Queenscliff may be best known today as a holiday town, but few places in Victoria pack as much history into so small an area: shipwrecks and sea pilots, an escaped convict, a Victorian-era fortress and even a pirate treasure legend.
Long before European settlement, the land around Queenscliff and Swan Bay was home to the Wadawurrung (also written Wathaurong) people of the Kulin Nation, who fished and gathered along these shores for thousands of years.
The first Europeans arrived in 1802, when Lieutenant John Murray sailed the Lady Nelson through the Heads and into Port Phillip; Captain Matthew Flinders followed just ten weeks later. The next European arrival came in stranger circumstances: William Buckley, a convict who escaped from the short-lived Sullivan Bay settlement near Sorrento in December 1803, walked around the bay and was taken in by the Wadawurrung, living with them for 32 years before giving himself up to John Batman's party in 1835. A cave below the Point Lonsdale lighthouse, reputedly one of his shelters, still bears his name.
Permanent European settlement grew around the point then called Shortland's Bluff, prized for one reason: it overlooks the Rip, the narrow and treacherous entrance to Port Phillip Bay. Sea pilots began stationing themselves here in 1839 to guide ships safely through, a service that continues from Queenscliff to this day. The town itself was surveyed in 1853 and renamed Queenscliff by Lieutenant-Governor Charles La Trobe in honour of Queen Victoria, with the first land sales held the same year.
As gold-rush shipping poured through the Heads, the infrastructure of a maritime town followed: piers, a lifeboat service, a telegraph station and the paired High and Low lighthouses of 1862–63 that still line ships up through the Rip. The High Light — the famous Black Lighthouse inside the fort — is built of unpainted bluestone. Local legend long held that its stones were cut and numbered in Scotland and shipped out as ballast; the more prosaic official account is that the bluestone was quarried near Melbourne and barged down the bay. Queenscliff's fishing fleet grew alongside it all, and its couta boats became an Australian icon.
Fear of Russian invasion in the second half of the 19th century transformed the town. A gun battery was built on Shortland's Bluff in 1860, and between 1879 and 1889 it was expanded into Fort Queenscliff, headquarters of the chain of defences that made Port Phillip one of the most heavily defended harbours in the Southern Hemisphere. A railway from South Geelong opened in 1879, partly to serve the fort and its garrison. The fort remained in military hands through both world wars and is now one of Australia's best-preserved 19th-century fortresses, open for guided tours.
The 1880s boom made Queenscliff the "Queen of the South." Paddle steamers brought day-trippers down from Melbourne, and grand hotels rose to meet them: the Grand Hotel (today's Vue Grand) opened in 1881, the Ozone in 1881, Lathamstowe in 1883 and the Queenscliff Hotel in 1887. Much of that streetscape survives intact, which is why the town remains one of Australia's finest examples of a Victorian-era seaside resort.
The railway closed in 1976, but volunteers of the Geelong Steam Preservation Society relaid the line between Queenscliff and Drysdale, reopening it in 1979 as the heritage Bellarine Railway — now, along with the fort, the museums and the historic streetscape, one of the main ways visitors step back into the town's past. The Queenscliffe Historical Museum on Hesse Street and the Queenscliffe Maritime Museum by the harbour keep the full story, from shipwrecks to fishing families.
No Queenscliff history is complete without the legend of Benito Bonito, the pirate said to have hidden a fortune in looted Spanish gold in a cave on the cliffs by Swan Bay, sealing the entrance with gunpowder. Treasure hunters have searched for it since the 1800s. Nothing has ever been found — which, of course, is exactly what keeps the story alive.
Want to see it for yourself? Start with our Plan Your Visit guides or read more about Queenscliff today.
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