The Twelve Apostles
Interesting facts
- Five drowned stacks about 10 metres tall stand on the seabed some 6 km offshore, relics of a coastline flooded as seas rose after the last ice age.
- Waves wear away the base of the limestone pillars at roughly 2 centimetres a year.
- Around two million people a year come to see the stacks.
- The waters below are protected by the Twelve Apostles Marine National Park, about 7,500 hectares along some 17 km of coast, where weedy seadragons shelter in kelp forests.
- The marine park also holds the wreck of the clipper Loch Ard, which struck Mutton Bird Island in 1878.
Why it is worth it
The Twelve Apostles are a scatter of limestone stacks standing in the surf of the Southern Ocean off the coast of Port Campbell National Park, in south-western Victoria. Rising up to about 50 metres, they are cut from soft limestone laid down on the sea floor in the Middle to Late Miocene, roughly 15 to 5 million years ago, and their horizontal bands of cream, buff and ochre record those layers of sediment. Behind them the mainland ends in cliffs of the same stone, and the whole coast is being slowly dismantled by the swell.
The stacks are a textbook of how such coasts evolve. Waves exploit weaknesses in a headland to carve caves, the caves meet and become arches, the arches fall and leave free-standing pillars, and the pillars are eventually undermined and collapse themselves. The process is visible in real time here: a 50-metre stack fell in July 2005 and another in 2009, and today seven remain standing, six of them visible from the main viewpoint. The present headlands are the Apostles of the future.
The name itself is an invention. There were probably never twelve: the group originally numbered nine, and before the present name took hold it was known more plainly as "the Pinnacles" and as "the Sow and Pigs", with nearby Muttonbird Island as the sow and the smaller stacks as her piglets. The land and sea here are the country of the Eastern Maar people, recognised by the Federal Court of Australia in 2023 as traditional owners of a large area of south-west Victoria that includes the Apostles.
The stacks are best seen at sunrise or sunset, when low light turns the limestone gold and orange against a dark sea. About a kilometre away, the 86 steps of the Gibson Steps lead down to a beach beneath 70-metre cliffs, with two further stacks, Gog and Magog, in view from the top, and nearby Loch Ard Gorge continues the same story of collapsing rock.
Getting there
The Twelve Apostles lie on the Great Ocean Road, about 6 km west of Princetown and 12 km east of Port Campbell, the nearest town with shops and cafés; Warrnambool is about 57 km away. Melbourne, about 275 km away by the coastal road (a drive of around four hours), is the usual starting point, with Melbourne Airport (MEL) the main gateway. There is a large sealed car park with paths and boardwalks to the viewing platforms.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Twelve Apostles are a collection of limestone stacks off the shore of Port Campbell National Park, by the Great Ocean Road in Victoria, Australia.
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