Sorrento 16°C Sunset 5:48 pm Bay glassy, tide low Winter Insider · June 2026
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Explore · Regions

Western Port

The quieter side: mangroves, French Island ferries, and a genuinely local pace of life.

Western Port is the Peninsula's other shore, the protected bay side where the water is calmer, the towns are more working than weekending, and the landscape shifts to mangrove and tidal flat. Hastings is the hub, with French Island ferry access and a working harbour that feels a world away from Sorrento. This is the Peninsula for locals and those who have graduated beyond the obvious. The birding is exceptional, the fishing is serious, and the absence of tourists is, for many, the entire point.

Places in Western Port

Western Port · village

Bittern

Bittern is a small Western-Port village named for the marsh bird that still nests in the coastal wetlands at its edge, and it has a thoroughly ordinary main street that conceals one of the most birdable shorelines on the Peninsula. The Bittern Coastal Wetlands - saltmarsh, mudflats, mangroves - are one of the least-promoted nature reserves in the region and one of the best places in Victoria to watch wading birds at low tide. The village itself is residential, with a station on the Stony Point train line and a general store. Bittern matters mostly as a stopping point: a wetland walk in the morning, a coffee on the main street, then drive south to Hastings or onward to Crib Point. There is little reason to stay here, every reason to stop for an hour or two if birds and quiet shorelines interest you.

Western Port · village

Crib Point

Crib Point sits halfway between Hastings and Stony Point on the Western Port shoreline, a small village built around a navy history that quietly defined it for most of the twentieth century - HMAS Cerberus is its southern neighbour and the largest naval base in the country. The village is residential, with a station on the Stony Point train line and a few low-key streets that lead down to Woolleys Beach, a small shaded swimming pocket that locals know about and almost no visitors do. The Western Port coast here is mangrove and mudflat country, and walking south along the foreshore toward Stony Point at low tide is one of the better long, flat coastal walks on the Peninsula. Come here for the walks and the train; stay in Hastings for the meal.

Western Port · town

Hastings

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.

Western Port · village

Somers

Somers is the quiet Western Port answer to the bay-side beach villages, and it has been keeping that profile low on purpose for a century. The village is set back from a long shallow beach with tea-tree banking the dunes, a small general store, a yacht club that has changed almost nothing about itself since the 1950s, and not much else. Coolart Wetlands and Homestead, set in its 87-hectare reserve on the village edge, is the other reason to come - one of the best places to walk a wetland boardwalk under a winter sky on the entire Peninsula. The Lord Somers Camp gives the village a residual association with leadership weeks and a particular kind of Australian institutional history. Stay here if you want a beach village without polish, where the loudest sound in the morning is birds in the reserve.

Western Port · village

Stony Point

Stony Point is the smallest possible village - a jetty, a ferry terminal, a railway terminus, a fishermen's hut or two - and one of the most useful addresses on the Peninsula. The ferry from the jetty runs across Western Port to French Island and on to Cowes on Phillip Island, which makes Stony Point one of the few places on mainland Victoria you can step off a train and onto a boat. There is no town to wander - the village is barely a village - but the working pier is a real fishing community and the views across to French Island catch the afternoon light beautifully. Park here, walk the jetty, take the ferry, or just sit on the pier with fish and chips brought down from Hastings. Stony Point is a transit point that rewards being treated as a destination for a few hours.

Hinterland · town

Tyabb

Tyabb is the Peninsula's antique town and, twice a year, its airshow town, and for the rest of the calendar it is a small Western-Port-adjacent farming village most visitors drive past on the way to somewhere else. The antiques district is unusual - a long shed-filled lane known as Tyabb Packing House, half barn, half market, full of dealers who have been there for thirty years and know exactly what they have. The Old Tyabb airfield, a working grass strip on the edge of town, hosts the Tyabb Air Show each March and is home to one of Australia's best-known warbird collections. Beyond those two anchors, Tyabb is residential and rural - horse paddocks, a small main street, a bakery worth pulling over for. Come for an antique-hunting day with the airshow if the timing aligns; otherwise pair Tyabb with Hastings as a Western Port-side day.

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