The smallish state of Victoria in the south-east of Australia is a beautiful place. It is the state that features the city of Melbourne.
Here we are randomly the only corner of mainland Australia that gets any decent rainfall, and therefore the only green state on the mainland. (The island state of Tasmania to the south of us is also very green and variedly beautiful, if less noticed.)
Because of this luck of the Irish green, Victoria is the second-most populated state in Australia despite being the second-smallest. The city of Melbourne is ever crying to reattain the premier status in Australia that it held a century ago and then lost to Sydney.
Now, Australia is geologically speaking a lump of flat land that basically just sits there and does nothing. There are few mountains and now no active volcanic activity. There are few rivers in the interior (the Outback of steakhouse fame) and forest only in specific places (tropical north, niche south-west, temperate south-east). The Australian continent is just dry savannah, or dry desert, as far as the eye can see and the car can roll, until that distant hour you arrive at the end and meet the ocean.
Victoria defies these trends. Our look mostly features rolling greenness the like we’d see in perhaps Wales or Argentina. There are also at least three mountain chains worth visiting off the top of my head – the Grampians in the west (Halls Gap), the Victorian Alps in the north-east (Bright, Mt Buller, Falls Creek etc) and the Dandenong Ranges just east of Melbourne.
There are peaceful costal towns along the Great Ocean Road called Lorne, Apollo Bay and Port Campbell. As well, closer to home, the thumb of land on the east of the Melbourne bay is a lovely place called Mornington Peninsula where all of these features I’ve spent a whole article detailing are combined into one: beach, green hills, hot springs.
Which annoys the shit out of me when I regularly actually drive past Mornington on the featureless road to Phillip Island of Little Penguin fame and have to pretend to people who have paid a lot of money that this windswept little island is the best that Victoria’s got to offer.
Aussie Tour Guide Life 