Location
Breamlea is halfway between Barwon Heads and Torquay, on Bass Strait, about 28km south of Geelong city.
Description
Breamlea remains the most secluded of seaside resorts along this beautiful coast. There is one store which serves the few residents and the caravan park. The seclusion has led to a paradoxical exclusivity and buoyant residential property prices. The Black Rock sewage treatment plant and ocean outfall was built three kilometres to the east of the town. Otherwise, little has changed at Breamlea. Thompsons Creek still runs through a natural lattice of reedy canals and widens before it enters Buckleys Bay. Point Impossible is a well-known longboard surfing break and the sheltered beaches are still popular during summer.
History
The west side of Thompsons Creek, now Point Impossible, was one of the base camps of the Mon Mart Clan of Wathaurong people. The Mon Mart owned the land east to Barwon River and north to Mount Duneed. Point Impossible, just across the creek from present-day Breamlea, and the whole area, was rich in shellfish and small canals where bream still spawn. Escaped convict William Buckley stumbled across the Mon Mart clan in the early 1800s when he was nearly dead from exposure and starvation. Aboriginal people follow a law that requires them to look after sick or distressed strangers in their land. The Mon Mart people became more welcoming when a widow claimed that Buckley was the reincarnation of her recently deceased husband. Buckley spent much of the next 32 years living with these Wathaurong people, in exile from the fledgling white civilisation. He built a house near Point Impossible. A natural well and the bay at the creek's mouth are named after him. Thompsons Creek attracted campers and fishermen from the 1870s onwards and by the 1920s, makeshift huts were built by regular campers. During the 1930s depression, squatters made permanent buildings, rent-free, and eked meals from the creek and the ocean. Freehold land was not subdivided for sale until 1942, creating boundaries to a small linear township huddled behind the high, ti-tree covered sand dunes.
