The handover took forty-five minutes, which felt excessive for a vehicle smaller than most sedans. The agent, a young woman named Ravi who had clearly done this spiel three times already that morning, walked us around the campervan with the practiced patience of someone who knows most people aren’t really listening. “The fridge runs off the auxiliary battery,” she said, tapping the tiny unit under the counter. “If you’re parked for more than a few hours without driving, it’ll drain. Most people learn that the hard way around day three.” We promised we’d remember. We didn’t.
Melbourne in late autumn has a particular quality of light that makes even the graffiti-covered laneways look intentional rather than neglected. We drove from the rental depot in the inner north straight into the city, the van groaning slightly on every hill, and found a parking spot near Flinders Street that was barely long enough. The Yarra River was doing its usual thing — brown, sluggish, reflecting the casino and the footbridges and the joggers who seemed to be everywhere at 11am on a Tuesday. We walked through Degraves Street, where the coffee smell was so dense it felt almost humid, and bought sandwiches from a place that didn’t bother with a menu board. The woman behind the counter just asked, “Turkey or eggplant?” and that was the whole transaction.
That first afternoon, we made a mistake that would cost us later. We assumed the campervan would be fine left parked overnight on a suburban street near the city. By 7pm, a handwritten note was tucked under the wiper blade — “No overnight parking. Move by 6am.” We moved it to a 24-hour supermarket carpark two suburbs away, slept badly, and woke to a light that suggested rain was coming but hadn’t decided when. The van’s heater, we discovered, was a small gas unit that sounded like a hair dryer and warmed roughly a one-foot radius around itself. We ate breakfast sitting in our sleeping bags, watching a man in a hi-vis vest hose down the carpark asphalt.
Day two is when the Great Ocean Road properly begins, but the first stretch from Torquay to Bells Beach feels more like preamble than arrival. Torquay is the kind of town that exists to sell you wetsuits and sunscreen, and it does both efficiently. The surf shops are clean, well-lit, and staffed by teenagers who look like they’ve stepped out of a wet magazine shoot. We bought a cheap esky from a hardware store because the van’s fridge was already proving unreliable — the battery had dropped to half charge overnight, just sitting there. Ravi’s warning came back to us, not usefully, but with the clarity of hindsight.
Bells Beach was quieter than expected. A Tuesday in April means the big swells are unpredictable and the crowds are thin. We sat on the cliff edge for maybe twenty minutes, watching a single surfer paddle in slow arcs, never quite catching anything. The wind was cold enough that we kept moving back to the van between glances. A couple from Germany pulled up next to us in a rented SUV and asked if we’d seen any koalas yet. We said no. They looked disappointed, as if we’d somehow failed a test we didn’t know we were taking.
The Twelve Apostles, when we finally reached them late that afternoon, were the kind of sight that makes you understand why people take the same photo from the same angle every time. They’re just there — big, obvious, impossible to miss. The viewing platform was busy but not unbearable. A tour bus had disgorged its passengers twenty minutes before, and most of them were already filtering back, phones held in front of them like shields. We stayed until the light started to change, which is what you’re supposed to do, and it worked. The limestone turned a shade of orange that looked overdone even as we were watching it. A ranger stood near the edge, not really supervising, just present, and we overheard him tell someone that two of the original twelve had collapsed in the past twenty years. “Seven and nine,” he said, pointing. “They’re the ones that fell. The names didn’t change, obviously. It’s still called the Twelve Apostles.”
Port Campbell is a small town that exists almost entirely to house people who work around the Apostles. We arrived at the campsite just before dark and found a spot near the back, under a leaky tap that dripped onto the gravel all night. The van’s battery was now at a quarter charge. We ran the heater for an hour and then turned it off to conserve power, layering fleeces and sleeping bags instead. Dinner was two-minute noodles with a tin of tuna mixed in, eaten off the van’s fold-down table while a possum watched from the branch of a eucalyptus tree about three metres away. It wasn’t interested in us, only in the apple core we’d tossed near the bin. It took small, careful bites.
Day three was the one where the van’s battery finally gave up. We woke to a fridge that was barely cool and a starter that turned over twice before clicking dead. A man at the campsite office — older, with a neck tattoo of a frilled-neck lizard — lent us jumper cables and told us where the nearest auto shop was. “Happens all the time,” he said, not unkindly. “Those rental vans, they never put decent batteries in. You drive for half an hour, you’ll be fine. But if you’re gonna sit anywhere for a day, you gotta run the engine.” We followed his advice, drove the loop around Port Campbell and back, and the van started without complaint for the rest of the trip.
Phillip Island is not on the Great Ocean Road. It’s a detour, a four-hour drive east that takes you through dairy country and past towns that seem to have been bypassed by the last forty years. We stopped for petrol in a place called Korumburra, where the servo had a pie warmer and a single table with a salt shaker shaped like a kangaroo. The woman behind the counter told us the Penguin Parade tickets were sold out for that evening. “School holidays,” she said, as if that explained everything. We bought tickets online from the carpark, overpaying by about fifteen dollars for the last available slots.
The Penguin Parade itself is a logistical operation disguised as a nature experience. You walk down a long boardwalk to a beach where bleachers have been built facing the water. The penguins come in at dusk, in groups, emerging from the surf and waddling up the sand to their burrows. They’re small — about thirty centimetres tall — and they make a sound like a toy being squeezed. The rangers use red-filtered torches so as not to disturb them. It felt managed, curated, but the penguins themselves didn’t seem to care. They had their own schedule. One group of three stopped under a light and preened for several minutes while a hundred tourists watched in near-silence. A child behind us asked, loudly, “Why are they so ugly?” and nobody answered, which seemed like the correct response.
We saw koalas the next morning, not in a sanctuary but along a dirt track called the Koala Conservation Reserve. It costs fifteen dollars and takes about forty minutes to walk. The koalas were wedged in the forks of eucalyptus trees, motionless, looking like stuffed toys that had been left out in the rain. One of them opened its eyes and blinked slowly, then closed them again. A volunteer nearby explained, unprompted, that they sleep up to twenty hours a day because their diet is so low in nutrients. “They’re basically just digesting leaves and waiting to not be digesting leaves,” she said. “It’s a pretty simple life.”
The coastal walk from the Nobbies to the blowhole took about an hour. The wind was strong enough that we had to lean into it on the exposed sections, and the sound of the waves hitting the cliffs was a constant, low percussion. A seal was visible on a rock about fifty metres out, a dark shape that might have been a piece of driftwood until it moved. We watched it for a while, then kept walking. The path was empty except for a single jogger who passed us twice — doing laps, apparently.
Day five was the long drive to Sydney. It took seven hours, including stops, and most of it was on the Hume Highway, which is not scenic. The van struggled on the uphill sections near Mittagong, dropping to eighty kilometres an hour while trucks roared past. We stopped at a rest area near Goulburn for a sandwich and watched a family unload their own campervan with the kind of practised efficiency that suggested they’d done this a hundred times. The father had a checklist. The children carried things without being asked. We ate our sandwiches and felt like amateurs.
Sydney arrived gradually, through suburbs that sprawled into each other without clear boundaries. We found the campsite near the city — a caravan park in Lane Cove, tucked between a golf course and a creek — and set up in the fading light. The van’s battery was fine now, holding charge through the drive, and the fridge was actually cold for the first time in days. We sat outside on the plastic chairs that came with the hire, eating leftover pasta from a container, watching a pair of magpies argue over a bread crust near the communal bins. The air smelled like eucalyptus and barbecue smoke from somewhere nearby.
📷 Photos: Peter Gladwin (Unsplash), Peter Gladwin (Unsplash)
