Return to the Great Ocean Road

Photo: Rufous Bristlebird.

For the last couple of days of our wonderful five week trip downunder we decided to head for the Great Ocean Road which lies just west of Melbourne. It's a spectacular place which is rightly high on the agenda for tourists to the area, with the Twelve Apostles in particular drawing the crowds, with a visitor center and a set up not too dissimilar to Stonehenge in the UK. For me it was an opportunity to try again for a bird which is a specialty of this coast but which eluded me on my previous visit.

Conveniently, rufous bristlebird is relatively easy to find at the Twelve Apostles. Easy that is if you can be there at dawn when there are less people around and the birds are more active and even singing. They are an odd bird, about the size of a blackbird preferring to run rather than fly, they scurry along the path in front of you, or sing from a high perch. They're sometimes described as elusive or skulking, but here they are used to people and are not too difficult to find. Even so, like all birds they are more active at dawn and I guess that sometimes in the middle of the day there are just too many people for them to comfortably feed along the footpaths.

The light was very poor when I took these photos, around 1/20th of a second shutter speed.

An unexpected bonus was a second new bird for me along the Great Ocean Road. We were in Grey River Road at Kennet River looking for Koalas when we came across about five gang-gang cockatoos, including at least two males with their red heads and bizarre crests.

Again the light was poor today, this bird was actually photographed through mist.

Australian king parrots are easy to see at Kennet River we even saw two perched on tourists heads, because despite the signs saying do not feed the birds, people think that they know best or perhaps they simply don't care about the welfare of the birds and go ahead and do it anyway. We live in an age where the most important thing in life is yet another pointless selfie at the expense of almost everything.

A surprise for me here was the number of satin bowerbirds which we saw. There were about five females and all pretty easy to spot.

However the real stars of Kennet River are the Koalas. You probably don't need to walk along Grey River Road in order to see them, in fact today there were two in the trees right at the start of the track, but there is so much more to see higher up that it is worth the walk for a mile or so. This is one of the best places in Australia for seeing wild koalas.

Thankfully the koalas are too high to be hand fed or stroked by tourists.

The Twelve Apostles. It's easy to hope for a beautiful sunny day with blue skies when you're at a place like this. I watch the tourists being bused in for their allotted 20 minutes in order to tick it off the list and take yet another rubbish and meaningless selfie at a place which has been photographed better a million times before and I wonder how many of them truly appreciate it, or is it just a place which has been put there for their convenience? Perhaps a letter of complaint should be sent and a refund demanded if the sun doesn't shine?

Actually though this isn't an art gallery set up to be a backdrop for visitors photographs, it's a living and changing coastline which every day looks different and unique due to ever changing weather conditions, and the very rocks themselves are carved by the elements. It would be a dull and uninteresting place if every day was sunny and warm.

The first day we were here it had been foggy, but when we arrived the fog had almost lifted and we were left with an improving but still misty evening.

By the following morning it was looking very threatening, with heavy cloud driven in across the Bass Straight by the Roaring Forties a truly bracing and exhilarating experience, and yet still the bristlebirds sang undeterred. Is there a more Australian scene than this? I know, I know, you're going to tell me Sydney Opera House.... doh!

Razorback awaiting the arrival of its creator and artistic director, the wind and the rain.

By the afternoon we had left the Great Ocean Road and arrived at the Bellarine Peninsula south of Melbourne ahead of our flight home. The sun was out and it was 33'C. But still the Roaring Forties roared....

Sadly the last bird I photographed on this holiday was this dead little penguin washed up on Thirteenth Beach on the Bellarine Peninsula. Who knows how or why it died? There were also several fluttering shearwaters dead on the same beach, part of a wreck which covers large parts of Victoria and Tasmania.