MELBOURNE, Victoria, Australia — If there is a scenic locale that demonstrates how the earth, at least to our human eyes, is artful-nature-in-transition, Australia's Great Ocean Road is certainly a strong candidate.

A postcard I picked up during a tour of the Southern Ocean coast southwest of cosmopolitan Melbourne shows four photographs: two pictures of an arch-pierced headland formation called "London Bridge"; two featuring a sequence of beach-side island-pinnacles, or "stacks," called the "Twelve Apostles."

They are "then and now" postcard photos.

One of London Bridge's two arches tumbled into the sea in January 1990. Now the more seaward window is part of a small island of its own and is simply called "London Arch."

The card's centerpiece Apostle — a huge, pointed hoodoo that looks from one angle like a portly wizard — collapsed in July 2005, leaving only a stump. As a more recent photo shows, most of the debris has washed away. The wizard has vanished.

The monoliths, just offshore and at the mercy of ceaseless waves and tides, once were at least a dozen, as their name implies. Now there are eight.

They are, National Geographic contributor Rolf Smith has written, "symbols of the wild grandeur, fierce gales, and pounding surf of what 19th-century mariners knew as the Shipwreck Coast." The stretch claimed more than a thousand ships, Smith noted in the book "Australia: Journey Through a Timeless Land."

Just another example of why it's so fascinating to see the world as it is today — you don't know what will be there tomorrow.

The serpentine Great Ocean Road is one of Australia's touring wonders, for its landscape and dramatic seascape panoramas as well as its engineering and construction. For wandering Americans, the route and its ragged views might bring to mind California's Highway 1 and the Big Sur along the Pacific Ocean. This really is the "Big South."

The modern two-lane Australian highway stretches for about 200 miles from, on the east, Torquay and Point Danger, near Melbourne, through eucalyptus and beech forests (complete with sleepy koalas, which live solely on eucalyptus leaves), small coastal villages and rolling rural farmland, to Port Campbell and Peterborough, where the road turns northwest toward Warrnambool.

The route is renowned in Australia as much for its construction as for its scenery.