How My Wife & I Spent 20 Years Creating the Great South Coast Walk in NSW

On a cool autumn day in May 2004, my wife Pennie and I drew a line in the sand of the beach at Mallacoota and stepped over it. It was the symbolic end to a magnificent 660km walk along the South Coast of NSW – a journey through forest and heath, high sandstone ocean cliffs, Aboriginal heritage areas, long isolated beaches, river crossings, and challenging rock platforms.

The faces of two people who just created an iconic coastal walk

It was a journey now known as The Great South Coast Walk. The walk had been inspiring, but it was over and the journey to establish it as an iconic long-distance coastal walk had begun.

A Walk Into the Unknown

Our walk had started three months earlier when we stepped off the ferry at Bundeena on the southern edge of Sydney and took our first steps, leaving the urbanised skyline of Sydney behind and heading southwards into the wild coast and bushland beyond.

The symbolism did not escape us, as after working for 30 years, I’d recently retired and we felt that something significant was needed to mark the transition between our working lives and what would follow.

We swapped city life for mountain ranges

And rugged coastline

Living in Canberra, we knew sections of the coast, but not its entirety. We weren’t even sure how doable the walk would be. In fact, armed with a complete set of coastal 1:25000 topo maps and a brand new GPS, it proved relatively easy to connect a series of existing tracks, some well-known and named, others just local access routes.

The beaches themselves were great connectors, as were fire trails and forestry roads – we only had to walk 15 of the 660km alongside sealed roads and navigate 5km of trackless bush.

The walk proved not only doable, but immensely enjoyable. It took 40 days of walking as we wandered down the coast in a relatively leisurely fashion, staying at some places a bit longer and making the odd side trip on the way.

Social media hadn’t yet swamped the internet, so I taught myself the basics of web design and set up a website called ‘Photodiary of a Nomad’. It was a way of keeping family and friends informed of our adventure, and an adventure has to have a name.

Thus, the Great South Coast Walk came into being.

What surprised us later was that other people were also reading our diary and, more surprisingly, as time passed, people started to do part or all of the walk themselves.

And why wouldn’t they? The Great South Coast Walk is a superb adventure. What other walk traverses 12 national parks and six nature reserves?

For Pennie and myself, the main feature of the walk was the great variety of landscapes – we walked along long stretches of pristine beach, around small sheltered coves, and next to sheer coastal cliffs. We climbed over hills, headlands, and dune systems, picked our way over rock platforms, and passed by estuaries, lakes, rivers, and even urban landscapes.

You get a taste of varying terrain

Across 12 national parks

The diversity of the vegetation struck us daily – there were different types of eucalypt forest, temperate rainforest, tall and short heathland, wetlands, and open pastures.

The walk also had a rich geology: cliffs and rock platforms switched between smoothly sculpted sandstones to dark basalts, sharply ridged granite, conglomerates, and richly coloured siltstones.

And then there were the beaches – we became addicted to the zen of strolling slowly down the pale golden sand of an isolated beach to the mesmerising roar of the surf.

Numerous water-crossings added adventure to the zen. While a few had bridges, others required shallow or deeper wades and a few even required a short swim.

For those that were too wide or fast-flowing to cross safely, we were able to get local help, crossing by tinnie, zodiac, oyster punt, and motorboat on occasions.

We soon learnt that knowledge of the tides and sea conditions was critical for water-crossings or walking on rock platforms.

The rich birdlife was a particular delight, especially the sea eagle. Not a walking day went by that we didn’t see one of these magnificent birds soar overhead.

In fact, we adopted it as our totem for the walk ….. or did it adopt us? The sea eagle was such a presence that it seemed essential later to incorporate it into the walk logo.

The South Coast of NSW has a string of towns and villages along it, so for the most part we stayed in cabins at holiday parks, camping in a tent when we crossed the bigger national parks.

This choice of accommodation offered a more ‘European’ style of walking than other long distance walks in Australia.

A hot shower and cold beer at the end of a long walking day are not to be sneezed at. There’s simply not enough space for more detail, but, for those interested, a day-to-day description can be found at the Photodiary of a Nomad.

By the time we reached Mallacoota, the allure of trekking had seeped in.

Over the next eight years, our travels revolved around other international long-distance walks in the Andes, Himalayas, European Alps, and Canadian Rockies, as well as Australia’s iconic tracks. The Great South Coast Walk was as good or better than any of these.

Floating the Idea of a New Long-Distance Walk

An idea began to gel – if we could get the right people interested, it could be refined, promoted, and recognised for what it was – the best long-distance coastal walk in Australia and one of the best in the world.

The latter was reinforced when an American couple came out to do the walk after reading our Photodiary and included it in their list of the ‘Top Ten World Walks’. It showed that there was international interest. Create it and they will come … but how? It was time to float the concept.

Could this be one of the greatest walks in the world?

In 2012, I reached out to several bushwalking clubs in the region who enthusiastically embraced the concept. I also made my first contact with the government to the National Parks and Wildlife Service as the walk traversed 12 national parks.

Unfortunately, their response was more muted, citing prior strategies and committed budgets. Somewhat deflated, the idea lapsed and Pennie and I continued to walk the long trails of the world and home.

Every walk that we compared with The Great South Coast Walk just reinforced its superb qualities. It was time to take the campaign to a new level.

Time to Get Serious

The first step was to develop a dedicated walk website giving maps, stage descriptions, track files, and resources to enable people to do the walk themselves.

The Great South Coast Walk website was published in May 2016 and has been regularly updated and expanded since.

Many of the issues of our original walk have now been overcome – new tracks like the Kiama Coastal Track now bypass private land, where we rolled under electric fences in 2004, and fellow walkers have marked routes across the few areas where we did a bit of time-honoured bush-bashing.

As more people explored the region, they helped enhance frequented tracks

Track variants, such as parts of the new Murramarang South Coast Walk, and interesting low-tide routes have been added. In addition, quite a few walkers have contributed improvements to the route. It’d become a collective effort.

At the same time as developing the website, I produced a four-page flyer highlighting the economic and social benefits of a long-distance walk along the South Coast.

This was pitched at local government and business chambers that might support the walk. I’d been told that, if you wanted such organisations to back an idea, you had to get their attention in the first five minutes.

The flyer was designed to do that and the website to provide the expanded information needed.

Armed with that, it was back to contacting various LGAs, business chambers, land councils, and peak bodies, such as Bushwalking NSW and the National Parks Association, to raise awareness and, in some cases, get formal endorsement to advance the proposal.

One critical feature of the concept was that we were not trying to build a new track or take over existing named tracks, which have their own identity and history.

It still seemed that a one-person show was not likely to be taken seriously, so, in June 2017, I approached a number of people influential in the walking, tourism, and national parks sectors of the South Coast region and we formed the Great South Coast Walk steering committee.

Members used their local networks over the next few years to raise awareness amongst potential stakeholders by talking to bushwalking clubs and community groups through newspaper articles and podcasts, as well as lobbying state and local government members, businesses, and tourism agencies.

The walk was becoming more known and, following a suggestion that we need a Facebook page to further raise awareness, I set one up in April 2018.

It has provided a forum for updates on the progress of the walk’s concept, feedback on the route, and shared descriptions and photos of sections by recent walkers. Without any promotion, it’s climbed to over 2700 followers.

There’s genuine interest in the South Coast area – and it’s not hard to see why!

Movement at the Station

Getting general support was fine, but we were dealing with many different stakeholders – six shire councils and 12 land councils, as well as NSW National Parks and Forestry Services – and co-ordinating these was beyond the scope of a small, albeit enthusiastic, group of people.

For the walk concept to progress and be adopted, we needed an overarching body, preferably at the state level. The road to finding one eventually led to Destination NSW, the state tourism agency.

In February 2019, I had a game-changing meeting with representatives from Destination Sydney South and Surrounds (DSSS) and Destination Southern NSW (DSNSW). Not only did they embrace the Great South Coast Walk concept, they acted on it.

The beauty that we and many others see finally gets recognised

By June, DSSS and DSNSW had commissioned an Opportunity Analysis and produced a promotional brochure and video. This 136-page document, published in December, highlighted the economic and social benefits that could be brought to the South Coast region by the walk.

Unfortunately, the twin disasters of Covid and the 2020/21 bushfires halted progress for a while, but work has recently resumed, and DSSS commissioned a follow-up consultancy to further the idea.

In March 2023, a report on ‘A regional priority project to position NSW South Coast as Australia’s premier walking destination: Great South Coast Walks’ was completed.

It looked more broadly at developing the South Coast as a walking hub and took a three-pronged approach to promote day walks and shorter multi-day walks, with the 660km-long Great South Coast Walk as Australia’s iconic coastal walk.

Importantly, the various stakeholders had signed up for the project.

A Walk is Born

It’s been a long road since we first walked from Sydney to Mallacoota in 2004 and first floated the idea of an ‘official’ walk in 2012, but the project is now considered ‘investment ready’ by Destination NSW.

As bigger organisations and tourism and marketing gurus become actively involved, my role is shrinking to more that of observer.

That’s a bit sad, but it has now gone way beyond my skill set. The Great South Coast Walk has progressed beyond a mere concept – it exists and people are walking it, either straight through or in stages.

It’s probably time to pick up my backpack and head off onto more of the great walking tracks of the world with Pennie.

Who knows, maybe we’ll create another walk again one day