"Cigarettes and whisky, and wild, wild coastlanders...." inhabited these shores; and when a clipper ship or like came to grief they swarmed about her like buzzards to a land kill.

The troopers and the excise men were always well behind the local lawless, and anything that washed ashore, or could be liberated from the stricken hulls, was slipped away into the hinterland and buried, chewed, smoked or drunk—fast.

Anglesea saw the Inverlochy and the Hereford come to grief on her shores; and the Hereford made such an impression on the locals they petitioned to have the town renamed Hereford Bay, but to no avail.

Another wreck lying off the coast between Torquay and Anglesea is an American war plane from World War 11. It is a declared war grave now. Observers from both the Anglesea and Torquay posts saw it go down, and boats were launched, and some of the crew saved by the Torquay boat; but some drowned, too.

From Torquay to Airey’s Inlet (maybe beyond) the wild coastlanders had a yen for hard liquor, and whisky stills in the hills behind kept the excise men and troopers good and active in the area. Distillery Creek as a name is about all that remains to remind us, as the major wildfires which inhabit the Otways tend to be great erasers of history (and the present, come to that).

As you climb the steep hill out of Anglesea, the lookout at the top of the hill (on your right) is worth a glance. During World War 11 it was set up and manned as an Air Observers Post by the locals; and had the reputation of reporting more aircraft than any other post in the state. (The Air Observers were a kind of Dad’s Army, and provided an essential part of Australia’s defence.)

Your driver won’t have to pay before you go up Cutler’s Hill at Urquharts Bluff, and won’t have to take the Scotsmans Road through the bush to avoid it, either. The Toll Gate is many years gone; it was there to help fund the building of the Great Ocean Road.

(Please excuse the apostrophe in Airey’s Inlet. It was there when we grew up in the town, and no one never asked us nohow that they could snatch it out.)

Back of Airey’s Inlet on the old Anglesea Road, legend has it, Mr Loud grew the only apples ever able to survive the long trip back to England in the sailing ships; but that’s an orchard that has become nature again, now.

The White Queen, more prosaically known at the Split Point Lighthouse, above the Eagle’s Nest Reef on the Split Point at Airey’s Inlet has both a real and a fanciful claim to your special attention.

Arthur Upfield put a body in the old minor-light cavity for his novel The Clue of the New Shoe; James Davin set his television show Alpha Scorpio in it; and the Australian Children’s Television Foundation filmed the Paul Jennings Round the Twist there. (I used it for the setting of my World War II children’s novel, Andy on Guard).

But truth has always been stranger than fiction: For twenty years the Split Point light shone white for danger and red for safety before anyone noticed, and hastily swapped the glass about! (Be wary of traffic signals which show "red" for "go", it could get very nasty.)

Out there at the foot of the Eagle’s Nest Reef lies an ancient hull that has yet to be identified; perhaps the Foam which went missing on a trip from Lorne to Melbourne back in the past?

Probably the first ship to respond in any way to the lighthouse was in 1891 when the tower was half built. The Godfrey out of ‘Frisco sailed in close and made signals to the builders requesting a position. She was heading for Melbourne Town.

Whatever the signals they gave her (you know builders), someone blundered, because the Godfrey turned about and sailed away from Melbourne and turned into the coast and named a river—the hard way; by wrecking (it was a very, very, small river) in her mouth.

Watch for the Godfrey River on this trip.

WRECK OF THE LOCH ARD

"Don’t miss the Otway Light, Captain!"

But Captain Gibb did on that fateful night of May the 31^st 1878. He was not, as he thought, many miles off the Victorian coast, but close inshore near the mouth of the Sherbrooke Creek.

Unforgiving—one of the wildest coastlines in the world—it was set to claim his ship as a victim.

When the coastal haze lifted early in the morning, and the true position of the ship was realised, desperate efforts were made to sail her off. But it was too late, and the breakers claimed her at the feet of towering cliffs.

She rolled, and her yards struck high on the sheer face of the cliffs, bringing rocks, spars and rigging down on passenger and crew alike.

The Loch Ard had left Gravesend for Melbourne with 54 passengers and crew, and a general cargo valued at 53,000 pounds, and was within a few days sail of her destination when she wrecked.

When those aboard her had had time to gather their wits after she struck, the port lifeboat was launched with six men aboard. It capsized, and one of the men, Tom Pearce, an apprentice, was trapped beneath it.

He was the lucky one. After swimming out from beneath it he clung to the upturned hull for nearly three hours before he was washed into a gorge some hundred yards from where the ship had gone down. He swam from there to a small beach.

Doctor Emery Carmichael, his wife, four daughters and two sons were also passengers. Only one of them, daughter, Eva, was to survive. She was carried into the same gorge Tom Pearce had been swept into, where her weak cries were heard by the young apprentice, who waded out into the surf to save her.

They found a cave, where Pearce left her while he scaled the cliffs. At their top he found a track, and followed it until he met men from Glenample Station mustering sheep.

They rode for help, while Pearce returned to the cave; only to find Eva missing.

She was found before dark by the rescue party from Glenample Station, and taken there to recover—and a month later both she and Tom Pearce went on to Melbourne; where Tom was treated as a hero.

Only five bodies were recovered from the wreck, two of them being Eva Carmichael’s mother and a sister.

In the subsequent salvage attempts, little was recovered, and the steamer, Napier, used in the salvage, was lost when she ran ashore in Port Campbell Bay.

As time passed, the exact whereabouts of the wreck were lost to the authorities (although many divers seemed to have known, judging by the tons of copper, bronze and lead recovered from properties over a wide surrounding area in latter years).

It was not until 1967 that she was officially found again, by Warrnambool skin diver, Stan McPhee, who used a light plane and a launch to search for her in the general area she was known to have sunk.

Of those two survivors: Eva Carmichael returned to England.