AUSTRALIANA Travel South Australia Victoria –
Australia’s south coast between South Australia’s Victor Harbor and Victoria’s Barwon Heads features a unique and fascinating concentration of natural scenic beauty and the nation’s early history.
In just over one thousand kilometres are the Murray River’s mouth, the Coorong wetlands, extinct volcanoes, deep limestone caves, The Apostles, the Otway Ranges and famous surf beaches. The author also writes about the coast’s historic settlements, fishing villages, ports and lighthouses, tragic shipwrecks, and the mysterious Mahogany Ship.
This is a timely book about a coast which, for the first time since Aboriginal people were forced inland at the end of the last ice age, is today threatened by rising sea levels.
In telling the South Coast’s story, and in retracing a barely remembered 1960s family caravanning holiday, Danny O’Neill writes for anyone who ever ignored parents’ attempts at history lessons, or impassioned pleas to ‘look at the countryside’, on long car trips.
Here, then, is what you might have missed travelling between South Australia’s Victor Harbor and Victoria’s Barwon Heads.
REVIEWS
‘Mr O’Neill has mastered several useful knacks. One is relating casual conversations so effortlessly you can imagine you are the one overhearing them. He nicely balances the long but necessary historical narratives with snatches of personal observation and experience, pausing now and then to bring in a new character for a few pithy words before moving on to the next topic.’
‘It’s very much a book for the casual read, to dip in and out of as your mood fancies. This is a good thing; there are formal histories of the south-west vailable but few such readable and lively descriptions of our corner of the world.’
‘It’s a bit like good newspaper travel writing, except this is a book to be put on a shelf for present and future enjoyment, maybe shared around.’