A Town Like Colac

Colac is a commercial, service and local government centre of about 14,500 people located at the eastern edge of the world's third-largest volcanic plain, a landscape scattered with craters and cones. These have been extinct for several million years. This plain’s fertile soil has resulted in a productive region with agricultural, pastoral and dairying industries, noted for its onions, potatoes, cattle, pigs, poultry, timber, sheep and milk products.
 

The area's prosperity is evident in a number of fine homesteads. With a wealth of natural resources, such as agriculture and timber, Colac has a strong manufacturing background, with major local employers including Bulla Dairy Foods, CRF (Colac Otway) Pty Ltd, Fonterra Cororooke, and AKD Softwoods.
 

While historically the region supported numerous successful brickworks, nowadays the major primary industries are agriculture such as the dairying, beef, lamb and fine wool merino industries. Colac is also known as 'the Gateway to the Otways' (a reference to the nearby Otway Ranges and surrounding forest to the south of town).

Colac is close to the coast and the Great Ocean Road, a notable tourist attraction with many surf beaches and coastal villages. Proposals for an ocean road were mooted as early as the 1880s, it wasn’t until 1912 and the Great Ocean Road Trust in 1918 that the concept started to become a reality. Construction gave employment to thousands of soldiers returned from World War I and was almost entirely carried out with picks, shovels and crow bars. The road follows the coastline through Port Campbell National Park, passing the well-known coastal landscape of the Twelve Apostles, part of the rugged and spectacular coastline that justifiably wears the name ‘The Shipwreck Coast’.

Municipality: http://www.colacotway.vic.gov.au/
Colac community site: http://wildeel.com/otway/community.html
Wikipedia says: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colac,_Victoria