The Great Ocean Road is among the most beautiful drives in Australia.

It is also the most haunted.

A reminder of old tragedies along the Great Ocean Road: Wreck Beach near Moonlight Head.Credit: Jim Darby Images

The single most haunting spot – a place with a relatively recent history that still shrivels the mind to contemplate it – lies towards the road’s far west.

First, we might note that a good part of the route is known as the Shipwreck Coast.

It tracks an often ferocious coastline littered with the submerged skeletons of hundreds of ships, 240 of which are recorded by divers. The bones of an unknowable number of seafarers are down there, too.

Some of the earliest wrecks remain mysteries of a lawless period of sealing and whaling, populated by runaway convicts and international freebooters averse to revealing their activities. Other ships carrying passengers and cargo from Britain to the gold-fuelled new world simply disappeared, lost to the unpredictable waters of Bass Strait and the cruel cliffs of its coast.

You don’t need much imagination to recognise another great tragedy of this physically awe-inspiring coastline.

Near the village of Peterborough lies a little indentation called Massacre Bay.

Port Phillip District Superintendent Charles LaTrobe.

Here, according to local lore, was one of the places where the numerous onshore campfires of Indigenous people spied in 1802 by rival navigators, Englishman Matthew Flinders and Frenchman Nicholas Baudin, were snuffed out forever.

The Port Phillip District Superintendent Charles LaTrobe took the trouble to note, without elaboration, in his annual report of 1846 that a group of “very loose men” had passed through Peterborough in October 1843 from Port Fairy en route to Johanna and back again.

Those “very loose men”, presumably bent on “clearing” the coast for white settlement, are said to have herded the men of the local Baradh gundidj clan of the Keerray Woorrong people over a cliff and murdered women and children at a nearby wetland. Such was the nature of the frontier wars during the 1830s and 1840s in south-west Victoria.

Less than a century later, the road itself was built by veterans of the most brutal war in history – World War I – and became the world’s longest war memorial, its 243km dedicated to the 60,000 Australians who died in the slaughter.

Some of those who survived the foreign kill lost their lives building the road.

Armed with gelignite, picks, shovels and wheelbarrows, they got ten........

© The Age