Australia’s second-smallest state, Victoria is the most densely populated and industrialized, and has a wide variety of attractions packed into a small area. It may not be a state to tour comprehensively, but Australians, at least, lap up the legends of their history that are thick on the ground: you’re never too far from civilization, but everywhere there’s a wild past of gold prospectors and bushrangers. All routes in the state radiate from Melbourne, bang in the middle of the coastline on the huge Port Phillip Bay, and no point is much more than seven hours’ drive away. Yet all most visitors see of Victoria apart from its cultured capital is the Great Ocean Road, a winding 280km of spectacular coastal scenery. Others may venture to the idyllic Wilsons Promontory National Park (the “Prom”), a couple of hours away on the coast of the mainly dairy region of Gippsland, or to the * Goldfields, where the nineteenth-century goldrushes left their mark in the grandiose architecture of old mining towns such as * Ballarat and Bendigo.