"...waves crashing just over the tops of the cliffs, which at that point are just on 100' high" - Charley, what are you getting us into now???

Don't worry Judy, it was an unusual event and the road is well back from those cliffs. But it WAS pretty exciting and every subsequent time I went there and could see the full extent of the cliffs over a smooth sea I would recall the event and be gobsmacked.

While you're down in that neck of the woods you should go and see the Lake Conda eel traps. Most Australians think of precontact Aborigines as having no particular technical skills and no settlements. Lake Conda is a serious counter argument. Covering some hundreds of Hectares (2.5 acres/Ha) are stone arrangements that, no matter what the water levels in the lake, allowed eel traps to be used to harvest eels in vast numbers. From memory, the vertical range is around 30m (~100') and the lines of stones are well visible. Stone circles mark the locations of eel-smoking huts, with residues dated at about 3000ybp (again, from memory) and the resource supported many hundreds of people. There is some argument that their settlement of the area was more or less permanent.

And, if you drive to Maldon from Melbourne you'll probably pass a stone's throw from where the Keilor Skull (~38 kybp) was found in the 60s, changing the whole view of Oz prehistory. And, if you wanted, I could probably give you a rundown on how volcanic eruptions 15 thousand years ago led to the different types of houses you'll see (in those parts of Collingwood that used to be slums on one hand and in South Yarra on the other) and who was (or was not) regarded as employable in Melbourne in the early 1980s. We used to call it "The basalt excursion".

Cheers, Rowan