Flinders Beach Hikes

Flinders is a town about 88 km south of Melbourne, on Westernport Bay.

The district was first settled in the 1840s, and has a rich history of squatting and fishing.

The Flinders Cable Station Walk, which traverses the foreshore area, commemorates the establishment, in 1869, of a telegraph station which connected mainland Australia and Tasmania.

The cable initially terminated at a receiving station near the jetty. Morse code messages were then conveyed by hand from the receiving station to the staff house halfway up the cliff where the message was decoded. It was taken by hand to the telegraph office atop the cliff. A new telegraph office was built in the early 1890s, bypassing the receiving station and staff house. The whole system was replaced by telephony in 1936 and the telegraph station was demolished in 1961.

I did a 5 km hike on January 4, 2007, which included the Cable Station Walk, an ocean walk to a point half-way to Shoreham (linking with an earlier walk from Shoreham), and the long pier.

The full set of pictures is at

http://worldisround.com/articles/322645/index.html