Sorrento Sunset 5:35 PM
Winter Insider · August 2026 Winter 2026
Photo · Peninsula Insider
Hastings is a port town on the Mornington Peninsula's Western Port shoreline, 75 km from Melbourne, with a Thursday street market and a working commercial harbour on the eastern bay.
Hastings sits on the eastern, working side of the Peninsula - the Western Port side, with its mangroves, mudflats, and fishing fleet. It is not a tourist town and never has tried to be, which is exactly what makes it useful. The fishermen's co-op here supplies some of the best seafood in Melbourne, the mussel farms offshore are among the largest sustainable producers in Australia, and if you are driving back from French Island or heading down to Flinders the long way round, Hastings is the place to stop for fish and chips eaten on the pier. The town itself is unvarnished in a way the western Peninsula no longer is, and that counts for something.
The Peninsula's working port, where the seafood is better than the streetscape.
Is Hastings the right base?
Looking for charm in the town centre - stop for seafood and the pier, then move on.
Hastings in brief
A perfect day here
Late-morning co-op stop, fish and chips on the foreshore, walk the pier, then ferry onward or drive south.
The fish co-op is the real reason to come; locals buy there long before visitors realise they should.
- Editor's note
What's mapped here
Read this place properly
Long-form editorial that builds the picture of a place beyond any single visit.
10 April 2026
The Peninsula is a wine region that happens to be surrounded by water. The seafood story is quieter than the pinot story, but it is arguably the more honest one - and the best of it is very, very good.
Planning guides
Long-form editorial that helps you build a weekend, not just a list of places.
Keep going
Because a Peninsula trip is always made up of two or three pockets, not one.
Red Hill · village
Balnarring is the village that locals still treat as their own - a cluster of shops, a Thursday morning farmers' market, a bookshop that has outlasted all reasonable expectations, and a road network that somehow always seems to lead back to a cellar door. It sits on the eastern edge of the Peninsula's wine country, closer to Western Port than Port Phillip, and that changes the character: the light is softer, the crowds are thinner, and the vineyards here tend to be smaller family operations rather than destination estates. Balnarring is where you go when you want a Peninsula weekend that feels like the way things used to work before the region became a brand. The beach is genuine and quiet, the coffee is unpretentious, and the drive in from Tedesca or Montalto takes fifteen minutes of roads you've mostly never seen.
Ocean Coast · town
Flinders sits on the wild southern edge of the Peninsula and carries itself with a kind of salt-air confidence. The village is compact but smart - a bakery, a handful of good shops, an old pub, and a coastline that feels a world away from the bay-facing polish further north. Base yourself here if you want your mornings to begin with wind off Bass Strait, your afternoons with a drive back inland for lunch, and your evenings under a harder, cleaner sky.
On the map
Every editorially verified pin in Hastings on one screen - toggle a category, click any marker for the editor's note.
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On the calendar in this place
Coming up in Hastings, pulled from the events registry.
The Insider Note
One pick, one weather-proof backup, one thing to skip. Written on the Peninsula, sent when there is something worth knowing.
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