Australia’s extraordinary wildflower wealth is reason enough to look beyond your next step when bushwalking. But with more than 500 varieties growing in the wild, Australian fungi is a fabulous added bonus. Preferring moist, shaded environments, mushrooms and toadstools come in diverse shapes (upstanding to jelly-like recumbent), colours (beige to enamel red), textures (velvety to slimy), sizes (pin head to dinner plate),...

Getting away from it all for a few days on foot is an Australian experience like no other but escaping the day-to-day for more than a few hours need not involve hefting a heavy load and making camp at day’s end. Guided and self-guided accommodated walking holidays are a less taxing, though more expensive, alternative to independent expeditions. Australian guided bushwalks...

Vast expanses of Australia are flat and much of the rest is saved from being likened to pancakes by uplifts that could be defined as mounds, hillocks and hill, but as monumental Australian mountains only in moments of exaggeration. And where the land does rise with any conviction, walkers find themselves not among peaks reaching the lofty heights of Asia, the...

The Finke River, in Australia’s Red Centre, is often cited as the world’s oldest river. The Murray–Darling River system – much in the news as irrigators, conservationists and townsfolk argue over the allocation of its precious flow – is one of the most extensive on the planet. And a campaign against the damming of Tasmania’s Gordon River below the Franklin for...

You don’t have to be a tree-hugging greenie to get a warm fuzzy feeling about Australian trees. And I don’t mean the warmth and fuzziness from insect bites and allergic reactions to our arboreal assets! It’s just that we have a wondrous diversity of native trees, many of which can be identified by their leaves. Trees as disparate as the...

Wow! Where to start about Australian wildflower wonders? The numbers are gobsmacking: 18,000 species of flowering plants across the country. They come in every imaginable shape, colour and size, from football-sized banksia cones to heath flowers smaller than a rice grain. They bloom in eucalypt forests and on alpine plains, transform coastal scrub and carpet the outback after rain. Some are common and others...

Bushfires in Australia are a part of life. Many native plants require fire, or at least intense heat, to germinate. Australian Aborigines used fire as a land management and hunting tool for millennia before European settlement and stories about the creation and use of fire are part of Indigenous Dreamings. A storyboard in Victoria’s Grampians National Park, gives the Aboriginal...

Properly fitting appropriate bushwalking footwear is the difference between enjoying a hike and vowing never to step out again. Uneven trails and pack-carrying can hammer ankles and good boot support is important on some walks (walking poles help too). Boots also protect against jutting rocks and sticks and MAY deflect a snake bite; they can, however, be hot in warm...

The biggest mistake bushwalkers make, says Sgt Ian Colless, Coordinator of the Blue Mountains (NSW) Police Rescue Unit, is inadequate planning and preparation. “They don’t take enough equipment, don’t know where they are going, and don’t have basic navigation skills.” Essentials for safe bushwalking. “Walkers should wear high visibility clothing,” he adds. Because hikers who wear blue, grey, black and similar hues are almost...

Regulars have been holidaying at Cape Conran Coastal Park, in east Gippsland, for years and newcomers rarely stop at one visit. It’s a perfect place to kick back with a book and ramble around rock pools. Or to expend more energy surfing and scuba diving. Tread the Dock Inlet Loop and you’ll quickly realise that it’s also a top bushwalking Victoria destination. Pink...

Cathedral Range, a 7km-long stand-alone ridge of sharply tilted sedimentary rock, two hours’ drive northeast of Melbourne, is a fabulous Victoria bushwalking destination – but not for beginners! It is exposed – baking hot at summer’s height, wet and cold in winter, with occasional snow – and the terrain rocky. Hiking here demands alertness and surefootedness. Your reward for these...

Travelling between coasts and even within Australian states and territories involves covering vast distances and people continue to tour Australia by car/4WD despite rising petrol costs and the falling price of airline tickets. Epic Australian hikes ensure walkers don’t feel left out. The daddy of them all is the Bicentennial National Trail (BNT), a multi-use track – horses, hikers and...

The Goldfields Track (GT) commemorates and celebrates Victoria’s 19th century Gold Rush, a mass migration of fortune seekers from around the world that increased the young colony’s population eight-fold to roughly half a million in just ten years. A shared mountain bike-walking trail, the 210km track links the historic cities of Ballarat and Bendigo, powerhouses of alluvial and deep reef mining respectively, passing through smaller towns, farmland and long-abandoned diggings along the...

Reaching just over 100km west from Apollo Bay to the Twelve Apostles, the step-on step-off long-distance Great Ocean Walk (GOW) is your bushwalking Victoria path to the dangerously beautiful Shipwreck Coast. The moderate 14.5km walk from Aire River to Johanna Beach, one of the GOW’s 14 legs, shows off fabulously diverse geology and plant life. . From the camping-parking area on the...

Summer temperatures soar in Hattah-Kulkyne National Park but frosty winter nights can thaw to crisp mornings heralding sunny afternoons perfect for walking. And the pick of the walks is the easy 9.5km Lake Mournpall Circuit, a bushwalking Victoria opportunity to step out in near-desert country. More than 200 bird species have been identified on and around the Hattah Lakes, a...

Why slog up Victoria’s highest mountain and immediately head down again when you can camp up top? Granted, spending a night on Mt Bogong (1986m), in Alpine National Park, involves walking beyond the summit to pitch a tent and carrying more than a day pack. When you can sleep among snow gums and dine under crystalline stars, however, doing it as...

To walk at Budj Bim National Park, in southwest Victoria, is to journey 10,000 years back in time. Back to when the earth shook and ruptured, disgorging clouds of ash and dust, and lava that snaked 50km towards the sea. A unique bushwalking Victoria experience. Eucalypt forest and water have long since camouflaged the site of one of the state’s...

Hiking from Mt Hotham to Falls Creek, two of Victoria’s major ski resorts, is becoming a bushwalking Victoria favourite. Why? Tree-less alpine high plains and majestic ridges in multiple shades of blue; white mountain gentians, yellow billy buttons and elegantly striped snow gums; butterflies, birds and feisty brumbies (wild horses). Taking in a leg of the long-distance Australian Alps Walking Track, in Alpine National...

Early explorers got it wrong when they described inland Australia as barren, sterile, monotonous, and lacking in colour. Granted, some of them died navigating the country’s interior, or turned back, or simply vanished. And some 150 years after their often epic journeys, more than 85% of Australians live within 50km of the coast. But the rest of the country, often...

Australian Aboriginal people, now also called First Australians, have occupied the Australian continent for at least 40,000 years – and probably considerably longer. Their creation mythologies – the Dreaming or Dreamtime – are colourful, evocative, sometimes complex and often ethical tales of ancestral beings who shaped mountains, valleys and waterways and populated the heavens with stars as they traversed a...