Visit the Prom and Shallow Inlet via Hourigan Camp Lane
 
Visit the northwestern-most corner of Wilsons Promontory National Park and the southeastern-most shores of Shallow Inlet via Hourigan Camp Lane at Yanakie.
Hourigan Camp Lane was named after Mick Hourigan, a road contractor who built many roads and bridges in the Promontory district during the 1950s. Mick was responsible for constructing a track and a bridge that once crossed a swampy area on the western side of the Yanakie Isthmus and led to Cotters Beach, which extends for about 20 kilometres along the west coast of the Prom.
   
Before the present day Promontory Road was built through to Tidal River, cars were driven south along Cotters Beach to Darby Beach and the banks of the Darby River where a chalet once stood, to gain access to the Prom.

According to Yanakie historian Rosie Crawford, Mick was a fiery Irishman who preferred living in relative solitude at his camp on the edge of Shallow Inlet, and who died in his early 40s, “the victim of his own over-indulgence”.
   
However Mick’s memory lives on in the Lane that bears his moniker and in the track that leads from the end of the Lane, into the National Park and across a gully to reach Shallow Inlet.

The Yanakie Coast Action Group, together with Parks Victoria, built the 500-metre track in November 1996, using funding provided by the Victorian Government’s Coast Action/Coastcare Community Programme.
   

To reach the track, park your car at the end of Hourigan Camp Lane, located off Millar Road, which lies west of the Promontory Road, just north of the hamlet of Yanakie.
Go through the gaps between the gateposts at the western side of the car park and you’ll find yourself entering Wilsons Promontory National Park, with the start of the Shallow Inlet track visible clearly across a grassy firebreak cut between farming land and the Park itself.

   

The first section of the track takes you past Gippsland mallee gums, several varieties of tea tree, casuarinas, banksias, wattles, paperbarks and understorey plants such as swords’ edge, bower spinach, heath, spiny mat rush and kangaroo apple.
Look out for the occasional tiny purple-flag orchid with its bright-yellow centre as you walk along. Soon you will come to a section of boardwalk crossing a swampy gully, which is home to delicate plants such as bracken and tree ferns, lichens, prickly moses and rough guinea flowers.

   
Look and listen for some of the many types of birds and animals who live in this part of the Prom as you go along the boardwalk, including little wattle birds, blue wrens, eastern whip birds, swamp wallabies, wombats, and perhaps even a hog deer, which were introduced into Victoria from India in the 1850s.

By the time you reach the end of the boardwalk, the vegetation is already changing from coastal forest species to hardier foreshore types like coast tussock grass, hare’s tails and indigenous pigface.

   

   
Come out on to the edge of Shallow Inlet and you can see the higher peaks of the Prom away to the south, and the sand dunes of Sandy Point, the blue of Waratah Bay and the grey-green outline of Cape Liptrap beyond right there in front of you.
Shallow Inlet is gradually changing shape from year to year as the surging tides actively rearrange the shoreline and the seabed, and the winds alter the form and height of the sand dunes flanking it.
   
At low tide, about 300 hectares of the Inlet are covered with water, but at high tide this increases to 1800 hectares.
Stroll along the beach at low tide and you’re very likely to see flurries of solider crabs scuttling away from your feet as they go about the business of surviving in the littoral zone.
   
Come back at high tide and you will find the vast expanse of sand that is exposed when the tide is out has shrunk to a narrow fringe between the water and the seagrasses.
The Inlet provides habitat for an incredible range of life, from microscopic plants and animals right through to large fish species such as flathead, whiting, salmon and trevally, and sea and water birds like black swans, white-bellied sea eagles, Pacific gulls and eastern curlews.
   
   
Watch carefully for the shy hooded plover or dotterel and for the sooty oyster catcher.
The foreshore is decorated with the grey skeletons of coast wattles killed either by king tides or by erosion, as well as with clumps of seaweed and uncountable numbers of shells such as pipis, cuttle and very rarely a paper nautilus.
Much of Shallow Inlet falls within the Shallow Inlet Coastal and Marine Park, while its southern end is part of the prom National Park.
Take the time to explore the coastal and foreshore ecosystems to be found along the Shallow Inlet track at the end of Hourigan Camp Lane, marvel at the views and leave nothing behind but footsteps when you leave.