From humble beginnings....

Captain Grant named this area after the "Duke of Bridgewater" in 1800.
This area was explored by Edward Henty in 1833 two years before he settled at Portland. When he did settle he established one of his six squatting stations or runs at Bridgewater in 1836. He grew potatoes there for a short time which he shipped to the Adelaide markets but he soon abandoned farming here. Then in 1838 Sam Bryant married one of Edward Henty’s sisters Jane and the couple resided on land at Bridgewater.
Once the Portland region was officially opened up to settlement by the NSW government in 1840, it took a couple of years before other settlers arrived. The first two settlers James Kittson and James Kennedy arrived in 1842 to take up land.
By 1860 there were 38 families living at Cape Bridgewater and a Methodist church had earlier been erected in 1858. Two small private schools were operating by 1860 and the first Post Office opened in 1863. A beautiful sandstone Anglican Church was also erected for the settlers at Cape Bridgewater in 1884. It is now upmarket accommodation.

Cape Bridgewater is famous for having the highest cliffs in Victoria and the amazing Petrified Forest near the Cape itself. The petrified forest is a series of sandstone tubes that have had their centres eroded out by millions of years of rainfall and weathering. It is a forest because these tubes began as trees which were covered by sand dunes and then gradually transformed into sandstone although some theories now discount the idea that the tubes began as trees. The interior of the tubes eroded quickly as it was just decaying plant matter.