Peter and Vicki's Travel Blog: From the Shipwreck Coast, Victoria to the Limestone Coast,South Australia

Changed coasts today!

Left Port Fairy on the Shipwreck Coast and headed to Mount Gambier, South Australia, on the Limestone Coast! Volcanic country here! We broke our road trip in Portland and then looped through the surrounding peninsulas, taking in Cape Nelson and Cape Bridgewater. Very scenic and very fertile farming land due to the rich volcanic soil.

The area we explored today

A lot of wind farms along the way - great area for them because it is very windy!

The Portland Wind Energy Project will be the largest in the Southern hemisphere, with 120 turbines, providing enough energy to supply the electricity needs for 113,000 homes each year. Keppel Prince is the local company supplying all the towers for the project, as well as others in Australia and New Zealand.

Victoria's birthplace

Lt James Grant charted the south western coastline of Victoria in 1800. Sighting the area from aboard
the Lady Nelson, he named Portland Bay after the English Secretary of State, the Duke of Portland.

Portland was were European settlement history for the Colony Victoria began with the arrival of
Edward Henty in the Ladybird in 1834.
Portland today is a thriving harbour-side city, population 11,000. As a strategically located deepwater port, just a short distance from the southern shipping lanes, its established export trade includes aluminium ingots, logs, woodchips, wood products, livestock and mineral sands. An aluminium smelter started full production here in 1988 and is one of Australia's largest export earners.

Looking across Portland Bay to the Harbour and Marina
The Lighthouse on the right sits atop Whalers Point

The Port of Portland
Wood chips where piled high waiting to be shipped

A vessel being towed out of the harbour by the tug boat

Bayview College is linked to a Portland notable - Saint Mary of the Cross MacKillop.
Mary came to Portland in 1862 to work as a governess for the Cameron family. A year later, she took up salaried employment at Common School No 510 in Bentinck Street, and then she established a boarding school for girls.
This was situated in a stone cottage known as "Seaview", which is now part of Bayview College.

Upon leaving Portand in 1866, Mary went to Penola to pioneer and establish the first Australian religious order, the Sisters of St Joseph.

Portland from Whalers Point

Nuns Beach

The Marina and the Harbour breakwall

The Lighthouse looks out over Portland Bay

Cape Nelson Lighthouse

Cape Bridgewater - It was once a volcanic island.

4kms sandy beach!

The road out to the tip of the cape is flanked by these giants

The Blowholes at the Cape, formed mainly of basalt(black) and scoria(purple) rock

The Petrified Forest

Conflicting theories to how the forest was formed!

Sme say it was formed when a forest of moonah trees was smothered by a large sand dune. Water seeped down through the sand to form a crust of sandstone on the outside of the trunks, decaying the organic matter, leaving behind "petrified" trunks. Others believe it was formed through the natural erosion of stone in the ground, with the remains looking coincidentally like fossilised tree trunks.

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