It only took me 40 minutes to drive from home, south to Dromana, the beachside town on the Mornington Peninsula popular for family summer holidays. I’d been considering attempting the Two Bays Walking Track for a couple of years: a day off work, combined with a forecast top of only 23° decided it for me. February in Melbourne can be brutally hot, as evidenced by the catastrophic bushfires on Black Saturday in 2009. But today was expected to be at least partly cloudy, so promised much better conditions for walking.
I parked the car in a car park a few metres from the waters of Port Phillip, the first of the two bays which give the trail its name. It was around 8:30am as I set off, with the most strenuous part of the walk first - the climb from sea level up to the top of Arthurs Seat, at 304 metres. The track meandered through some quiet suburban streets before entering Arthurs Seat State Park and becoming steeper. About an hour later, I reached the top at Seawinds Gardens and was rewarded with sweeping views back across Port Phillip - down to Portsea and Point Lonsdale on either side of the narrow entrance to the bay known as The Rip, and the other way, up to the city of Melbourne, some 60km distant.
The walk continued southwards, descending slowly through the T.C. McKellar Flora Reserve, which one sign described as one of the few remnant pieces of untouched native bush on the peninsula. Being relatively close to Melbourne, and easily accessible by the sheltered waters of Port Phillip and later on, by roads, the peninsula was quickly settled by Europeans and transformed into fertile farm lands. The remaining native bushland isn’t as dense as in other parts of the state, due perhaps to sandier soil and lower rainfall.
The Two Bays Track was finally completed in the 1980s as part of the celebrations around the state of Victoria’s 150th anniversary, the city of Melbourne having been founded in the 1830s. The symbol used on all the trail signs is the blue wren, an exquisite, tiny local bird, which can be seen throughout the area, flitting from branch to branch. The wren was a totem animal for certain Aboriginal tribes - the local nation being the Boonwurrung people. There is a sad, rather predictable history around the encounter between the Boonwurrung and European settlers on the peninsula, not differing greatly from similar stories told throughout Victoria.
As I walked quietly onwards, clouds of Monarch butterflies erupted into the air at every step. It lent the surroundings an almost magical ambiance. I stopped for a couple of minutes to enjoy the tranquillity and was joined by two large Eastern Grey kangaroos, hopping slowly between the trees some twenty metres away.
A steep downhill section led out of the trees and eventually down to a small dam. A couple were sitting on its banks, enjoying the view, the woman puffing on a cigarette. On the other side of the dam, a bobcat (mini-digger) was working furiously, and loudly, removing undergrowth as part of a fire-break clearance (there were notices everywhere about it). As I walked past the couple, I remarked that it was a lovely view, but it was a shame about the noise pollution. I think the woman thought I was having a go at her smoking habit with the word “pollution”, as she looked at me rather sharply. The man laughed and replied that you can’t have everything.

The road ended and became a grassy track, wending its way through green fields and copses with a, by Australian standards, decidedly English feel to them. The sun had begun to come out and I enjoyed the brightness and warmth it lent the scene. The English countryside fell slowly behind and I entered a forest of unmistakably Australian eucalypts and grass trees, the beginnings of the largely untouched Greens Bush area. I walked for a good hour and a half through woodlands before coming to a large, elevated, bracken-filled clearing, with views in all directions. Time for lunch, so I sat down on the ground, took off my shoes and retrieved my food from my day pack.
In four hours of walking since leaving my car, I had only encountered a handful of people - the couple by the dam, two girls riding horses, two women out jogging together and one lone walker: this last probably doing the same as me, but in the opposite direction. This was to continue for the rest of the day, including my solitary lunch break.
Half an hour later, I continued (after putting my shoes back on) along the trail on the other side of the clearing and, after a couple of kilometres through woodlands increasingly dominated by banksias, joined the Main Creek track, familiar territory to me as a place I’ve often walked on weekends when living in Melbourne. In fact, I even felt so inspired by the place once, 20 years ago, that I wrote these dreamy lines, following a walk here on a cold but clear winter’s day:
What peace, tranquillity this place distills
Away from noise, anxiety and care;
The skylark’s plaintive song, the swelling hills,
the waving grass, the gentle breeze, the air.
And soaking all, the sunlight from on high;
the silent Earth’s great presence in reply.
For the technicians reading this, these lines are known collectively as a “Venus and Adonis” stanza (iambic pentameter, rhyming ababcc), after Shakespeare’s poem of the same name.
The Main Creek track ended at a car park on Boneo Road, where I encountered two men in their 50s preparing to set off on a walk. They asked me if I’d come from Baldry’s Crossing, which was the previous point for road access on the trail, about 9km back from where I’d came. I said I’d actually come all the way from Dromana, at which they were hugely impressed. One of them quizzed me regarding the track, how difficult it was, what I’d taken with me. I could see the plan hatching in his mind as he spoke and he confirmed it when he exclaimed to his friend that they should tackle it one day too. His friend looked a little less enthusiastic at the prospect of a 30km walk but smiled weakly all the same.

I drank the last of my water looking out over Bushrangers Bay and along the coastline. The last 40 minutes of the walk followed the tops of the cliffs between the bay and Cape Schanck, occasionally affording excellent views in either direction. It was with some relief that I plodded into the car park and headed straight for the toilets, where I promptly filled up my water bottle from the rainwater tap and drank my fill.

So, I found myself standing next to my car in Dromana on a beautiful sunny afternoon, feeling tired and rather foot-sore, but deeply satisfied, less than 8 hours after having set off on foot from there that morning. I took off my shoes and discovered that the afternoon's walking had created three rather spectacular-looking blisters on my heels. I changed into my swimming trunks and walked gingerly down the beach and into the cool, clean water. My fatigue washed off me as I plunged under the surface. As I soaked in the water, there was some splashing about 100 metres further out - two dolphins surfaced with a loud exhalation, before nonchalantly rolling and diving again beneath the surface. I smiled, lay back and looked up into the clear, blue sky.
Some video highlights