Until early 2023, New South Wales had no Great Walks. Now it has 10 and will soon have 13. Queensland has 15 and Victoria has three multiday walks with “Great” in their names. Then there’s Great Walks of Australia, a collective of 13 luxury guided walks, not to be confused with the popular SBS television series Great Australian Walks.
So where did all this greatness come from?
What is a Great Walk?
Short answer: they come from across the ditch. New Zealand’s Department of Conservation (DOC) launched its world-first Great Walks program in 1992 to manage “overcrowding and ecological damage from indiscriminate camping and walking” on New Zealand’s eight most popular multiday walks such as the Milford, Kepler and Routeburn tracks, according to a DOC spokesperson.
There are now 11 Great Walks in New Zealand including the Tuatapere Hump Ridge Track, which opened in 2024 after a NZ$7.9m refurbishment, and a five-day canoe trail called the Whanganui Journey (so great, you can walk on water).
Great is not just a name in New Zealand, but an entire management system with online bookings, caps on walker numbers and affordable campsites and huts. It’s also a public access success story. Independent walkers now make up 93% of all bookings – the rest are guided trips and school groups – and the NZ Great Walks brand has become the gold standard for walking tracks worldwide.
Australia’s Great Walks
In Australia, the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) is the latest tourism body to catch on. NSW Great Walks, launched in 2023, is part marketing tool and part infrastructure project. Its aim is to create durable walking tracks for hikers of all levels, protect sensitive environments and encourage recreational walkers to spread out across the state – reducing overtourism while bringing more tourist dollars to regional NSW.
Ten of the 13 NSW Great Walks are open to the public, with NPWS saying the final three will open by mid-2027. Most are existing trails that have been upgraded – along with their campsites, huts and lookouts – and extended to create new routes. Some, such as the Gidjuum Gulganyi Walk in northern NSW (which opened this year), the Grand Cliff Top Walk in the Blue Mountains and the Snowies Alpine Walk, have been given new names to reflect the new routes.
In Queensland, the Great Walks trail gets muddier.
Until September, Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service listed only 10 Great Walks of Queensland, eight of which have “great” in their names, such as the Cooloola Great Walk. But Tourism and Events Queensland has always promoted 15 Great Walks – including the Thorsborne Trail, which wasn’t on the Parks and Wildlife Service’s original list despite being one of the state’s best-known walks and in a national park (Hinchinbrook Island national park).
While Victoria has no official list of Great Walks, it does have the spectacular coastal Great Ocean Walk, the Great South West Walk (officially opened way back in 1983) and the Great Dividing Trail, named after the Great Dividing Range it traverses.
Nor are there any Great Walks in Western Australia, South Australia or the Northern Territory, despite these states having plenty of great walking tracks.
Tasmania is in a league of its own
Then there’s Tasmania. Despite its reputation as a walking holiday destination, the island state doesn’t officially have any Great Walks, just an impressive list of 60 Great Short (day) Walks.
But six of Tasmania’s classic multiday walks are part of Great Walks of Australia (GWOA), a program launched by Tourism Australia in 2013 to “grow the country’s profile as a world-class walking destination”, says Genevieve Matthews, Great Walks of Australia’s executive officer.
Just to confuse matters, four of those Tasmanian walks are also represented in The Great Walks of Tasmania, a different venture set up by a group of walking companies.
How great are these Great Walks?
Confusion aside, the Great Walks brand, in all forms, seems to be encouraging many of us to walk more. In NSW there has been a 20% increase in bushwalkers on trails that have become Great Walks within the past two years, according to NSW NPWS. And when the Flinders Island Walk in Tasmania joined Great Walks of Australia in 2024, its tour operator, Tasmanian Expeditions, reported a 72% increase in bookings on the previous year.
“Our guests often treat the Great Walks of Australia as a curated shortlist of Australia’s most iconic walking experiences,” says Phil Wyndham, general manager of Australian Walking Holidays and Tasmanian Expeditions, which both operate GWOA walks. “We hear time and again that it gives people the confidence to book, especially if they’re trying multiday walks for the first time.”
Some experienced walkers aren’t sold on the Great Walks label, however. Hobart-based hiker Andrew Bain says Tasmanians tend to create their own lists of non-Great Walks such as Frenchmans Cap and Lake Rhona – or tackle more challenging goals such as the 158 Abels, the Tasmanian mountains higher than 1,100 metres.
And for Melburnian long-distance hiker Laura Waters, the author of two hiking books, New Zealand’s Great Walks remain the benchmark. “The Great Walks badge has been attached to so many random walks in Australia it has become a bit meaningless,” she says.
“In New Zealand it represents a clear and consistent offering. You know you’re going to get an epic, scenic walk with certain track standards, rangers and hut facilities. I’ve personally ticked off seven of New Zealand’s Great Walks, not in a peak-bagging way, but because I know each one is going to be a walk that’s really worth doing.”
