The Great Ocean Road's Twelve Apostles

Standing at the Edge: The Twelve Apostles in Winter

The Twelve Apostles are not twelve, and they are not apostles. They are eight - or seven, depending on when you visit, since the Southern Ocean is slowly, patiently dismantling them - limestone sea stacks standing off the coast of Port Campbell National Park like the remaining teeth of a very old jaw. They were called the Sow and Piglets until 1922, when someone decided that was insufficiently dramatic for one of the most dramatic landscapes on Earth.

I drove the Great Ocean Road from Melbourne in July - winter in the Southern Hemisphere - and the journey alone is worth the four hours. The road clings to the coast like a ribbon on a dress, curving through rainforest and surf towns and stretches of open grassland where the wind hits the car sideways with genuine conviction. Past Apollo Bay, the landscape changes. The hills flatten, the trees thin, and the ocean appears in enormous, unbroken stretches of gray and white, the swells rolling in from the Southern Ocean with the accumulated energy of a fetch that extends, uninterrupted, to Antarctica.

The viewing platform at the Twelve Apostles is a short walk from the car park, and when I arrived at eight in the morning, I had it nearly to myself. Winter does that - the tour buses do not arrive until ten, and the cold keeps casual visitors in their cars. The wind was ferocious, salt-laden, and cold enough to make my eyes stream. And the stacks - my God, the stacks.

They rise from the sea like monuments to erosion, their limestone walls banded in layers of cream and ochre that record twenty million years of geological time. The tallest stands perhaps forty-five meters, carved into buttresses and arches by the constant assault of waves that hit the base with a sound like controlled demolition. The sea around them was white with foam, and the spray reached the clifftop in gusts, tasting of salt and deep cold.

I walked the clifftop path east toward Loch Ard Gorge, a narrow inlet where the clipper Loch Ard wrecked in 1878, killing fifty-two of its fifty-four passengers. The gorge is enclosed by limestone walls a hundred feet high, and the water within is an impossible turquoise - sheltered from the swell, eerily calm while the open ocean rages just beyond the entrance. I stood at the top and looked down, and the scale made me dizzy in a way that had nothing to do with the height.

Come in winter. I know the guidebooks say summer, and summer is beautiful, but in winter the light is low and dramatic, the crowds are thin, and the Southern Ocean is at its most theatrical - gray and green and white, throwing everything it has at the limestone, which takes the beating with the patience of something that knows it will outlast the century but not the millennium. The Apostles are disappearing. That is their power. You are watching a landscape in the act of becoming something else.