The size of Switzerland, Gippsland spans a huge chunk of south-eastern Victoria, taking in about 500 kilometres of coastline and stretching to the High Country. Here’s an insider’s guide to one of Australia’s most diverse regions.
Words Emma Hearnes
Like many people who grew up in a beautiful place, I foolishly spent my adolescence dreaming of getting the heck out of there.
After high school I moved to the city, and for a while I enjoyed the caffeine-on-every-corner lifestyle. But then, as I have learned is the case for many who grew up in Gippsland, the village that raised me called me back home.
I’ll be honest: at first, it was less a spiritual call of the land and more a job offer in the field I actually wanted to work in. I became assistant editor at Gippslandia, a community not-for-profit publication celebrating the region. In my naivety, my overwhelming thought during the first editorial meeting was, “How the hell are we going to fill 56 pages with content just about Gippsland?”
Two years later, I agonise over space and which stories to leave out of each edition, and I’m the one at a dinner party waxing lyrical about the beauty of the region and its people.
Roughly the size of Switzerland, Gippsland stretches from the outskirts of Melbourne to the New South Wales border. It follows the coastline along popular sites such as Phillip Island, Wilsons Promontory, Lakes Entrance and Mallacoota, and reaches up to the mountainous High Country of Baw Baw and Omeo. As diverse as it is expansive, the region spans sea and snow, bushland and rainforest, and has an equally diverse population of farmers, artists, epicureans and entrepreneurs.
Here are just a few of the spots (more to come in our extended digital version) that made me fall deeply in love with the place I came from. Just click on the drop-down menus for my suggestions about where to eat, drink, stay and what to do. And we'll also be joined by writer and serial community volunteer Shelley Banders to hear how she'd spend her dream day in South Gippsland.
