Warrnambool

Warrnambool is the largest town on the western end of the Great Ocean Road, and most people pass through it on the way to somewhere else, which is a genuine mistake between June and September. That’s when southern right whales — a species hunted to near-extinction in the nineteenth century and only slowly recovering — arrive at Logans Beach to calve, sometimes within a hundred metres of the shore. I stood on the viewing platform for over an hour watching a mother and calf roll and slap the surface, and the volunteer ranger beside me, who does this every winter, still sounded genuinely delighted rather than routine about it.

Flagstaff Hill Maritime Village sits on the site of an old fort and recreates an 1870s port town in full — a lighthouse, a working blacksmith, a windjammer moored in an artificial harbour — built around the story of the Loch Ard, a clipper ship wrecked nearby in 1878 with only two survivors, a story the museum tells with real gravity rather than theme-park gloss. I’d underestimated how affecting a shipwreck museum could be until I stood in front of the recovered peacock statue that somehow survived the wreck intact.

Just out of town, Tower Hill is a genuinely strange landscape: an extinct volcanic crater, reforested with the original vegetation after a century of farming had stripped it bare, now home to koalas, emus, and kangaroos that wander the crater floor with an indifference to visitors that made the whole place feel slightly unreal.

When to go: June through September specifically for whale season at Logans Beach. Outside those months, Warrnambool is a perfectly pleasant regional stop but loses its single best reason to detour off the Great Ocean Road.