Otherworldly land formations, abundant wildlife, pristine beaches, weird and eerie shipwrecks: Tony Perrottet falls under the spell of Australia's Great Ocean Road, one of the world's most spectacular drives

"No way, mate!" scoffed the burly matron who runs the general store near Moonlight Head. "You don't want to go to Wreck Beach tonight!"

The other customers had fallen strangely silent when I'd asked directions to the cove where the remains of colonial shipwrecks lay scattered on the rocks, and even as the shopkeeper shook her head, I noticed ominous storm clouds rolling in from the horizon. "Jeez," she added darkly, "I got lost last time I tried to find the bloody place myself..."

Remote, mysterious, with a faint whiff of danger—this was exactly what I wanted to hear about Wreck Beach. Ever since I was a kid, I'd plotted to explore this wild coastline, so a touch of melodrama was definitely in order—in this case, an outtake from The Hound of the Baskervilles ("Arr, ye'll not go out on the moors at night..."). The name alone suggested that this was the place to start.

My family was not big on adventure, but while I was growing up in suburban Sydney, I had a disreputable, history-loving uncle who would disappear traveling for years, then return, bringing me relics from semimythic places: a rusty Byzantine coin, a Napoleonic bayonet, a conquistador's brass ring from the Andes. This was pretty inspiring stuff for a kid from Wahroonga, one of Australia's freshly minted house-scapes in the California-style suburbs. The present that really got my imagination going came, unexpectedly, from the fringes of my own country: a small strip of wood presented to me inside a Victorian teacup. These had first been plundered, my uncle swore, from the shattered hulk of a nineteenth-century shipwreck on Australia's southern coast. One rainy day, he showed me a pile of dog-eared books with black-and-white photographs of clippers rammed against the rocks, tossed up by the violent Southern Ocean.

I remember looking at those faded images and finding it hard to believe that this place was part of Australia. Unlike my manicured beachside Sydney, this was a brutal coastline backed with craggy mountain ranges and swaths of primeval rain forest. Looming just offshore were immense limestone pillars, clawing up from the sea like the arms of drowning sailors. It seemed as alien as the landscape in Planet of the Apes.

Years later, based in New York, I traveled to plenty of exotic places—Zanzibar, Iceland, Tierra del Fuego—but I never forgot those otherworldly images from a corner of my homeland. Then, on a recent trip to Australia, I learned that my cherished Victorian teacup and timber spar had succumbed to one of my parents' dreaded garage purges. This was a sign if ever there was one. It was time—at last!—to make the pilgrimage to the continent's deep south, where I could follow the 145-mile coastal highway west of Melbourne called the Great Ocean Road. Who knew? On that spectacular, shipwreck-strewn shore, maybe I could discover some equally fantastic replacement.

Which is how I found myself, early in the journey, standing in a general store that had the sort of sleepy, decrepit charm Faulkner might have relished, trying to find my way to that treacherous spot called Wreck Beach.