The Twelve Apostles are limestone towers standing offshore in the Southern Ocean, below the cliffs of the Great Ocean Road in Victoria, Australia. There were never twelve of them, and seven are standing now. They were the Sow and Piglets until 1922, when promoters wanted something grander and the biblical name stuck; nobody counting them has ever got to twelve. The sea did not build them. It took away everything around them: the cliffs are soft limestone, and the waves cut caves into headlands, caves into arches, and arches into pillars left stranded in the water. The rock is millions of years old, but as free-standing stacks they are only a few thousand, younger than the first farms.
The clifftop rail is where everyone stands, and the change from orange to silhouette at the end of the day takes only minutes. When the colour goes almost everyone drives off, and what follows is the part you stay for. Around eight hundred little penguins come ashore after dark and cross the sand to their burrows, fifteen to fifty metres beneath where you were standing. A short drive east, Gibson Steps cut down the cliff to an open beach where the stacks rise directly overhead, and the wet sand is the only place you feel their height properly. Three minutes west a staircase drops between two stacks into Loch Ard Gorge, a closed beach of pale sand where the swell arrives muffled. The clipper it is named for struck an island just offshore in June 1878, and only two eighteen-year-olds survived, washed into this gorge; four of the dead lie in the cemetery on the cliff above. A helicopter from the pad by the visitor centre gives you the one view the boardwalks cannot: the stacks scattered across bright shallow water along a coast caught mid-collapse. That collapse keeps its own schedule. In January 1990 the shoreward span of London Bridge, a few minutes west along this coast, dropped into the sea and left two visitors stranded on the rock beyond it, waiting three hours for a helicopter.