About Barwon Heads

Barwon Heads Information

The township of Barwon Heads was surveyed in 1870 but remained sparsely populated for years. In the 1920s and 1930s the town became a popular holiday resort and a number of the richer families of Melbourne built houses here.

In 1959 the closing scenes of the film On the Beach based on a Neville Shute novel about the end of the world was filmed in the town.

Barwon Heads was just another sleepy seaside holiday destination until it was used as the location for the hugely successful ABC-TV series Sea Change and it became a place where people wanted to go to check out the television locations; the seaside Ramsay St. In the past decade Barwon Heads has become subject to what is colloquially known in some parts of Australia as the 'seachange effect'. Since the SeaChange television series first aired in 1998 there has been a significant increase in tourism and real estate sales in the area. Barwon Heads is somewhat quieter and smaller than Ocean Grove.

Barwon Heads is situated on the Bellarine Peninsula 22 km south-east of Geelong and 95 km south-west of Melbourne.