Great Southern Touring Route: Nature & Wildlife - Britz

Four nights and 776 kilometres in a loop from Melbourne in a campervan, west to the Grampians and back along the coast.

Ballarat comes first, with Sovereign Hill and the goldfields history, and a wildlife park on the edge of town where the kangaroos are loose and the koalas are not.

Halls Gap follows inside the Grampians, where the kangaroos graze on the recreation reserve in the evenings and the cockatoos arrive in numbers, with sandstone ranges, waterfalls and rock art shelters around the town. Warrnambool comes next on the coast, where southern right whales calve at Logans Beach through the winter and can be watched from a platform on the dune, and Tower Hill nearby is a volcanic crater holding a nature reserve with emus and koalas in it. Point Lonsdale closes the loop on the way back to Melbourne.

Britz supply the camper and the day-by-day plan, and the hire is priced live per vehicle rather than per person; campsites, fuel, ferries, park fees and activities are all extra, with a nil-excess insurance pack available at booking. Five days for 776 kilometres is comfortable, and the wildlife is the thread rather than an incidental: the Grampians in the evening and Tower Hill at dusk both deliver reliably, though no sighting can be promised. The whale season at Warrnambool is narrow, so timing matters if that is the main draw. Nothing on this route needs a 4WD, and the whole loop is comfortably inside a long weekend extended by a day or two. Ballarat and Halls Gap are each worth a full day, which is roughly what the itinerary allows.