Great Ocean Road driving road map

by Sidney van den Boogaard

This coast road is also a memorial. Between 1919 and 1932, around 3,000 returned servicemen built the Great Ocean Road in memory of comrades who died in the First World War, making it the world's largest war memorial. Leaving Torquay, you pass beneath the Memorial Arch at Eastern View, and then it gets dramatic: from Lorne to Apollo Bay the road clings to the cliffs with the ocean right beside you. That stretch was the last to be finished, in November 1932. The full road runs for 243 kilometres; this is its historic eastern section. For anyone who has wanted to drive it since the first photo they saw.

This work is part of the Petrolhead Roads collection: the world's finest driving and riding roads, from coastal routes and mountain roads to legendary ribbons of curves. Each road is drawn from the real route and finished in the same calm, graphic style, with the elevation profile and, along the bottom, the length, the road number and the facts that made the road famous.

The road is drawn from OpenStreetMap data (© OpenStreetMap contributors) and the profile from Copernicus elevation data. A great gift for anyone who would rather drive a great road than the motorway.