This audio journey walks the Great Ocean Walk, 91 kilometres of cliff-edge, shipwreck coast, and ancient forest from Apollo Bay to the Twelve Apostles. Eight voices carry you through the history that built and broke this landscape: the bullock teams stripping the Otways bare in the 1860s, the Lightkeeper’s Wife waiting for a supply ship that might never come, and the returned soldiers of the 1st AIF who traded the trenches of the Western Front for the vertical mud of the Sappers’ Memorial Road.
Along the way, the Gadubanud Custodian offers a five-thousand-year counter-narrative to every European ambition, watching the road-builders from the ridges, reading the estuary as a pantry, and sitting at Johanna Beach in the lee of a dune where her grandmothers feasted for a thousand years. The Naturalist tracks Hooded Plovers nesting in the open sand, Black Cockatoos ripping into the bark overhead, and the invisible biological bulldozer, Cinnamon Fungus, that your boot sole carries from valley to valley.
The guide closes at the Twelve Apostles, where the Sapper exhales for the first time since the Somme, and the Historian reveals the hundred-year-old marketing lie behind the name.
The boot cleaning stations are not optional theatre, they are the front line against Cinnamon Fungus (Phytophthora cinnamomi), a water-mould that can devastate the Otway forest system. Episode 7 explains exactly what you’re protecting. Scrub every sole, every time.
Purchase this guide to unlock this, and all the remaining chapters.
Each of the 8 episodes opens and closes with an original score, from the jarring cut of a 19th-century blacksmith’s hammer in Episode 1 to the soaring orchestral crescendo of the finale, where the grounding cello of Apollo Bay meets the windswept peak of the Twelve Apostles. Eight soundscapes. One coast.
The route runs west from Apollo Bay along the cliff edge of the Otway coast, passing through Cape Otway, the Aire River wetlands, and Johanna Beach before climbing to Ryan’s Den and descending to the Twelve Apostles at Port Campbell.
Key waypoints: Apollo Bay → Elliot Ridge → Blanket Bay → Cape Otway Lightstation → Rainbow Falls → Aire River → Castle Cove → Johanna Beach → Ryan’s Den → Milanesia → The Gables → Wreck Beach → Devil’s Kitchen → Gibson Steps → Twelve Apostles.
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