Great Ocean Road Coast Committee Blog
News and stories from our iconic coast
Tourism Australia just released a short YouTube video enticing people to visit the Great Ocean Road and a free App to for holiday makers which they say will ensure “you can see for yourself why There’s Nothing Like Australia”.
Check out the video below and the app on their website here and let us know what you think of it!
For more of our blogs on visiting the coast, click on one of the following links.
Gone are the days when we had to read outdated maps and sift through hundreds of brochures to find out valuable information on our favourite tourist destinations.
A new App called the Great Ocean Road GPS Tour has been designed for those who both love the Great Ocean Road and technology.
As you travel along the Great Ocean Road in a westerly direction, the App will act as your own personal guided tour whilst providing you with audio-visual material at specific locations along the route.
General Information
Where can I find out more?
For further information, please visit the Apple store at http://itunes.apple.com/au/app/great-ocean-road-gps-tour/id511163046?mt=8
Check some more of our blogs on visiting the coast:
Head out now to look out on our spectacular coast!
What’s not to love about our coast in Winter?
Have you used the new GPS App? Give us your reviews and let us know how well it worked for you!
There are lots of opportunities for people of all ages to get involved in learning to help the environment and volunteering on the Surf Coast.
Is there one to suit you?
Educational Opportunities offered by GORCC
The Great Ocean Road Coast Committee (GORCC) has recently launched an education program which has been specifically designed to be flexible, catering for a range of ages, skills and requirements and is available to schools and groups. Check out the Education and Activities program
Stay tuned because GORCC is currently developing further educational resources which will be made available online and will include fact sheets, web clips, games, puzzles, activities, lesson ideas and more. These reources will be fun and interactive and will be made accessible for use by teachers, students, parents and anyone interested in coastal environments by the end of this year.
If you’re looking for educational resources already available look at our fact sheets and video clips.
Environmental volunteering can be an educational opportunity too!
If you are interested in making new friends and challenging themselves consider volunteering with one of the many volunteer groups operating on the coast. Volunteering is a great way to have new experiences, build knowledge and skills and is a hands on way to make a real difference. Volunteering can also be a great addition to your resume as well as being good for your health and fitness.
Many groups offer learning opportunities such as informative walks and resources. Get in contact with a local group to find out what they offer. For a contact list and details of local coastal volunteer groups click here.
There are a range of other environmental education programs, activities, learning resources and more available from many different organisations and providers. Check out just a few examples of the opportunities on offer:
Plants and Animals Education Page
Threatened Species Education and Information Resources
Eco-Logic Education and Environment Services
Birds Australia Education Resources
Australian Maritime Safety Authority Education Page
Victorian Association for Environmental Education
Australian Water Education Toolkit
Do you know of any other great environmental education resources?
Have you or your family been involved in environmental education programs or accessed any resources?
Please share your thoughts and experiences!
During the forum, the group was asked this question:
If we had a magic wand that we could wave to make our work together everything we hoped for, what tangible things would we see?
The following responses provide a glimpse into our goals and hopes for the future as coast carers:
The Community Forum for Coastal Volunteers last Sunday, 29 August 2010, turned out to be quite an experience for all concerned.
Throughout the day, Fairhaven Surf Life Saving Club was abuzz with the conversation and laughter of some 40 voices as a playful whale made the most of the glassy waves on offer, delighting and sometimes distracting participants from forum proceedings.
With some arriving after very long drives from as far away as Princetown, the first order of the day was morning tea and pit stops before Coast Action/Coastcare Facilitator Jess Brown welcomed everyone to the forum and introduced facilitator Geoff Brown.
Geoff got straight down to business working with the group to map out the connections between the various groups and agencies represented, including by inviting everyone to ‘find their tribe’. A number of tribes quickly formed, primarily along geographic and/or organisational type lines (e.g. Land Manager Tribe, Community Volunteer Group Tribe). 
It was fascinating to see which tribe people saw themselves as belonging to, with the sole Princetown representative welcomed into the Anglesea community tribe and Friends of Queens Park ending up in the land manager tribe.
This exercise highlighted the different types of connections and the benefits of building constructive networks – a perfect introduction into the three guest speaker presentations that followed:
Then it was time for everyone else to share their own stories with others via a ‘Jumpstart Story’ process that enabled one to quickly listen and share with at least half those gathered before identifying the five or six most inspiring stories for further investigation by the whole group.
The conversations continued flowing throughout a very lively lunch, interspersed with visits to the top of the grassy knoll to view the whale who, by now, looked to have taken up residence out the front of the club.
Fed and watered, the group soon settled down after lunch into the task of future gazing, using a magic wand to look at goals and hopes for the future. The stories from the morning session proved useful in identifying the ‘X factors’ for success, including the skills, capacities and connections among the volunteer groups that are already in place and can be built on. 
Meanwhile the various land managers worked on simple but enlightening role statements to support them in communicating and connecting with others.
Finally, the home straight was in plain sight (as was the whale – still!) as the discussion moved to the next steps needed to making the future a reality, with the first step being to share what happened at the forum via this blog.
In all, the day provided a fantastic opportunity to connect and share with others whose passion is caring for the coast. A big heartfelt thank you to Coast Action/Coastcare Facilitator Jess Brown who put in a lot of hard work and effort to put it all together and make it happen.
Over the coming weeks, the stories emerging from the forum, the lessons we learnt, the goals and wishes for our various groups and our coast, and the next steps we need to take will be progressively added to this blog for participants to refer to and comment on, and to share with those who weren’t there, including people we don’t even know from coasts in other parts of the world.
We look forward to sharing these experiences with you and invite you to post your impressions, thoughts and ideas to this blog – and to spread the word to others.
Traditional wisdom has it that good connections are vital to getting on in life. For us however, good connections are critically important to our beautiful coast, both now and in the future.
As coast managers, we share a strong connection with the coast and are passionate about its ongoing care, protection and conservation. Such passion also connects us with the many local coastal volunteer groups and individuals involved in caring for the coast, and with government agencies and other bodies who, like us, are responsible for managing the coast.
Sometimes it can be confusing to know just who is responsible for what on our coast. Good connections between the different managers are vital to building the foundation for an integrated approach to coastal management. Good connections between coastal volunteers provide the basis for sharing knowledge, skills and experiences, and for working cooperatively on various coast care activities.
Such connections also play a crucial role in helping to connect the ordinary person on the beach, or in the street, with the coast and hopefully contribute to raising their awareness of why they need to play their part in looking after it.
Over the past few months, we have been working towards building our capacity to connect with people in the online environment, via this blog for example, our website and popular social media tools. While this is an exciting, new thing for us, we recognise that it is certainly not the ‘be all and end all’ when it comes to connecting with people to connect them with our coast.
Consequently, we have also been working to improve the way we connect via more tried and tested means. We know for example that the strongest connections come from sitting down and talking to people face-to-face, which beats technology every time.
This is why we are looking forward to the upcoming Forum for Coastal Volunteers on Sunday 29 August 2010, which is being organised by Coast Action/Coastcare, in partnership with ourselves and Otway Coast.
We see this important forum as providing an invaluable opportunity to strengthen connections – between ourselves, our partners and our volunteers, and between the many coastal volunteer groups themselves – which will benefit the entire Great Ocean Road coast from Torquay to Port Campbell.
The forum promises great food and great company while providing opportunities to share, celebrate, connect and look to the future. We can’t wait to be there and to see what comes out of it in terms of building the good connections so vital to our beautiful coast.
Today marks the start of a brave new world for GORCC with the launch of our new website and associated social media tools, including this GORCC Talk Blog.
For some time now, we’ve recognised that our existing website, which was launched in November 2005, was in need of an overhaul if we were to achieve our objective of improving the way we communicate and engage with people online.
This view was reinforced by a research project undertaken between April and June last year, which identified a strong need to redevelop the website as a resource where people can learn and discover our coastal environment, and local groups and others can share information online.
We also saw – perhaps somewhat belatedly – the multitude of exciting opportunities offered by Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, FlickR and other social media tools in terms of informing, educating, connecting, interacting and engaging with people in the online environment.
Over the past few months, we’ve been exploring some of these tools and are now ready to make our first real foray into social media in conjunction with the new website.
The development of the new website has been funded from the Australian Government’s Caring for our Country program and is part of our Helping communities help the coast along the Great Ocean Road program, which aims to raise awareness of the importance of caring for the coast in the face of population growth, climate change and other threats.
As such, our new website provides an interactive and dynamic tool that enables people to learn about our organisation and its work, the issues confronting our coast and the simple things we can all do to help look after it. We want people to enjoy the coast but to also respect and care for it.
Our new Facebook and Twitter pages build on these themes by providing regular real-time updates about what we’re up to and allowing users to interact directly with us online.
YouTube and FlickR enables people to access and comment on our offerings – and to share their own video and photographic resources – while this GORCC Talk Blog provides a space for generating ongoing commentary and dialogue about various aspects of the coast and pertinent issues.
It’s still early days for our new website and social media tools, and we’re still very much on our training wheels in this regard. However, we see these tools continually evolving as people start to use them to communicate and engage with us.
I encourage you to visit www.gorcc.com.au, to have a look around the site to see what’s there and to get the conversation going by telling us what you think, either by clicking on the homepage links to Facebook or Twitter, or by posting a comment here.
Over to you!
Posted by David Clarke, CEO.
Great Ocean Road Coast Committee Blog 