Elisha Kennedy dives into the catch-and-cook philosophy, literally, by taking a hands-on tour through the bountiful waters of NSW’s Far South Coast.
We had always planned to make our road trip to the base of the New South Wales south coast our ‘seafood holiday’. As city-dwellers, my partner and I relished the opportunity to cast our phones aside and drive to a place where the ocean is sapphire blue and you can pick up a dozen delicious oysters from a roadside stall for under $10.
That is our idea of heaven, but we wanted more than just buying our meals – we wanted to physically catch our own. We’re both competent at fishing and were keen to try something more hands-on, but how would we know where to look? What to bring? Or what to do with it when we found it? Easy – ask a local.
Scott Proctor grew up on the Sapphire Coast and has spent a large portion of his life either in the ocean, or learning about it. After studying marine science at the University of Wollongong, he returned to his hometown of Pambula, deciding to share his passion for the sustainable seafood that is available there through his tour company, Australia’s Coastal Wilderness Adventures (ACWA).
Through ACWA, Scott offers small-group marine experiences including snorkelling, prawning and ocean to plate. We chose the ocean-to-plate experience, which incorporates a targeted dive for abalone, lobsters, mussels, crayfish and sea urchins followed by a cook-up of the seafood harvest for lunch. The market value alone to buy this produce is hundreds of dollars, but it was the opportunity to pick the brains of a local marine expert that really had us hooked.
We met Scott at the Eden Visitor Information Centre, and from here he drove us to a remote access point to Twofold Bay. All necessary gear, equipment and a fishing licence is provided and, after kitting up, we clambered over rocks to the shore.
A quick verbal run-through from Scott on snorkelling and breathing techniques, and we were in practising our dives. It doesn’t take long to get the hang of it, and we improved with each resurfacing. When we felt comfortable in depths of several metres, Scott led us further offshore to begin ‘the hunt’. We snorkelled through a changing ocean landscape: rocky walls, seagrass beds and shallow reefs.
The bay was teeming with marine life. On our two-hour dive we encountered wobbegong sharks, eastern rock lobsters, black and red spined urchins, starfish, abalone, blue mussels and a variety of fish species. But only some of those are good eating, and we were after a meal.
The prized abalone hide in crevices, cementing themselves between the curves of rocks in the deep. The smaller ones are plentiful here in the bays of Eden, but the minimum legal size to keep is 11.7 centimetres, and finding the larger ones takes patience. What we were really after were lobsters, and finding them is no easy feat. They’re extremely well camouflaged and surprisingly strong. Scott’s well-trained eye spots them, lying low in the crayweed – given away only by their thin and reddish antennae. A quick and agile grab secured them, and we kept them in netted bags attached to our weight belts. Deeper offshore we found mussel beds, easy enough to twist off the rocks – if you can hold your breath long enough to do so.
Between the three of us we bag two crayfish, four abalone and 40 mussels. Scott chats about the importance of bag limits, encouraging you to take “just enough for lunch", and he always varies dive locations. “It’s crucial not to harvest too much from the same area," he tells us. “It might be tempting but it’s not sustainable, for you or the ecology."
We carted our harvest up the hill to Eden’s Rotary Park lookout, to cook what we would go on to confidently claim as the best meal of our lives. After two hours of intense swimming and diving in the salty ocean we had worked up a healthy appetite and, as we readied lunch together, Scott demonstrated the best ways to prepare and cook our catch.
We couldn’t believe the immense satisfaction and overall sense of wellbeing we gained from a single meal. You haven’t tasted fresh until you’ve eaten seafood that your own hands have plucked out of the ocean and thrown into the frypan in a matter of minutes. Our catch is paired with a local sourdough from Wild Rye’s Baking Co in Pambula and oysters fresh from the Merimbula leases. “It’s so important for me to support the local producers," Scott explains. “In this way, we’re working together." Everything we ate for lunch came from the local region – even the tomatoes were grown in Scott’s family’s backyard.
At the end of our ocean-to-plate experience, our bodies felt fit and full. In such a short amount of time we had gained a skillset that could feed us for many meals to come, and that is an invaluable experience.
The Grampians just might be the ultimate antidote for the metropolis, writes one returning Aussie ready to disconnect from the modern world and reconnect to the Great outdoors.
There are no kangaroos back in Chicago: they’re all here in the Grampians/Gariwerd . In the heart of the Grampians National Park’s main gateway town, Halls Gap, pods of eastern greys are eating grass beside my parked rental car beneath the stars. Next morning, when I see the backyard of my rented villa on the edge of town for the first time, there are kangaroos feeding beside a slow-moving creek, lined with river red gums.
Five hundred metres up the road, 50 or so of them are eating by the side of the road in a paddock. I pull over to watch and spot three emus. Yellow-tailed black cockatoos fly overhead towards the tall green mountains just beyond town.
‘Kee-ow, keee-oww’… their calls fuse with the maniacal cackle of a kookaburra (or 10). Gawd, how I’ve missed the sound of them. Far above, a wedge-tailed eagle watches, and there you go: the ‘great birds of Australia’ trifecta, all half a kay from the town limits.
Exchanging city chaos for country calm
The park is renowned for its significant diversity of native fauna species. (Image: Visit Victoria/Robert Blackburn)
I’ve come to the Grampians to disconnect, but the bush offers a connection of its own. This isn’t just any bush, mind you. The Grampians National Park is iconic for many reasons, mostly for its striking sandstone mountains – five ridges run north to south, with abrupt, orange slopes which tumble right into Halls Gap – and for the fact there’s 20,000 years of traditional rock art. Across these mountains there are more than 200 recorded sites to see, created by the Djab Wurrung, Jardwadjali and Gunditjmara peoples. It’s just like our outback… but three hours from Melbourne.
I’ve come here for a chance at renewal after the chaos of my life in America’s third-largest city, Chicago, where I live for now, at the whim of a relative’s cancer journey. Flying into Melbourne’s airport, it only takes an hour’s drive to feel far away from any concept of suburbia. When I arrive in Halls Gap two hours later, the restaurant I’m eating at clears out entirely by 7:45pm; Chicago already feels a lifetime ago.
The trails and treasures of the Grampians
Grampians National Park /Gariwerd covers almost 2000 square kilometres. (Image: Ben Savage)
Though the national park covers almost 2000 square kilometres, its best-known landmarks are remarkably easy to access. From my carpark here, among the cockatoos and kangaroos on the fringe of Halls Gap, it only takes 60 seconds’ driving time before I’m winding my way up a steep road through rainforest, deep into the mountains.
Then it’s five minutes more to a carpark that serves as a trailhead for a hike to one of the park’s best vantage points, The Pinnacles . I walk for an hour or so, reacquainting myself with the smells and the sounds of the Aussie bush, before I reach it: a sheer cliff’s edge lookout 500 metres up above Halls Gap.
Overlooking the vast Grampians landscape from Hollow Mountain. (Image: Robert Blackburn)
There are hikes and there are lookouts and waterfalls all across this part of the park near town. Some are a short stroll from a carpark; others involve long, arduous hikes through forest. The longest is the Grampians Peaks Trail , Victoria’s newest and longest iconic walk, which runs 160 kilometres – the entire length of Grampians National Park.
Local activities operator Absolute Outdoors shows me glimpses of the trail. The company’s owner, Adrian Manikas, says it’s the best walk he’s done in Australia. He says he’s worked in national parks across the world, but this was the one he wanted to bring his children up in.
“There’s something about the Grampians,” he says, as he leads me up a path to where there’s wooden platforms for tents, beside a hut looking straight out across western Victoria from a kilometre up in the sky (these are part of the guided hiking options for the trail). “There are things out here that you won’t see anywhere else in Australia.” Last summer, 80 per cent of the park was damaged by bushfire, but Manikas shows me its regrowth, and tells me of the manic effort put in by volunteers from town – with firefighters from all over Australia – to help save Halls Gap.
Spot wildflowers. (Image: Visit Victoria)
We drive back down to Halls Gap at dusk to abseil down a mountain under the stars, a few minutes’ walk off the main road into town. We have headlamps, but a full moon is enough to light my way down. It takes blind faith to walk backwards down a mountain into a black void, though the upside is I can’t see the extent of my descent.
Grampians National Park at sunset. (Image: Wine Australian)
The stargazing is ruined by the moon, of course, but you should see how its glow lights up the orange of the sandstone, like in a theme park. When I’m done, I stand on a rocky plateau drinking hot chocolate and listening to the Aussie animals who prefer nighttime. I can see the streets of Halls Gap off in the distance on this Friday night. The restaurants may stay open until 8pm tonight.
What else is on offer in The Grampians?
Travelling along the Wimmera River in Dimboola. (Image: Chris McConville)
You’ll find all sorts of adventures out here – from rock climbing to canoeing to hiking – but there’s more to the Grampians than a couple of thousand square kilometres of trees and mountains. Halls Gap may be known to most people, but what of Pomonal, and Dimboola, and Horsham? Here in the shadow of those big sandstone mountains there are towns and communities most of us don’t know to visit.
And who knew that the Grampians is home to Victoria’s most underrated wine region ? My disconnection this morning comes not in a forest, but in the tasting rooms and winery restaurants of the district. Like Pomonal Estate, barely 10 minutes’ drive east of Halls Gap, where UK-born chef Dean Sibthorp prepares a locally caught barramundi with lentil, pumpkin and finger lime in a restaurant beside the vines at the base of the Grampians. Husband-and-wife team Pep and Adam Atchison tell me stories as they pour their prize wines (shiraz is the hero in these parts).
Dine in a restaurant beside vines at Pomonal Estate. (Image: Tourism Australia)
Three minutes’ drive back down the road, long-time mates Hadyn Black and Darcy Naunton run an eclectic cellar door out of a corrugated iron shed, near downtown Pomonal. The Christmas before last, half the houses in Pomonal burnt down in a bushfire, but these locals are a resilient lot.
The fires also didn’t stop the construction of the first art centre in Australia dedicated to environmental art in a nature-based precinct a little further down the road (that’s Wama – the National Centre for Environmental Arts), which opened in July. And some of the world’s oldest and rarest grape vines have survived 160 years at Best’s Wines, outside the heritage town of Great Western. There’s plantings here from the year 1868, and there’s wines stored in century-old barrels within 150-year-old tunnels beneath the tasting room. On the other side of town, Seppelt Wines’ roots go back to 1865. They’re both only a 30-minute drive from Halls Gap.
Great Western is a charming heritage town. (Image: Griffin Simm)
There’s more to explore yet; I drive through tiny historic towns that barely make the map. Still part of the Grampians, they’re as pretty as the mountains behind them: full of late 19th-century/early 20th-century post offices, government offices and bank buildings, converted now to all manner of bric-a-brac stores and cafes.
The Imaginarium is one, in quirky Dimboola, where I sleep in the manager’s residence of an old National Australia Bank after a gourmet dinner at the local golf club, run by noted chef and teacher, Cat Clarke – a pioneer of modern Indigenous Australian cooking. Just south, I spend an entire afternoon at a winery, Norton Estate Wines, set on rolling calico-coloured hills that make me think of Tuscany, chit-chatting with owners Chris and Sam Spence.
Being here takes me back two decades, when I lived here for a time. It had all seemed as foreign as if I’d driven to another planet back then (from Sydney/Warrane), but there seemed something inherently and immediately good about this place, like I’d lived here before.
And it’s the Australian small-town familiarity of the Grampians that offers me connection back to my own country. Even in the better-known Halls Gap, Liz from Kerrie’s Creations knows I like my lattes with soy milk and one sugar. And while I never do get the name of the lady at the local Ampol station, I sure know a lot about her life.
Kookaburras are one of some 230 bird species. (Image: Darren Donlen)
You can be a local here in a day; how good is that? In Chicago, I don’t even know who my neighbour is. Though each day at dusk – when the kangaroos gather outside my villa, and the kookaburras and the black cockatoos shout out loud before settling in to sleep – I prefer the quieter connection I get out there in the bush, beneath these orange mountains.
A traveller’s checklist
Staying there
Sleep beside the wildlife on the edge of Halls Gap at Serenity .
