Every Apostle began as part of the mainland cliff. The limestone itself is the compressed remains of an ancient seabed - shells, coral and the skeletons of marine creatures, laid down and hardened over millions of years before the land rose to meet the air. The Southern Ocean, with nothing to slow it between here and Antarctica, throws its full weight against that soft stone. Water finds a weakness and works it into a cave. The cave deepens into an arch. The arch, undermined, collapses - and what survives is a stack, stranded offshore, the last fragment of a headland the sea has otherwise dismantled. The process never stops. The waves that built these towers are the same waves erasing them, surrendering the cliff face a couple of centimetres at a time, year after year. Watch long enough and you are watching geology happen in human time.

In July 2005, a fifty-metre stack simply gave way, dropping into the sea in a matter of seconds and leaving eight standing where there had been nine. In 2009, another collapsed, bringing the count to seven. No one was hurt either time, though visitors at the platform that July day felt the impact and watched the column dissolve into rubble and spray. The losses are not the end of the story. Along the cliffs, the ocean is already hollowing out the next generation of caves and arches. The headlands you see today are the Apostles of some distant tomorrow - a coastline forever rebuilding itself by falling apart.

Long before any of these stacks had a Christian name, this was the Country of the Eastern Maar people, whose connection to the south-west Victorian coast runs back thousands of years. That connection was formally recognised in March 2023, when the Federal Court of Australia determined native title over more than 8,500 square kilometres of land and sea, including the Twelve Apostles. It was the first native title ruling in Victoria in a decade, the product of more than ten years of patient legal effort. The towers tourists photograph by the millions sit, once again in the eyes of the law, on Eastern Maar Country.

The Apostles anchor a coastline that rewards anyone who keeps driving. A short way east, Gibson Steps cut down through the cliff to a beach where you stand at the base of the stacks and feel their true scale. Further on lies Loch Ard Gorge, named for the clipper wrecked here in 1878. Of the 54 people aboard, only two survived: an apprentice named Tom Pearce, who clung to an overturned lifeboat, and a young Irish passenger, Eva Carmichael, who held to a floating spar for hours in the dark until Pearce heard her cries and swam back out through the surf to pull her into the gorge. Nearby, London Bridge lost its landward span without warning in 1990, stranding two startled visitors on the newly created island until a helicopter lifted them off. This is the Shipwreck Coast - beautiful, and never quite safe.