Australia: Driving from Sydney to Melbourne

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Outside Traveler Winter 2005

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Australia's Southeast Coast
Lost Coast, Found
Discover the wild, sandy stretch between Sydney and Melbourne, the next idyllic beach paradise Down Under

By Tony Perrottet


	DAGGY NO MORE: Driving Australia's southeast coast (left), studded with lodges like the Paperbark Camp (right), is suddenly cool. (Mikkel Vang)

If Nicole Kidman went feral," a friend told me one night in Sydney, "she'd hang out on the south coast." I remembered this dubious recommendation—which was made, I should add, at 3 a.m. in a raucous Bondi Beach pub—as I was piling a rental car high with camping gear for the 650-mile road trip southwest to Melbourne. The Princes Highway may connect Australia's two biggest cities, but it also skirts some of the wildest coastal bushland in the whole country. Imagine a stretch longer than San Francisco to San Diego, with wilds as beautiful and empty as Alaska, and you get the idea. For a little added challenge, I'd lured my wife, Lesley, and our five-year-old son, Henry, along on this seven-day grand excursion, so we had enough gear for an Everest assault.

"Scattered at convenient intervals are nodes of comfort and hipness—small hotels and lodges designed to take full advantage of their settings."

My vision of a hardcore camping trip lasted about three hours. Some 120 miles south of Sydney, I turned onto a gravel track straight into virgin forest—and came upon a rustic refuge called Paperbark Camp. Wild and remote, yes, but not your average campground. Ten "luxury tented facilities" imported from South Africa's high-end safari circuit had been artfully placed among soft paperbark trees. Each tent was raised on stilts, with its own soft woolen-draped bed, solar-powered lights, and open-air bathroom stocked with handcrafted Australian cosmetics. A glassy creek, with canoe and paddles at the ready, meandered nearby. There was even a chic restaurant serving the latest modern Australian inventions, such as cumin-encrusted kangaroo fillets with caramelized-onion-and-red-wine jus.

What was going on? A few years before, visitors would have been as likely to find a decent caffe latte south of Wollongong as they would a three-star chef in Sprott, Alabama.

Access and Resources

CLICK HERE to follow a seven-day itinerary down the slow road south.

It's a sign of the times that a touch of glamour has reached the southeastern coast, sometimes derided as "daggy" (Australian for "uncool"). For generations, Sydney folks have preferred to head north to find their escapes. Now they're realizing that the often ignored road to Melbourne not only connects mile after mile of empty beaches and chunks of pristine wilderness but also contains extra enticements. Scattered at convenient intervals on the route are unexpected nodes of comfort and hipness—a string of small hotels and lodges that are designed to take full advantage of their settings.

Some of these, in fact, are shamelessly deluxe, like the Bannisters Point Lodge, in Mollymook, south of Jervis Bay—a funky retro motel recently renovated into a sleek jet-age love nest by the sea. The comfortable minimalist rooms offer sumptuous whirlpool bathtubs, while the lodge's rimless infinity pool, suffused with colored light, allows 300-degree views of the Tasman Sea. And then there are the Cape Conran Cabins, some 460 miles into the route, designed by trendy urban architects to integrate into the bush environment, using expansive decks of native timber and windows set in corrugated iron.

Other hotels have taken advantage of historic landmarks that happen to possess stunning locations: At the 335-mile mark, Mallacoota's Karbeethong Lodge, a revamped 1920s guesthouse overlooking a large inlet, has the soothing ambience of a Buddhist retreat. The isolated lighthouse at Point Hicks, deep in the otherworldly Croajingolong National Park (roughly 350 miles from Sydney), has turned its pair of atmospheric lighthouse keeper's cottages, built in the 1880s from shipwreck timber, into hideaways fit for Phileas Fogg. Each of these places offers the heady pleasures of a night in the Aussie bush without having to set up your tent.

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Sydney-born Tony Perrottet has written travel guides to Australia, Melbourne, and other destinations, and contributes to publications such as Outside, Esquire, Civilization, Escape, Islands, Blue, Travel Holiday, and the U.K.'s Sunday Times.

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