Victoria’s Great Ocean Road clocks up a century on Thursday but the world-famous tourist drive is fighting for survival amid dual threats of climate change and over-popularity.

Famous for its limestone cliffs, surf breaks and rainforests, the 242km route is close to “being loved to death”, locals say.

“It’s becoming a bit of a gridlock,” says an Apollo Bay surfer and fisherman, Peter Fillmore, who has lived in the region for 40 years.

Traffic congestion has worsened in the past decade fuelled by a boom in tourists on coach tours and independent driving trips.

The road was driven on by 6.1 million international and domestic tourists who spent $1.4bn in the year ending March 2019. But some locals lament that many day-trippers come for a quick selfie and then return to the city and don’t spend much money in towns along the way.

“What we would like to see is fewer tourists but spending longer here … exploring the other wonders that the area has to offer,” Aireys Inlet and District Association’s president, Charlotte Allen, says.

There have also been safety concerns raised about international drivers after multiple fatal road smashes.

“One of the real pressure point places is at the memorial arch,” Allen says. “Parking is limited and there are no toilet facilities. All the big buses leave Melbourne at the same time and they all want to stop at the memorial arch to get a photo. It just becomes absolutely crazy with people standing in the middle of the road and people using the bushes for toilets. It’s a nightmare.”

Her association has called on authorities to undertake a study to determine whether the region’s peak tourism capacity has been reached and consider measures such as tolls to limit numbers.

Fillmore says the road is no longer fit to cope with today’s traffic.

“When they built the road they probably didn’t put a lot of base material on it thinking that it was just going to be for Model T Fords and horse and carts,” he says.

Although federal and state governments have given $150m in recent years to fixing landslips, Fillmore believes tourists should be helping to maintain the road.

“You’re passing through a national park to get here,” he says. “Virtually everywhere else in the world where you enter a very popular national park you pay a fee. Every tourist who comes down that road should be paying at least $20.”

He says a ban or limit on the big 50- to 60-seat coach buses should be considered. “The really big buses weigh a lot and you can see they’re damaging the road,” he says.

Climate change impact

Victoria’s south-west coast has always been a treacherous part of the world. More than 200 shipwrecks lie off the coast.

In 1802 the explorer Matthew Flinders said he had “seldom seen a more fearful section of coastline” and the climate emergency has the potential to make conditions even rougher.

A University of Melbourne ocean engineering expert, Ian Young, says by 2050 the average sea level rise could be 60cm along Victoria’s south-west coast.

“Our work shows by 2100 you can expect extreme storm waves in the Southern Ocean to increase [in height] by between 10 and 15%,” he says.

Asked if this could mean the loss of more of the 12 Apostles Young says: “It’s quite possible there could be some more natural erosion of those sorts of coastal features, yes.”

Young says low pressure systems that come across the Southern Ocean are intensifying and this has implications for tides and sand dunes.

“The winds are getting stronger and that accounts for the higher wave conditions, and also those low-pressure systems are tracking further to the south and what that does is it means the waves will come from a slightly more southerly direction,” he says.

“If the wave direction changes you’ll see a change in orientation of the coastline as well. If you have a long beach and the wave conditions change two or three degrees then the alignment of the beach will change. This may not seem like much … [but] the change in orientation of the coastline will cause erosion in some parts of the beaches.”

Young says a lack of data makes it difficult to know whether storm surges will increase on the Victorian south-west coast.

Geomorphologist Neville Rosengren and geotechnical engineer Tony Miner looked at erosion around the Apollo Bay and Mounts Bay areas over the past two years for a independent report released last October.

They warned the state government “the Great Ocean Road could potentially be compromised in less than a decade and possibly within five years”.

Indigenous cultural heritage at risk

At beaches along the Great Ocean Road there are scores of shell middens which in some cases date back 5,000 years.

These Aboriginal cultural heritage sites mark where Indigenous people would cook and eat abalone, periwinkle sea snails, mussels and spoon fish shells. Ancient tools have also been found. But the sites are starting to wash away.

Guli-Gad elder Ron Arnold says dozens of middens have already been destroyed and damaged.

“We can’t protect all of them … There are some that are a little more inaccessible,” he says. “There are certain ones that could be highlighted for tourism and education. They’re the ones that we’re looking to protect and preserve for the future.”

The Twelve Apostles on Victoria’s Great Ocean Road. Photograph: Brook Photographer/Getty Images

The people’s road

The Great Ocean Road didn’t have government support when construction began in 1919. The concept was the brainchild of the then-Geelong mayor, Howard Hitchcock, and Victorian residents funded it themselves through tolls to help create jobs for veterans returning from the first world war.

A member of the Lorne historical society, Peter Spring, says 3,000 returned servicemen worked on the most difficult stretch from Eastern View to Apollo Bay which winds around cliffs. The men were hanging by ropes using picks and shovels to cut into the cliffs.

“There were no explosives used in the first few years, mainly because a lot of the servicemen returning from war were suffering from shell shock,” Spring says. “It was hard work done by hand.”

The men worked in gruelling cold, windy and soggy conditions.

“In fact there’s one section of the road at the start of the climb at the Otway Ranges which they referred to as the Somme, named after the battlefield in western France where the conditions were appalling,” Spring says.

Remarkably there were no casualties in the construction, which was completed in 1932.

Rescue efforts

The Victorian government released an action plan last October. It is also establishing an independent authority to preserve the road and coastal environment.

The Victorian roads minister, Jaala Pulford, says modern technology helps engineers monitor conditions.

“Drone surveying has allowed geotechnical engineers to model the terrain above and below the road, capturing steep cliff faces, historical landslip sites and areas previously inaccessible to surveyors,” she says.

“Rock armour walls are being constructed beneath the road and along the foreshore to help protect the road from the impacts of coastal erosion, while high-tech weather stations are providing rainfall and soil moisture content data to help engineers measure the impacts of these factors on the cliff faces above and below the road.”

Pulford says rock netting, soil nailing and erosion control matting are also being rolled out to stabilise the embankments to help prevent loose rockfall.

Lorne beach on the Great Ocean Road Photograph: Justin Hannaford/Alamy Stock Photo/Alamy Stock Photo

Cycling haven

The Great Ocean Road has a special place in the heart of 2011 Tour de France champion Cadel Evans, who has a home at Barwon Heads, near Geelong.

Despite riding professionally all over the world Evans says the Great Ocean Road is one of his favourite cycling routes.

“It is so spectacular. You don’t realise how good this country is until you live overseas – the smell of the eucalypts, the clear skies, the people are friendly and when the sun is shining, it is just beautiful,” he told Jetstar travel magazine earlier this year.