Australia’s Ultimate Road Trip : The Great Ocean Road is a meandering breathtakingly beautiful drive, the Down Under version of California’s Highway 1 : The thick forest prevented us from seeing, though not necessarily from hearing, many animals.

Having been taught from early childhood the marvels of the “side road,” I am immediately skeptical of any attraction too fabricated, too obvious.

So when a friend suggested my family and I take something called the Great Ocean Road during our recent trip to Australia, I was immediately suspect. The first thing I learned was that the Great Ocean Road doesn’t entirely run along an ocean--and, then, that its 185-mile length of asphalt was built as a works project during Australia’s Depression and opened in 1932 specifically as a tourist attraction.

But then I looked at a map of Victoria, Australia’s southeasternmost state. And I discovered the Great Ocean Road was indeed the side road between Melbourne and Adelaide 454 miles to the west, at least three other routes being quite faster, much straighter and far more trafficked.

The Great Ocean Road, I also learned, is a winding, two-lane byway meandering along the Bass Strait, which connects the Pacific and Southern oceans and separates Victoria from the island state of Tasmania. In its relatively short run, it slithers past small seaside-resort towns, up through the rain-forested Otway Ranges and back down along often wind-swept stone seawalls. And like its American cousin, Big Sur’s Highway 1, it is one massively beautiful drive--cliff-hugging hairpin turns and dreamlike vistas, with pounding surf on one side and majestic mountains on the other.

Doubts dispensed with, my wife, daughter and I set out from Melbourne, Australia’s second-largest city, early on a weekday fall morning (April is early fall, the seasons being opposite in the Southern Hemisphere).

The road southwest from the city, along its industrial corridor, took us past trucks belching diesel fumes and factories apparently designed by architects too caught up with their T-squares. But as we passed Geelong, the last of the industrial suburbs about 60 miles from Melbourne, the road changed from four lanes to two and became like most Australian highways--narrow and pastoral.

Thirty miles farther, past what seemed like thousands of cud-crunching cows and sheep with wooly coats puffed up for the coming Australian winter, we reached the little resort town of Torquay, the opening note of the Great Ocean Road. Torquay is western Victoria’s surfing capital; the action is especially strong at Bell’s Beach, home of 20-foot-high waves and an Easter surfing championship. Though there were no surfers out when we reached Torquay, the waves were pounding heartily against the many coves surrounding the town.

Torquay is a scenic spot with a population of 5,000. It’s a place that smacks a bit of the worn hippie look, where a generation ago muscled guys with battered surfboards searching for the perfect wave settled in for a spell and built a pre-New Age infrastructure. Accommodations are Spartan, but clean; whitewashed pre-World War II hotels mix with undistinguished camper-van parks and post-war motels. Eating tends to be beer garden, pizza and what appears to be the hip Australian cuisine of the 1990s, Mexican.

Besides its beaches (most of which are prone to strong winds), Torquay, like most every small and large town in Australia, promotes its bush walks. The best bush-walking trail in Torquay is called the surf coast walk, which follows the coastline up and down grassy ridges for about 20 miles. Sea views (and the exercise getting them) are its prime attraction. With my 2-year-old daughter, Ella, in a backpack, I was not about to do the whole thing. But, we happily discovered, Australians don’t expect you to. Bush walking is supposed to be a pleasure, not a competition, and the sooner we got the hang of not completing every last centimeter of a trail, the more we got to like doing it.

Those first 60 miles of the Great Ocean Road out of Torquay could take an hour and a half or the better part of two days, depending on your inclination to dawdle in the scenery. We split the difference and stopped every so often to dutifully breathe in the salt air.

We passed through two more seaside resorts about half the size of Torquay: Anglesea and Lorne. The air was crisp with a stiff breeze; tourists bounded jauntily in and out of small craft shops, delis and bakeries; the buildings themselves were bland but clean. We stopped in Lorne for a snack and watched some proper men, all dressed in white, bowling on a manicured lawn overlooking the ocean. Lawn bowling as a spectator sport usually falls somewhere between watching slugs slither and ragweed germinate, but the dramatic setting helped captivate us for nearly a half-hour.

We didn’t do much bush walking in this first part of the Great Ocean Road, though we read of trails inland to pretty waterfalls and along the grass-and-rock outcroppings to scenic lookouts. We were saving our hiking legs for the part of the road that wound into the mountains. In the meantime, any seaside view we could get without clambering up rocks with little Ella was grand enough for us.

We stopped for the night at the point where the Great Ocean Road bends away from the sea toward the Otway Ranges. Here in Apollo Bay, a town of only 900 year-round inhabitants that swells to at least four times that number in summer, the road becomes the main drag, the Esplanade.

After checking in at the $37-a-night Grandview Lodge, perhaps the only place in town without a view, we trundled down to the Esplanade for dinner at the Apollo Bay Hotel. (“Hotel” in Australia indicates a place with a liquor license, not necessarily one with rooms to let.) As we found all over Australia, restaurant meal portions range from immense to obscene. The Apollo’s decor was more roadhouse than the Ritz.

But our meal made up for it: A piece of gemfish, a basslike fish found in the Indian Ocean, flopped over the bow and stern of my plate. My wife and daughter shared a piece of roast lamb the size of a Kareem Abdul Jabbar sneaker, but still tender. With an unlimited salad bar of several different homemade offerings, an orange juice and four steins of beer, the feast came to only $21.

From Apollo Bay there were only 64 miles or so of the Great Ocean Road to go, but each turn seemed to promise something different. Turning away from the Bass Strait toward the mountains gave us a fine contrast.

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The Otways are part of one of the world’s few temperate rain forests, and most of the land along the 35-mile stretch is state nature preserve. You can stop and take any number of well-marked or self-made bush walks. There are no rangers or guides, but signage is good. We took our bush walk on the trail in Melba Gully State Park, where the prime draw along the two-mile hike is the world’s largest great gum tree, 300 years old and 88 feet in diameter. A member of the eucalyptus family, it resides almost unobtrusively--with only a small sign next to it and a little “don’t touch” rope around--among the many ferns, mosses and other eucalyptus trees in the dense, perpetually misty forest.

The thick forest prevented us from seeing, though not necessarily from hearing, many animals. But we did get a glimpse of several wallabies--those small cousins of the kangaroo--hidden in the ferns, and a number of small birds such as jays and sparrows.

The prime attraction of the Great Ocean Road, at least the one most often seen in tourist brochures, was still ahead as the highway turned back to the coast through Port Campbell National Park. Out of the mists of the Otways we glimpsed the outlines of spectacular sandstone outcroppings--huge pillars rising 100 feet or more up from the Bass Strait, their sides smoothed by years of pounding from wind and water, making them look like rooks or bishops from a Brancusi-like chessboard.

These are the Twelve Apostles, a dozen majestic stone shafts separated from the cliffed coast through thousands of years of erosion. The creators of the Great Ocean Road knew a good natural attraction when they saw one, so they started naming each piece of carved-out stone along this 12-mile stretch of coast. We, like the small caravan of other tourists braving the fall winds, stopped at virtually every scenic vista along the way.

On down the road from the Twelve Apostles was Loch Ard Gorge, where we strolled the boardwalks and admired several magnificent blowholes as much as 100 feet below us on the surf. Further on was London Bridge, a 200-yard bridgelike outcropping that caved in back in 1990, leaving visitors who’d walked out to the ocean end waiting, gape-mouthed, until an emergency helicopter came to rescue them. Finally, there was the Bay of Islands, a wonderful warren of eroded sandstone mounds 10 to 50 feet high, sitting in a quieter cove off the heavier surf.

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The Great Ocean Road continues only a few more miles along the strait, but it would be a mistake to turn back toward Melbourne when the highway reaches its end in the town of Warrnambool. For the next 60 miles, we traveled on Victoria Highway 1 along the “Shipwreck Coast,” where we were told more than 80 ships met their ends in the wind-swept waters of the Bass Strait from 1880 to 1930. We were intrigued by the whole shipwreck idea, but the Flagstaff Hill Maritime Village, a museum in Warrnambool, was closed the day we went by. Apparently, the Great Ocean Road saved even more ships from their doom, since cargo started coming in by highway almost exclusively after it was built, rather than over the rocky coast swells of the Bass Strait.

We were there a bit too early in the year to see the Southern Right whales, which have made a comeback in the nearby waters since the government started protecting them a generation ago. Southern Rights are cousins to the gray whales that migrate off California, but with a larger head and no dorsal fin. The whales visit during the Australian winter, from about May to October, and can be seen even from Warrnambool with standard binoculars.

One of our favorite stops along the entire road was Tower Hill State Game Reserve, a 15-minute drive past Warrnambool. A small park by Australian standards (about two square miles), Tower Hill is a treat--not only for its animals, but for its landscape. We veered off the road and down the steep 50-foot sides of a punch-bowl-like meteor crater whose landscape varied from scrub brush on the outer rims to eucalyptus forest and lakeside pines in the interior.

Walks are well marked and viewing spots are plentiful, as is the wildlife. The stars of Tower Hill are the koalas and emus. Thanks to a thick stand of eucalyptus, koalas were introduced there by state game officials. Koalas eat only leaves of certain eucalyptus and, with stands of those types being deforested in many parts of Australia, the need to transplant koalas to areas such as Tower Hill has become necessary. With Ella on my back and my sharp-eyed wife at my side, I trudged into the eucalyptus forest, certain of a good koala find.

I was not disappointed. We spotted at least a dozen koalas, even though the nocturnal cuddlies tried to jam themselves into the crooks of the branches far up in the tallest trees.

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Koalas would seem to be the ultimate little-kid animal--shy, pug-nosed and furry. But then, you probably haven’t seen a 2-year-old child flocked by emus.

The emu is the world’s second-largest bird, smaller only than the African ostrich and, like the ostrich, flightless. They look a bit disheveled, with shaggy, brown feathers and off-white craggy heads. But they lope along on their skinny legs, undaunted by the humans around them. Their awkward gallops brought shrieks of delight from Ella, who viewed them as Big Bird incarnate. She chased them, and they chased back, and we could almost make out a grin on their beaks as they did.

We spent the night in Port Fairy, 15 miles west of the Tower Hill Game Reserve. The fishing port of 2,500 residents claims to be the oldest continuously settled place on the Victoria coast, whalers having set up shop there from Tasmania in 1826. The town still has a lot of mid-19th-Century buildings, most of those on the main streets looking like the two-story quasi-Victorian structures familiar to Wild West movies.

There are also some decent little eating places, mostly along Bank Street going away from the water. We stopped at the Portofino, a husband-chef/wife-hostess place where I had a local boar fish (similar to pike) baked in paprika; my wife, a spaghetti with shellfish in red garlic sauce; and Ella, a special-for-her-with-a-smile penne and cheese--for only $24 the lot. Here, and in the rest of Australia, we never got the brush in a restaurant for having a 2-year-old.

Australians we met said the country is no longer Crocodile-Dundee laid-back, but it seemed to us that no one was ever too rushed or aggravated to attend to us.

In the evening, we took a walk along the port, where a few dozen small, well-kept fishing boats were moored, and across a 100-yard causeway to Griffith’s Island, where we and a half-dozen other tourists had heard that you could see some nesting mutton birds on the marshes just off a certain pier. None of us saw any, though it clearly would have been hard in the gloaming to see a mutton bird, since none of us knew anything about them save that they were a sooty gray with dark bills and feet.

We needed to get back to Melbourne for business, so we blitzed back from Port Fairy the next morning in five hours on the Princes Highway, one of Victoria’s major roads. But we couldn’t help wishing we’d had the time to meander back a bit more slowly--along one of the world’s finest “side roads,” Victoria’s Great Ocean Road.

GUIDEBOOK

Winding Away From Melbourne

Getting there: Qantas and United have daily flights from Los Angeles to Melbourne; round-trip fares with 21-day advance-purchase start at $1,098. Most major car rental companies have offices in Melbourne; count on spending about $60 per day for a mid-size car.

Where to stay: The Lorne Hotel (Mountjoy Parade, Lorne; from the United States, telephone 011-61-52-89-1409, fax 011-61-52-89-2200) is an old-fashioned guest house; double rooms with baths, $48-$63 nightly. In Apollo Bay, we chose the unprepossessing Grandview Lodge, where two-bedroom suites with full kitchens cost $23-$51 per night, depending on the season, with highest rates charged Dec. 25 through January (1 McLennan St., Apollo Bay; tel. 011-61-52-37-6461). In Port Fairy, we stayed at the Douglas-on-River Motel (Gipps Street, Port Fairy; tel. 011-61-55-68-1016) in a neat $33 room with views. There’s also the handsome Dublin House Inn, an 1855 pub with the standards of a big-city hotel (57 Bank St., Port Fairy; tel. 011-61-55-68-1822; rates for a double room are $51-$83 per night).

Where to eat: The Lorne serves a family bistro meal with counter service; Pacific Hotel (268 Mountjoy Parade, Lorne; local tel. 052-89-1609). Both offer local seafood and Australian beef and lamb; meals under $10. Huge, quality meals at the Apollo Bay Hotel (Great Ocean Road, Apollo Bay; tel. 052-37-6250); about $10 per person. Among several Bank Street restaurants, we chose Portofino (28 Bank Street, Port Fairy; tel. 055-68-1047); about $10 per person.

For more information: To find out more about the parklands, contact the Department of Conservation & Natural Resources, Port Campbell National Park, Morris Street, Port Campbell, 3269 Victoria, Australia; tel. 011-61-52-37-6889. For general information, contact Tourism Victoria, 2121 Avenue of the Stars, Suite 1200, Los Angeles, Calif. 90067; tel. (310) 552-5344, fax (310) 552-1215.