The Twelve Apostles in Australia - Your Ultimate Guide

Discover everything you need to know about the Twelve Apostles before your next trip on the Great Ocean Road.

A rare geological phenomenon that has inspired awe and wonder for generations, the Great Ocean Road’s Twelve Apostles are one of Australia’s most well-known and visited attractions.

A true highlight of a drive along the Great Ocean Road, seeing the monumental rock formations known as the Twelve Apostles is one of those travel ‘must-dos’ that you genuine must do. Standing on the windswept coast of Victoria to take in the extraordinary sight of these ancient landmarks that rise stoically out of the Southern Ocean is worth the 4.5-hour drive along the Great Ocean Road from Melbourne.

Whether you see them at sunrise, dusk or in the middle of the day, you’ll be glad you travelled to see what all the fuss is about. Read on to find out how to make it happen.

What are the Twelve Apostles

The Twelve Apostles are an offshore collection of limestone stacks along the Great Ocean Road. Estimated to be around 20 million years old, this sculpted coastline originated when billions of tiny marine skeletons accumulated on the ocean floor, gradually creating limestone formations. As the ocean retreated, the cliffs were exposed above the sea level.

Twelve Apostles in Australia at sunset — The limestone stacks have been shaped over millions of years. (Image: Visit Victoria)

The wild and wilful Southern Ocean gradually eroded the softer limestone, forming caves in the cliffs, which eventually became arches. When they collapsed, rock islands up to 65 metres high were left isolated from the shore. This process also created a host of other natural features including Pudding Basin Rock, Elephant Rock, Mutton Bird Island, Thunder Cave, Bakers Oven, London Bridge and the Grotto.

The Baker's Oven in Twelve Apostles, Great Ocean Road — The Baker’s Oven is known for its unique landscape. (Image: Visit Victoria)

Where are the Twelve Apostles

Located on Australia’s southern coastline in the Port Campbell National Park, Victoria, the Twelve Apostles are a popular stop on the iconic Great Ocean Road drive. Just 10 minutes from the town of Port Campbell, if you are driving you will need to park at the dedicated Twelve Apostles carpark and walk to the lookout by following the signs along the path.

a staircase leading to the lookout of the Twelve Apostles at sunset — Walk to the lookout for a better view of the Twelve Apostles. (Image: Visit Victoria)

This is a somewhat isolated location, so come prepared with everything you need. However, there is toilet access and a kiosk here open 7 days a week during the day, offering hot and cold drinks and souvenirs to take home. Otherwise, bring your own snacks or stop in Port Campbell for lunch.

an aerial view of The Baker's Oven in Twelve Apostles, Great Ocean Road — See other notable features of the rock islands, including the Baker’s Oven. (Image: Visit Victoria)

History of the Twelve Apostles

Until the 1960s the formations were called the Sow and Pigs – Mutton Bird Island being the sow and the stacks the piglets. Then, in a flash of marketing brilliance, they were renamed the Apostles. By some divine intervention, the name soon evolved into the Twelve Apostles – even though you could only see nine at the time.

the Twelve Apostles in winter — In winter, the otherworldy landscape is nothing short of spectacular. (Image: Visit Victoria)

But how many you can count depends on where you stand and what you include. There are actually as many as 30 stacks stretched along the coast, but not all are visible from the viewing areas. It’s a work in progress.

the limestone stacks of Twelve Apostles from above — These magnificent stacks are stretched along the coast. (Image: Visit Victoria)

In 2005, one of the Apostles had its last supper. Onlookers reported that the stack shuddered, fractured and then slid into the ocean. The Twelfth Apostle (known as Judas) went from a magnificent 50-metre stack to a pile of rubble in seconds. Then in 2009, another rock came crumbling down. Although not as dramatic an exit as the Judas, this small formation eroded due to weather conditions. Located out the back near Razorback Lookout, this was the most recent Apostle to have fallen.

Twelve Apostles at sunset — Witness the breathtaking beauty of the Twelve Apostles. (Image: Visit Victoria)

Getting to the Twelve Apostles

If you’re located in Geelong, lucky you! You’ve only got a 2-hour road trip ahead. Travelling from Melbourne? You’ve got a 3-hour drive inland to reach the rocks. If you’re willing to tack on another hour to the journey, take the Great Ocean Road for some spectacular scenic views.

an aerial view of a car passing by the London Bridge, Great Ocean Road — The Twelve Apostles are a popular stop on the iconic Great Ocean Road. (Image: Visit Victoria)

A 10-minute drive from Port Campbell, you will need to park at the dedicated Twelve Apostles carpark and walk to one of the lookouts which can be accessed via a signed pathway. If you’re using a pram or wheelchair follow the signs to access the lower viewing platform.

a scenic landscape of the Twelve Apostles, Great Ocean Road — Take the Great Ocean Road for some spectacular scenic views. (Image: Visit Victoria)

Depending on where you’re located, day tour packages to the Twelve Apostles are a great option if you don’t drive or just prefer sitting back and relaxing instead of downloading directions.

the eucalypt trees at Otway Rainforest, Great Ocean Road — Stop by the ancient Otway Rainforest. (Image: Visit Victoria)

Sightseeing Tours Australia offers a day trip to the Great Ocean Road and the Twelve Apostles. With CBD and St Kilda pick-ups, this bus will take you along the breathtaking coastline, stopping at popular beaches, seaside towns, the Otway Rainforest (with the tallest eucalyptus trees in Australia) and of course, the Twelve Apostles before you are whisked back to Melbourne. It’s a big day filled with blockbuster sights – a great option if you’re short on time or prefer not to drive.

Spot the stunning cascades of the Triplet Falls in the Great Otway National Park. (Image: Visit Victoria)

Other ways to experience the Twelve Apostles

If you’re up for an adventure, there are also guided walking tours that head out to the landmark. Book in with the Aus Walking Co. and you’ll get to enjoy a 4-day, immersive walks along the coast, bedding down in a private eco-lodge each night. If you feel comfortable walking up to 7 hours in a day, then you won’t want to do this trip any other way.

the Great Ocean Walk — Take an mmersive walk along the coast. (Image: Visit Victoria)

Prefer to walk and camp without a guide? Great Ocean Road Shuttles offers camping assistance (food and water drops, luggage transfers), camping gear hire and a shuttle service to support your journey.

Twelve Apostles from Gibson Beach — Head to Gibson Beach to see the stacks from a different perspective. (Image: Visit Victoria)

If you want to make the most of this experience and don’t mind splashing a bit of cash, then book yourself in for a scenic flight with 12 Apostles Helicopters to take in the famous landmark from above.

a scenic flight above the Twelve Apostles, Great Ocean Road — Take in the beauty of the rock formations from above. (Image: Visit Victoria)

In just 15 minutes of flight time you’ll be able to see the Twelve Apostles, Loch Ard Gorge, The Sentinel, The Arch and London Bridge from a point of view you’ll never forget.

the London Bridge from above on a scenic flight with 12 Apostles Helicopters — Capture the London Bridge on a scenic flight with 12 Apostles Helicopters. (Image: Visit Victoria)

Discover our guide to the Great Ocean Road.

Video credit: Visit Victoria/Tourism Australia

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

kangaroos near Halls Gap, Grampians National Park — 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

sunrise at Grampians National Park /Gariwerd — 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.

walking through a cave, Hollow Mountain — 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.

wildflowers in Grampians National Park — 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?

a boat travelling along the Wimmera River inDimboola — 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).

dining at Pomonal Estate — 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.

Salingers of Great Western — 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 on a tree — 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 .

Playing there

abseiling down Hollow Mountain — Hollow Mountain is a popular abseiling site.

Go abseiling under the stars or join a guided hike with Absolute Outdoors . Visit Wama , Australia’s first environmental art centre. Check out Dimboola’s eccentric Imaginarium .

Eating there

steak, naan bread and beer at Paper Scissors Rock in Halls Gap — Paper Scissors Rock in Halls Gap serves a great steak on naan bread.

Eat world-class cuisine at Pomonal Estate . Dine and stay at much-revered icon Royal Mail Hotel in Dunkeld. The ‘steak on naan’ at Halls Gap brewhouse Paper Scissors Rock , can’t be beat.

Dunkeld Arboretum in Grampians National Park — The serene Dunkeld Arboretum.

For Halls Gap’s best breakfasts head to Livefast Cafe . Sip local wines at Great Western’s historic wineries, Best’s Wines , Seppelt Wines and Norton Estate Wines .

two glasses of beer at Paper Scissors Rock in Halls Gap — Sink a cold one at Paper Scissors Rock.

Your quick guide to the Twelve Apostles on the Great Ocean Road