FUTURE GREATNESS: Aireys Inlet the focus of latest Great Ocean Road Futures research

THE Great Ocean Road Futures research project is continuing its multi-year study into the long-term challenges and possible solutions for the road and surrounds, with the latest phase focusing on Aireys Inlet.

Starting in January 2021, the project involves hundreds of post-graduate students from The University of Melbourne, Monash, RMIT and Swinburne, who are, as the project’s website states designing and “reimagining what is possible to achieve a truly sustainable – regenerative and resilient – future for the Great Ocean Road”.

So far, 10 separate groups have finished their work.

Completed projects include future-proofing the Lorne foreshore, ecotourism at Apollo Bay, and citizens transforming the Great Ocean Road at Anglesea.

Providing an update on the project in the latest Aireys Inlet and District Association newsletter, project co-ordinator Professor Chris Ryan from the University of Melbourne said the latest group of 20 students from the RMIT Masters program examined the impact of projected visitation – predicted to return to 2018 levels next year and be as high as 10 million a year within the next decade – the accelerating effects of climate change, and the state government’s net zero targets.

“As with all the Great Ocean Road Futures work, this team took a radical view of ‘sustainability’; for this critical and fragile region, sustainable development must not be conceived as merely slowing down deterioration, it has to be more innovative and realistic, responding to the scale of the challenges to its natural environment.”

He said the students in the group considered how Aireys Inlet and district could evolve through the balancing of the Great Ocean Road between growing visitation and protecting the natural features that make it so attractive.

“Under these conditions, the students talked of ‘the road’ – which already divides the town in two – as a barrier to the conviviality of the settlement; a physical (and audible) fracture in the social and cultural threads of the community; a vehicular wall to habitability and community movement; a freeway funnelling the buses and cars of passing tourists though the town as they take snaps of the ocean and inland sides of a community that most residents once described as serene.

“This group’s radical idea was to return the Aireys Great Ocean Road to a shared space for people to mix with bikes and dogs… and very slow-moving vehicles.

“That meant taking the three-minute tourist vehicles off the current road, rerouting them to bypass the town.”

Two possible solutions were suggested: a conventional bypass inland from Anglesea to the far end of Eastern View; or a tunnel under the existing road from the hall to the bottom of the hill past the Allen Noble Sanctuary.

Other students looked at promoting citizen science – using the tagline “Arrive as a Tourist, Leave as a Scientist” – in which sites, views, walks and all major points of engagement along the Great Ocean Road would become places to collect environmental data, record observations, and upload images, in a fun and engaging way for both adults and children.

“Aireys is envisaged as a case study, a model for how this would work that could be replicated along the Great Ocean Road,” Professor Ryan said.

For more information on the project, head to greatoceanroadfutures.com