Great Otway National Park

Great Otway National Park holds the Otway Ranges and a long stretch of the Shipwreck Coast in one park: cool-temperate rainforest, tall mountain ash forest, waterfalls and fossil-bearing sea cliffs between Torquay and Princetown. The Otway Ranges are the most extensive landform in the park, and everything runs off them. It is an Aboriginal cultural landscape — the Country of the Eastern Maar and Wadawurrung peoples, with the Cape Otway coast associated with the Gadubanud — and more than a hundred registered Aboriginal sites sit within it, from scar trees to shell middens. The park's management plan records 1,388 plant types, 97 rare or threatened species, and ten sites of geological significance, including Artillery Rocks, one of the clearest clusters of volcanic cannonball concretions in the world, and the dinosaur fossil exposures around Dinosaur Cove. Streams and waterfalls run through the ranges, and landslides with them.

What pulls most visitors in is a pairing: the Great Ocean Walk — just over 110km one-way from Apollo Bay to the Twelve Apostles, with seven bookable hike-in camps — and the waterfall-and-fern country around Beech Forest: Triplet Falls, Hopetoun Falls and the Maits Rest boardwalk beneath myrtle beech up to 300 years old.

What to expect

Reviewed 7 November 2026

You start in the rainforest, and it changes how the whole park reads. At Maits Rest a boardwalk loop of about 30 minutes leaves the carpark and puts you straight under mountain ash and myrtle beech, with tree ferns crowding the track and moss on everything that stays still. The beech here is old — Parks Victoria describes giant beech trees up to 300 years old — and the gully holds the air several degrees cooler than the coast, so a Great Ocean Road forecast is close to useless once you drive inland. Look low and slow: the Otway black snail, a carnivorous species that eats worms and slugs, works this leaf litter, and long-nosed potoroos move along the forest edges at dusk. The walking is on formed track and boardwalk, but the surface stays slick year-round after rain, and in winter the fog sits in these gullies well into the morning.

Waterfalls are the other constant. Triplet Falls runs a 2km circuit through forest where the mountain ash is estimated at around 200 years old, past a historic sawmill site to three separate cascades; Hopetoun Falls drops 30 metres into the Aire River, a listed Heritage River, reached in about 30 minutes return with roughly 200 steps down to the lower platform. Beauchamp Falls is the steeper proposition, a 3km return walk rated strenuous to a viewing deck 20 metres above the falls. All of them run hardest in late winter and spring, and all of them share the same hazard — wet rock, wet steps, and boardwalks that stay slippery long after the rain stops.

Wildlife here is not a sideshow. Koalas sit in the roadside eucalypts on the Lighthouse Road into Cape Otway, platypus are a dawn and dusk job at Lake Elizabeth, glow worms light up Melba Gully after dark, and humpback and southern right whales pass just offshore through the winter. On the beach at Johanna you are sharing the sand: hooded plovers nest above the high tide line there from August to February, and dogs are allowed on lead only. Keep your distance from the nest line, and expect the surf to be doing its own thing — these are unpatrolled beaches with strong currents and no flags to tell you where to swim.

Then the land drops into the Southern Ocean, and the coast takes over. The cliffs between Aireys Inlet and Princetown are steep and broken — sea caves, tidal platforms and long sandy beaches, with ancient rock exposed by erosion and dinosaur fossils recorded at several points along the escarpment, including Dinosaur Cove and the Parker River to Point Lewis stretch. Lookouts do the work for you here: The Gables is a 400m return walk to one of the highest sea cliffs on mainland Australia, and Castle Cove Lookout puts you on a headland above breaking surf and a small beach below. At low tide you can drop down to Wreck Beach and find the anchors of the Marie Gabrielle and the Fiji bolted into the rock platform — more than 350 steps down and back up, and worth checking the tide chart before you commit to it.

The Great Ocean Walk ties all of it together. It runs just over 110km one-way from Apollo Bay to the Twelve Apostles through this park and Port Campbell National Park, and Parks Victoria budgets eight days for it, with seven small hike-in campsites that must be booked before you set out. Named stops along the way include Blanket Bay's rockpools, Station Beach, Milanesia Beach, Ryans Den, Devils Kitchen and the high cliffs at Moonlight Head. Day walkers get the best of it without the logistics — the 10km section from Cape Otway to Aire River is rated medium, and the 12.5km Aire River to Johanna Beach section is rated medium to hard, ending in an unbridged river crossing on the beach. Licensed tour operators run pack-free guided and self-guided versions of the full walk if you would rather not carry the week.