that felt almost rude given the history. Back on shore, the black-painted 1863 lighthouse and the little maritime museum rounded out an afternoon that felt like stumbling into a much older Australia than the one twenty minutes up the road in Geelong.
When to go: Autumn weekends for mild weather and a quieter town than midsummer delivers. The Queenscliff Music Festival in November is worth planning around if live music in a small heritage town appeals to you.