DESCRIPTIVE SKETCH OF VICTORIA   

Atlas Page 34
By James Smith

COAST LINE  -  WEST 

Five miles beyond the Otway, the united waters of the rivers Aire and Calder find an outlet in the sea, after expanding into a narrow lake bordered on the east side by a low range of miocene limestone. Beyond the embouchure of these streams, the Eagle’s Nest and the Sentinel Rocks stand like guardians of the coast, which maintains the same rugged character to Moonlight Head; at the back of which, the Latrobe Range recedes in a north-easterly direction. The country inland has been very imperfectly explored owing to the difficulties it presents, for it is in places so heavily timbered, and there is such a tangled mass of underwood to obstruct the tourist, that the most adventurous lover Of the picturesque is baffled in his efforts to penetrate it. Deep ravines separate ranges so precipitous by such narrow intervals, that a bridge four or five hundred feet long would serve to unite the summits of opposite hills. The trees not unfrequently attain an altitude of three hundred feet, and rise in their columnar majesty as high as one hundred feet before they throw out their first branch. At the bottom of these chasms, springs of deliciously pure and icily cold water ripple and bubble beneath the over-arching fronds of motionless tree-ferns; the soil is completely hidden by the matted herbage, intermingled with which are fantastic creepers and parasites —shrubs which distil an aromatic odour on the air, and others which are garnished at particular seasons of the year, and notably towards the end of the summer, with lustrous berries —white, crimson, purple and a delicate amber —the fruit of the Exocarpus cupressifornius, the Aristotelia peduncularis, and the Drimophyla cyanocarpa of botanists, sylvan ornaments upon which perhaps more homely and expressive names will hereafter be bestowed.

After passing a bold projection, which constitutes the wave-washed buttress of the range just described, and has received the descriptive epithet of Gable, the coast begins to trend steadily towards the north-west, the high lands visible from the water consisting of heathy plateaux and grass-tree plains about five hundred feet above the level of the sea. Some two miles beyond Moonlight Head a change occurs in the formation of such cliffs as present themselves, and the mesozoic sandstone finally disappears. At Point Ronald the river Gellibrand empties its waters into the Pacific; the coast is generally depressed, and the only indentation of any importance is the estuary known as Curdie’s Inlet, which receives a river of the same name, both of them deriving their appellation from an early settler. just beyond this inlet is the Bay of Martyrs, with which tradition associates the murder of several white people by the natives. The only conspicuous landmarks which attract the eye as the voyager skirts the coast are Flaxman’s Hill and Point Buttress. Just before reaching the flourishing seaport town of Warrnambool, is perceived the outfall of the Hopkins River, which, taking its rise in the Great Dividing Range, a hundred miles distant as the crow flies, absorbs an immense number of affluents in its tortuous course. The coast curves round somewhat at Warrnambool and thus forms a pretty bay, and a breakwater is in course of construction which will shelter it, from the violence of the south-westerly gales and seas. From a geological point of view, the whole of the coast from this point westward as far as the embouchure of the Shaw and Eumeralla Rivers at Yambuk, a distance of something like forty miles, is highly interesting, because over, the whole of this tract of country a stream of lava must have flowed, projected from the then active volcano of Mount Rouse, thirty-six miles inland. Belfast, or Port Fairy, as it was formerly called, which lies midway between these points, was formed of basalt thus ejected; while the indurated tufas of Tower Hill, in its immediate neighbourhood, are found to have been originally composed of ashes, red-hot stone of a vitreous structure, dust and vapour. Three distinct coast lines are traceable hereabouts, with limestone bluffs running from east to west for a distance of six or seven miles, while, in a marshy flat on the right bank of the River Moyne, which flows into the sea at Belfast, shafts which have been sunk for wells, have bottomed on the original sea-bed, plentifully strewn with shells. Two small islands guard the entrance to the harbour, and just behind the town the waters of the Moyne, after having formed the Tower Hill Swamp, expand into a lagoon somewhat resembling a boomerang in shape. Five miles westward is the entrance of Portland Bay, the scene of the earliest settlement in Victoria, although long before the landing of the Hentys it had been often visited by ships engaged in the capture of whales; and it is remarkable that the contour of the bay strikingly resembles that of the head and shoulders of one of these leviathans of the deep, with its nose resting on what is known as Whaler Point. Sixty or seventy years ago, schools of these sociable creatures used to visit Portland Bay at certain periods of the year, and as this was soon discovered by the hardy adventurers engaged in their pursuit, the place was selected as a whaling, station, and at various "points of vantage" look-outs were established; one of these, as Mr. Richmond Henty tells us, having been stationed at the Lighthouse Point, another at the Whalers’ Bluff, and a third at a spot seven miles north from Portland known as the " Convincing Ground." The writer who has just been quoted states that he has seen as many as thirty whales at a time spouting in the waters of the bay, and "rubbing their huge bodies on the sandy bottom in order to clear away the barnacles which clung to them."

To-day the whales have pretty well disappeared from this part of the coast, and instead of nineteen or twenty per annum being captured —as when the Hentys reaped the harvest both of sea and land —the apparition of a solitary whale in Portland Bay is a phenomenon which excites a powerful sensation in the district. The bay itself is named after the Duke of Portland. It is upwards of thirty miles wide at the entrance, while its greatest indentation is between five and six miles from the chord of the irregular arc formed by the coast. This consists chiefly of sandy hillocks, and the country inland is densely timbered, with occasional flat patches and swamps. Eighteen miles from the coast, a mass of basalt lifts itself one hundred and fifty feet above the level of the sea which welters round its base. It is exactly bisected by the one hundred and forty-second meridian of east longitude, and is familiar to all mariners as Lady Julia Percy Island.

From its isolation and its difficulties of access, this huge pillar, fissured and grooved by the never-ceasing action of the elements, and perforated with caverns excavated by the restless sea, has been selected by the gregarious seal as a place of sojourn during two periods of the year. Hither these aquatic mammals resort by hundreds, recalling to mind Poseidon’s flock and the passage in the "Odyssey" descriptive of old Proteus as the herdsman of that strange assemblage, classing them in groups of five. Here these gentle, timid creatures, with such a curiously human look in their soft brown eyes, and with such preternaturally acute senses of hearing and vision, lie basking in the sun, and living in perfect amity with such of the sea-fowl as make their nesting-places on the rocks. Each family selects and appropriates its own exclusive little bit of territory, and the mother brings forth her young upon a couch of seaweed, or other marine plants. Nothing can exceed the tenderness of the affection or the depth of the solicitude which she exhibits for her offspring. This comes into the world fully developed and covered with a thick, soft fleece which prevents it from taking to the water. In a short time this is exchanged for its future coat, and the grotesque little seal —with its dog’s head, its cat’s muzzle, its short arms terminating in fins that look like hands arrested in process of development, its valvular nostrils, its cropped ears and its soft flute-like voice —is conducted to the sea, where it receives its first lesson in swimming and diving from its watchful parent, who seems to derive as much amusement from its gambols as human beings do from the performances of a company of trained athletes. But, in general, the seals of Julia Percy Island are but little disposed to bodily exercise. Their delight is rather that of the laureate’s "Lotus Eater’s:"

To watch the crisping ripples on the beach,
And tender curving lines of creamy spray;
To lend their hearts and spirits wholly
To the influence of mild-minded melancholy.

At the western extremity of Portland Bay —which is admirably sheltered from the gales on this side, although exposed to those ‘which blow from the south-east —is the bold headland known as Point Danger, whence the cliffs curve round to the rugged promontory named after Sir William Evans. From the summit of this headland a noble and extensive prospect is obtained, and one that varies amazingly with the season and the weather. In the calm and brightness of : midsummer afternoon, when the cliff expands its "broad, bright side beneath the broad, bright sun,"

The lazy sea-weed glistens in the light;
The lazy sea-fowl dry their steaming wings;
The lazy swells creep whispering up the ledge
And sink again.

In one direction, Cape Nelson lifts its rugged outline against the western sky, while, in another, the eye takes in the graceful sweep of the bay, with Percy Island breaking the unwrinkled level of the slumbering sea to the eastward, the Lawrence Rocks, only two miles off, serving as a foreground. The far-distant line of the horizon is almost undistinguishable in colour from the sky, which bends down to it, and the whole scene is suggestive of drowsy languor and dreamy reverie.

Nelson Bay, shaped like a sickle, has Cape Nelson for its heft, and the cliffs, with high land behind them, heavily timbered in part and in part covered with scrub, maintain the same rugged character from point to point. Upon a platform of rock jutting out into the ocean, like a vast bastion reared by Titanic might, stands the lighthouse, overlooking a wide expanse of sea; and, beneath that lofty ledge, there is

A belt of dark-red storm-beaten crags, which grimly face
The baffled billows that lie ever panting at their feet,
Or gurgling in black-throated caves where still they moan and beat.

On the western side of this peninsula, the coast line bends backward slightly to the east, and the land dips downward to a semi-circular ridge of sand hummocks which extend along the margin of Bridgewater Bay to a point almost exactly opposite to that at which they have commenced, where a broader promontory opposes another fortress of basaltic rocks to the impetuous and tempestuous seas which come surging up from the south-west, under stress of foul weather. Bridgewater Bay is about six miles wide, but its land margin is nowhere more than two miles from the open ocean. The headland, of which Cape Bridgewater is the south-eastern extremity, is barely a mile across at its neck or junction with the mainland, and it rises nearly four hundred and fifty feet above the level of the sea, at what may be called its point of greatest resistance to the waves. Some of the most romantic coast scenery in Victoria is to be found in this locality, and to see it under its most impressive and imposing aspect, it should be visited when the summit of the huge bluff is being swept by the skirts of the thundercloud, and the tumultuous sea is flinging itself with all its might against the dark masses of immovable rock which forms its base; while

In many a spire
The pyramid billows, with white points of brine,
On the cope of the lightning inconstantly shine
As piercing the sky from the floor of the sea.

At such a time, the spectator is awed by the savage grandeur of the scene, which is terrible in its sublimity, and conveys an overwhelming sense of the tremendous power of the forces of Nature, and of the relative insignificance of the feeble observer, who staggers under the shock of the fierce wind which comes raging up from the icy south, and feels the very earth beneath his feet shuddering as the waves leap at it, as if in a frenzy of ungovernable passion. Then, too, the resounding sea comes up with a rush and a roar through a blow-hole in the cliff, and sends a column of water, crowned with a wreath of snow-white foam, high into the air; and the caves, which have been hollowed out of the solid rock, as if by the labour of human hands, are transformed into seething cauldrons; while the boom of the ocean, the deep diapason of the thunder, and the dissonant shrieking and howling of the gale, are heard far inland, and people listening to the elemental discord in the comfort and security of their own firesides, put up a silent prayer for those who are in peril on the sea.

But in the halcyon days of summer, when no breath of air is stirring on sea or shore, and the faint ebb and flow of the sea resemble, in their soft regularity, the pulse of a sleeping child; when a hot haze settles down upon the scarcely-definable horizon, and the hills inland lose the ordinary sharpness of their outlines by reason of the veil of vapour which softens their colour and confuses their bulk; Cape Bridgewater —no longer the grim and austere buttress against the encroaching waves "that lifted its awful form" above them when they were lashing themselves into foam against its massive escarpment and "lacing the black rocks with a thousand snowy streams" —seems to bask in the warm sunshine, and to be enveloped in an atmosphere of peace and serenity; while its caves, which are only accessible when the sea is calm, are delightfully cool and shadowy by comparison with the dazzling glare of the water, and the heat that radiates from the land. What is known as the "Watery Cave" is just the sort of place where Stephano, in the "Tempest," would have hidden the butt of sack which he rescued from the wreck, and Caliban would have chosen for a hiding-place when he had done anything to subject him to the displeasure of his sovereign lord and master.

The coast from Cape Bridgewater to the mouth of the Glenelg trends in a north-westerly direction. The country is of an undulating character, sand hummocks, marshes and diminutive lakes of fresh and salt water, with a background of high land for the most part heavily timbered, constituting its leading features.

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