Sorrento Sunset 5:35 PM
Winter Insider · August 2026 Winter 2026
Photo · Peninsula Insider
McCrae is a small bayside town on the Mornington Peninsula's Port Phillip coast between Dromana and Rosebud, 75 km from Melbourne, anchored by McCrae Lighthouse, McCrae Homestead and a calm bayside swimming beach.
McCrae sits quietly between Dromana and Rosebud, often skipped over by people who treat the bay drive as a single line - which is a shame, because it has the best small-town beach on this stretch and the oldest building still standing on the Peninsula. The McCrae Lighthouse is the postcard, and Andrew McCrae's 1844 homestead, still set in its original garden, is the kind of history that survives only by being mostly forgotten. The foreshore here is a clean, gently shelving bay beach with bathing boxes and a long swimming pier, and the residential streets behind run up to the foot of Arthurs Seat. It is the sort of town that locals on the Peninsula use as a base when Dromana is too busy and Rosebud is too sprawling. Stay here for calm-water swimming and the back-of-Arthurs lookout walks; do not come for nightlife.
Bayside swimming, a lighthouse, and the Peninsula's oldest homestead - the bay's quiet middle.
Is McCrae the right base?
Driving past on the way to Sorrento - McCrae rewards stopping properly.
McCrae in brief
A perfect day here
Bayside swim at the bathing boxes, breakfast in Dromana, McCrae Homestead garden mid-morning, Arthurs Seat chairlift up after lunch, lighthouse at golden hour.
Park at the homestead and walk the residential streets down to the lighthouse - the most pleasant approach, and you avoid the foreshore car-park scramble.
- Editor's note
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 · ridge
Arthurs Seat is the Peninsula's high point - the ridge-top lookout, gondola, gardens and hairpin road that orient the whole region in one view. It is less a village than a landmark, but for visitors it behaves like a destination: come up for the bay panorama, the Eagle, short summit walks and the first real sense of how the beaches, vineyards and villages fit together.
Bay Coast · town
Dromana is the town at the foot of Arthurs Seat, and the practical hinge between the bay road and the hinterland behind it. Look one way and the long shallow beach runs uninterrupted toward Safety Beach; look the other and the land climbs fast into pinot country. Because of that geography, Dromana has always carried more than its weight - it is where many of the Peninsula's founding wineries planted their first vines in the 1970s, where Crittenden and the Dromana Estate groundstock still sit, and where the ferry from the ocean side of the ridge puts locals back on the bay in fifteen minutes. The town itself is unpretentious: a foreshore, a pier, a post-war main drag quietly modernising. Use it as a base for Red Hill without paying Red Hill prices, swim in the morning, drive up for lunch, and come back down in time for a sunset on the beach.
Bay Coast · town
Rosebud is the largest of the bayside towns and the one locals use when they actually want something done - a supermarket, a hardware store, an everyday main street that has not yet been aestheticised into a postcard. That practicality is also its charm. The beach is long and genuinely good, with a sheltered swimming area and grass right up to the sand; the jetty is a quiet fishing spot at dusk; and a string of ethnic kitchens along Point Nepean Road provide the kind of honest, unheralded lunches that make a weekend on the Peninsula feel less like a brochure and more like a real place. Use Rosebud as your resupply stop, but don't rush through it.
On the map
Every editorially verified pin in McCrae on one screen - toggle a category, click any marker for the editor's note.
Loading map…
The Insider Note
One pick, one weather-proof backup, one thing to skip. Written on the Peninsula, sent when there is something worth knowing.
Wednesdays
The next issue lands Wednesday. Check your inbox for a note confirming the address.