Torndirrup National Park, Western Australia: Food, wine and wildlife along the south-west coast

When the sun shines, the Southern Ocean can appear beautifully blue and so smooth that seagulls can see their wing-spanned selves reflected against a cloudless sky in the water below. On other days, this awesome ocean, one of the planets big five, where the freezing waters of the Antarctic mix with the warmer subantarctic flow from the north, can be as vengeful as a character in a Shakespearean tragedy. Brutish clouds hang above its white peaks like angry eyebrows, menacing waves pummel the shore and its unrelenting fury blurs sea and sky in a gun-metal grey horizon.

Torndirrup National Park on the south-west corner of Western Australia is well worth a visit to for this wild weather alone. On days like this, the wind whips your face like a cat 'o' nine tails, rain comes at you sideways and the full force of nature makes you want to sound your barbaric yawp all the way from Bald Head along the coastline to West Cape. Key to the experience is The Gap, a treacherous rock chasm that sucks the ocean swell in and spits it back out with the temper of a megalomaniac. It is accessed via a raised boardwalk and ogled from a purpose-built platform jutting out 40 metres above the ocean on five cantilevered beams. Up here, you can grip the guardrails like a storm-wrecked sailor as the wind lashes from every direction and the swell does its best to soak your shoes.

A second platform, five minutes' walk away on a raised pathway, brings the Natural Bridge into view. This behemoth span of immovable granite gets mocked by pounding swell that sends up buckets of ocean spray. In the past, sturdy feet have slipped on these sheer cliffs and granite outcrops, great swimmers have been lost in greater waves, and lives have been lost to the ocean. But a 2016 renovation costing $1.6 million saw the facilities upgraded. Now, with guardrails, handholds, non-slip boardwalks and demarcation signs in place, it's a worthy destination in all kinds of weather.

With approximately 250,000 visitors each year, the most to any national park in Western Australia, Torndirrup is one of the big drawcards for visitors to the nearby coastal city of Albany. Albany is remote – it's more than 400 kilometres south of Perth – or a five-hour drive, and a similar distance from Margaret River, but the city's quaint settler houses and sea-vista shops, its Anzac history, and the spectacular Southern Ocean coastline make it a destination for nature boffins, culture vultures and foodies alike.

Visitors can tap into the city's poignant Anzac heritage at the incredibly moving and contemporary National Anzac Centre, which overlooks the actual harbour from which 41,265 Anzacs, in the first and second convoys, departed Australia for the Great War.

A standout feature of the centre has visitors assuming the identity of one of 32 Anzacs and tracing their lives – and deaths. My Anzac is Sergeant Colin Charles Blumer who fought in the third battalion on Gallipoli's western front. Zeroing in on newspaper clippings, old photographs and personal artefacts, I follow his journey learning that he was wounded on four occasions, including gunshot wounds to both the thumb and the back, and that a shrapnel wound saw him finally evacuated to Egypt. He survived the war "having been sent back to Australia as a medical evacuee in July 1917" to resume post war life. Others weren't so fortunate, and the exhibition often sees visitors shedding a tear or two.

Like Margaret River, Albany has a food and drink scene that belies its population of 34,000. On the waterfront of Princes Royal Harbour, Great Southern Distilling Company is the home of Limeburners, known for producing top-notch craft gin and premium single malt whiskey in traditional small-batch copper pot stills. You can sit at the wood-lined American-style bar and sip on a Ginversity botanical gin or a Darkest Winter, a drop that was named best whiskey in the Southern Hemisphere in 2018. A short 30-minute tour out back reveals a one-shed distillery where I'm told distiller Cameron Syme is adamant about the benefits of using pristine Albany water and malt barley from the nearby wheat belt. The peat is sourced from a local farmer "who doesn't mind getting paid in whiskey".