Send me your ships, your schooners,

and my rocks and reefs will take them.

Send me some seven hundred,

and howling wrecks I will make them.

Give me stormy nights and surging tides,

give me captains who lack in skill,

and I will show you shipwrecks

that no other coastline will.

Teacher’s note: By day, the coast appears calm and safe.  But Victoria’s treacherous, storm-tossed 130-kilometre Shipwreck Coast, from Cape Otway to Port Fairy, has claimed around 700 vessels.