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If the Great Ocean Road were a symphony, it might be an al fresco blast of Dvorak's "New World" alternating with Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition" - such is its span of mood and images.

This road that loops like a roller coaster along the southern sea-cliffs of Victoria, Australia is an epic performance. In places, the voracious waves that roll up from the Antarctic to gnaw off great chunks of the continent threaten to consume the very road. Then, just a few kilometres further on, prehistoric Giant Southern Beech trees crowd gently in upon the road's shoulders, shading your car from the midday sun.

The true grandeur of the Great Ocean Road lies in the first 300 or so kilometres of its journey westwards beyond Victoria's state capital, Melbourne. To drive it is to set out upon a map of promises: grand forests and old guest houses, great surf, rolling pastures, sea mysteries and shipwrecks.

The route starts "officially" at Geelong, 75 kilometres southwest of Melbourne - or, unofficially, at the old bayside resort of Queenscliff. For me it begins at nearby Torquay. It can end wherever you like, from Port Fairy to Portland - or even 500 kilometres past that at Adelaide in South Australia. The "GOR" is that sort of road: an anarchic, stop-and-start-as-you-please trail.

Torquay is Victoria's "surf city", the home of the fascinating museum of Australian surfing, Surfworld, and a multimillion dollar surf products industry. All because some 40 years ago, a gang of wild watermen wrestled their old jeep through the coastal scrub to find the classic point surf waves of Bells Beach. Nowadays their "discovery" is the world's first State Surfing Reserve; here you can watch riders from around the world - especially during the famous Easter competition - carve on the long-walled waves of Bells and adjacent Winkipop.

Australians have a term for the dysfunctional languor that can overtake one in the tropics: "going troppo". This coast of Victoria is far from tropical, but its holiday hamlets are so snoozy that they demand an equivalent term, the temperate zone's version of "troppo". For much of the year, the GOR's towns like Anglesea, Lorne and Apollo Bay slumber in the sun, or huddle beneath the lash of winter storms. Yet during summer and school holidays they erupt with socialites from Melbourne, wave hunters, caravan gypsies and families in their annual retreat from city life.

The road insinuates itself along the cliffs and coves leading to Anglesea where I found Victoria's oddest golf course. Scores of kangaroos and their baby "joeys" lounged like lazy caddies all over the greens. The 10th hole in particular is regarded as a "'roo hazard", though there is no record of anyone scoring a pouch in one.

Further on, as I looked down on the sea, the waves of Bass Strait were throwing tantrums at the land. At times the road seemed to be no more than a tenuous interface between massive swells of two very different natures - implacable ocean and eternal earth.

Arriving in the former whaling port of Apollo Bay, I took refuge in a cafe that specialised, oddly, in graphics of ladies as large as, well, whales. The coffee was far better than the decor; both propelled me out of town, leaving the exploration of its 100-year history of logging, fishing and farming, not to mention visual arts, for some other day.

The Jurassic grandeur of the Otway National Park soon enfolded the road, the car, and much of the daylight, within a leafy tunnel of mountain ash, gum, beech and ferns. The comparative lack of vista gave me a chance to reflect on the arduous task that building this road must have been. The Great Ocean Road was hewn from the cliffs and forests between 1919 and 1932 by returned soldiers from World War I, who during the Great Depression formed a different army, the unemployed. Fittingly, the road is a memorial to those who fell in the Great War.

From the early 19th century, Cape Otway became the target that ships' captains had to miss. This was the first landfall for vessels sailing the "great circle course" from South Africa's Cape of Good Hope to the eastern Australian colonies. Riding the gales of the "Roaring Forties", ships were swept through savage seas before coming abruptly to this rocky cape. With only the 90-kilometre wide Bass Strait separating Cape Otway from King Island, making it through this gap was known as "threading the needle". To fail was to have one's ship ground to scraps of wood and canvas against the cliffs.

Little wonder that along the next 130 km to Port Fairy - the "Shipwreck Coast" - there were 80 major shipping disasters. I found headlands still dotted with the gravestones of those who had perished, and one stretch known as the Bay of Martyrs, honouring those who had drowned in attempting to save others.

The most mysterious wreck of all, the "Mahogany Ship", is said to lie under the dunes, somewhere between Warrnambool and Port Fairy. It has been sighted periodically, before disappearing again beneath the sands. One theory has it as the hulk of a Portuguese caravel wrecked here in the 1560s.

"If you're still standing, it's not blowing hard enough," said the bloke next to me as we leant against the gale that swept our observation platform at Port Campbell National Park. We were overlooking the giant, 25-million year old limestone pillars called the Twelve Apostles, stranded forever off-shore by the retreat of the land. Further down the coast, spray billowed through the collapsed arch of London Bridge - now sometimes known by wags as London Tower.

The Great Ocean Road is, however, not all primal conflicts between waves, wind and land. At many places the two-lane road slides gently down through pastures and farmlands and into old sea-and-sealers towns like Warrnambool and Port Fairy. Near the former, at Tower Hill Sanctuary the original wetlands are being replanted (after a century of over-grazing) according to the native trees and shrubs recorded in Eugene Von Guerard's rhapsodic painting "Tower Hill 1855".

Warrnambool's fine Falgstaff Hill Maritime Museum pays homage to the pioneers who sailed this coast. At nearby Port Fairy, founded in 1835, I found plenty of touristy touches - Cornish pasties, Devonshire teas and old stone pubs. But a few minutes wandering along the inlet wharf had this "boutique-ing" of history pass from sight, to be replaced by images of the rough-house sealers and whalers who made this one of the first settlements in the colony of Victoria. I could almost hear the coopers banging, smell the blubber cauldrons boiling.

Over what else but Devonshire tea, I decided that tomorrow I would decide where, for me, the Great Ocean Road ended - 56 kilometres away at Portland? Or perhaps 500 kilometres further still, at Adelaide? It's that kind of road.

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