The Ways of the Bushwalker: On Foot in Australia

The Ways of the Bushwalker

MELISSA HARPER is a senior lecturer in Australian Studies and Cultural History at the University of Queensland. She has published widely on the history of walking in Australia, including the acclaimed first edition of The Ways of the Bushwalker. She is also the co-editor of Symbols of Australia and wrote the chapter about the billy.

A NewSouth book

Published by

NewSouth Publishing

University of New South Wales Press Ltd

University of New South Wales

Sydney NSW 2052

AUSTRALIA

newsouthpublishing.com

© Melissa Harper 2020

First published 2007

New edition 2020

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

ISBN9781742236674 (paperback)

9781742244945 (ebook)

9781742249483 (ePDF)

Internal design Josephine Pajor-Markus

Cover design Nada Backovic

Cover image Woman on the summit of Mount Kaputar, New South Wales, 1932 (© Fishwick, Herbert H., 1882–1957. / Sydney Morning Herald and The Age Photos, nla.obj-163065665)

Printer Griffin Press

All reasonable efforts were taken to obtain permission to use copyright material reproduced in this book, but in some cases copyright could not be traced. The author welcomes information in this regard.

Some quotes and descriptions reflect the prevalent attitude of the time and are now considered offensive.

This book is printed on paper using fibre supplied from plantation or sustainably managed forests.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface

Introduction

1Stepping out in Australia

2The arrival of the tourist walker

3Walking the colonial adventure

4The Bush, My Lover

5I walk, therefore I think

6From the open road to the bush track

7Happy feet: The interwar hiking craze

8Bushwalkers unite! The politics of organised walking

9Wild about wilderness

10Whose bush is it anyway?

11The cost of walking

Notes

Select bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Many people and organisations have helped bring this book to completion. I am especially grateful to Richard White, who provided ongoing enthusiasm, advice and support during the PhD and beyond, including casting a critical eye over new material. Many other scholars gave valuable feedback that informed the project, including Maureen Burns, Martin Crotty, Tom Griffiths, Ivor Indyk, Ewan Morris and Joanne Tompkins. A number of people provided valuable research assistance. Thank you to Meredith Lake, Claire McClisky, Paul Newman, Lila Oldmeadow and Olwen Pryke. Thanks also to Peter McLaren and Matthew Karpin for proofreading the first edition and to Fiona Sim for her work on this edition.

I am grateful to the staff at the National Library of Australia, the State libraries of New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania, the Archives Office of Tasmania, the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, and the Library of the National Museum for their assistance and knowledge. I would especially like to thank the bushwalking clubs who gave me access to their archives, most notably the Melbourne Women’s Walking Club, the Melbourne Walking Club and the Hobart Walking Club. A special thanks to those bushwalkers who shared their memories: Peter Allnut, Bill Bertram, Dot Butler, Enid Rigby, Don Smart, Jim Somerville, Harry Stephenson, Nancy Weaver and Harry Whaite.

This project received financial support from the Faculty of Arts at the University of Queensland in the form of a research grant. The Australian Academy of Humanities and the School of English, Media Studies and Art History at the University of Queensland provided publication subsidies. The Department of History at the University of Sydney gave very welcome financial and administrative support during my life as a PhD student. The School of Communication and Arts at the University of Queensland facilitated this new edition.

I am especially appreciative that UNSW Press took this project on board. John Elliot and Heather Cam proved to be very patient and supportive editors of the first edition. My heartfelt thanks go to Phillipa McGuinness at NewSouth for suggesting it was time for a new edition and for her patience, belief and enthusiasm along the way. I really wouldn’t have finished this without her. Sophia Oravecz has been a very supportive project editor.

My sincere thanks to my family, especially to my parents for introducing me to the bush and for much, much more. I am also indebted to the many friends who have provided encouragement and shared their own bushwalking stories. As always, my love and gratitude to Bill, Daniel and Matthew for their forbearance as writing took over yet another holiday and the opportunity to go walking ourselves.

Preface

This book was first published in 2007. Thirteen years is time enough for new developments but it would also be easy to think that not too much would have happened to impact on bushwalking, an ‘age-old’ sort of recreation. Certainly not much has changed regarding why people like to go bushwalking in the first place: to be in nature, for the physical activity, to ‘recharge’. But when it comes to who is going walking, where and how they are going and what is happening to the bush in the process, there are plenty of new tracks and pathways to explore.

The most obvious recent influence on bushwalking but also the hardest to assess in terms of ongoing impact are the devastating fires that swept through Australia in the summer of 2019—20. Indeed, the fires hit before summer arrived and they hit in places we didn’t expect. On 8 September Binna Burra Lodge, in Queensland’s world heritage—listed rainforest of Lamington National Park, was razed to the ground. The fire was one of more than fifty tearing through the state.

Binna Burra Lodge had been established in 1933, an early example of what we now think of as nature-based tourism. Over the years the Lodge and the national park became a firm favourite with families, honeymooners and bushwalkers. In articulating what was lost in the fire I was particularly struck by writer Mary-Rose MacColl’s ‘obituary for Binna Burra’ published in the Guardian.¹ MacColl had first visited Binna Burra as a ‘damaged teenager’ on a high school biology excursion, not expecting to enjoy it. She recalled:

I do not come from a hiking family — we never once visited a national park — but that first experience began for me a lifelong love affair with this national park in particular and national parks more generally. And what a gift it has been. Like a mother, the rainforest at Binna Burra takes you in its arms. In one way or another, I have been in those arms ever since.

MacColl wrote of the giant trees, the understorey, the birds, and the campground she preferred over the Lodge but she also noted that ‘I can’t hope to make you understand. You’d have to go there.’ I knew just what she meant. Binna Burra is a place that leaves its mark long after you return home.

When summer did arrive, things got worse. Fire tore through thousands of hectares of bush in almost every state. It felt as though the whole country was burning. Australians mourned for the thirty-four lives lost, and for those whose homes and livelihoods were damaged or destroyed. We mourned too for the bush, for the trees, the plant life, the landscapes, the ecosystems and for the animals (more than a billion) that did not survive.

As the fires raged and many grew frustrated by the unwillingness on the part of those in power to discuss the links with climate change, I was reminded of bushwalker-conservationist Myles Dunphy’s words in 1934 that Australia’s European history was an Age of Wastefulness. Fire, he said, was the number one enemy that hindered the national intellect (the second was the axe, the third production beyond demand). I suspected that if Dunphy were alive today he would see the fires as a symptom and an outcome of an even more powerful threat to the national intellect: climate denial and political inaction.

At the time of writing, many walking tracks in national parks remain closed; the future of some is uncertain. But the processes of recovery, of bushland regeneration and wildlife rehabilitation, have begun. Ironically, heavy rains have hampered the rebuild at Binna Burra Lodge. The fires are a powerful reminder of one of my central concerns: the meanings that we attach to the bush, of the places we make special and that can find their way into our very being. Many Australians have discovered both a sense of self and a sense of belonging through the seemingly simple but profoundly cultural act of walking in the bush.

This new edition provided the opportunity to make small changes to the original text and, of course, to make some corrections. It was an opportunity also to acknowledge some new work that intersects with and often expands the story I tell here. Bill Garner’s delightful Born in a Tent: How Camping Makes Us Australian (2013) provides something of a companion piece, with its argument that camping connects us to the land. An edited collection, Richard White and Caroline Ford’s Playing in the Bush (2012), fleshes out the history of recreation in NSW national parks. Kate Legge’s Kindred: A Cradle Mountain Love Story (2019), an account of the remarkable Gustav and Kate Weindorfer, the couple that did so much to open up Cradle Mountain to tourism, tells a story that gets far too short shrift here. And Glen Morrison’s two excellent books, Red Centre: Songlines and Fault Lines (2017) and Writing Home (2017), are especially valuable for their accounts of walking and writing in Central Australia.

In addition to these Australian texts there have also been histories of recreational walking elsewhere, including Sinclair McKay’s Ramble On: The Story of Our Love for Walking Britain (2012), Shaun Barnett and Chris McCauliffe’s Tramping: A New Zealand History (2014) and Silas Chamberlin’s On the Trail: A History of American Hiking (2016). These histories demonstrate many shared characteristics between bushwalking and walking in nature elsewhere: walking as a form of escape from the city, its predominantly white middle-class basis, and the importance of organised clubs to the broader development of recreational walking. But they also reveal differences and points of distinction — whether due to landscape, climate or government policy — the greater reliance on huts in New Zealand, the political underpinnings of rambling in Britain and the importance to hiking in the United States of the National Trails System Act of 1968.

My main focus in this new edition is to explore why in the twenty-first century governments across Australia have become so keen to invest in bushwalking tracks, particularly in the multi-day walk. Even just across the last five years there has been an enormous amount of energy and resources directed towards trail strategies, nature-based tourism plans and walking track management. There have also been feasibility studies for new walking tracks and a concerted program of track building and infrastructure. Alongside this development, governments are also making it easier for commercial interests to invest in walker and tourist infrastructure in national parks. In the process, the audience for bushwalking is expanding and bushwalking is being refashioned and made anew. On the one hand, the attention to the bushwalker is encouraging, but on the other, new track-making is also raising questions about who the bush is, or should be, for.

Introduction

Am I a bushwalker? This was a question I was often asked during the writing of this book. I would usually hesitate for a moment, trying to gauge if the person doing the asking expected that I should be. Would it somehow legitimise the project if I said yes? But I could only be truthful. ‘I like to go bushwalking’, I would say. ‘But I wouldn’t call myself a bushwalker.’ It was an attempt to have it both ways but I could see in the eyes of half my interrogators that I didn’t measure up, and while the other half seemed mildly relieved I’m sure they still thought I was a little peculiar.

When answering the question I was conscious that in the 1920s a particular group of walkers, mostly belonging to the organised walking movement, had developed a particular definition of what bushwalking, ‘real’ bushwalking, was and that many decades on that understanding continued to hold sway. A ‘real’ bushwalk meant getting off the beaten track and knowing how to find your own way, carrying all your own gear and camping out at least overnight. It was a walk in the wilderness. Most of my walks simply did not measure up. I kept to made tracks, I didn’t often camp and my skills with a map and compass were minimal. And if truth be told, sometimes I was as happy to walk a very short distance, find a peaceful spot to sit and just do nothing. In spite of all the bushwalking I had done, from aimless childhood wanders in bushland that was an extension of my backyard to more purposeful walks in country as far-flung as the Warrumbungles, Cradle Mountain, Mount Buffalo and Lamington National Park, I didn’t feel I could identify as a ‘real’ bushwalker.

The history of how this distinction came about, of how a particular understanding of bushwalking came to be privileged over all others, lies at the heart of this book. How bushwalkers have seen themselves, how they have been seen by others, and how the ways they have walked in and understood the bush have shaped Australian ideas about the land — these are the paths I traverse.

It also seemed to me that behind the question lay two assumptions. Firstly that only an enthusiast should write the history of bushwalking and secondly that only an enthusiast would actually choose to do so. But I always thought it was worth turning these ideas back on themselves to ask why they were such common reactions. The argument that only a ‘real’ bushwalker should tackle the subject is easily answered. Good history requires an objective eye. As someone who likes to walk but who isn’t a bushwalker I could take the role of the detached, though certainly not dispassionate, observer. I struggled more with the suggestion that tackling the subject was not worth doing. Why did my endeavour to treat bushwalking seriously generate raised eyebrows, derisive laughter and a glazing of the eyes? I put it down to two things: that despite its widespread appeal, bushwalking is an activity that perplexes some Australians and an uncertainty that bushwalking even had a history, or at least had a history that was worth telling.

Bushwalkers, particularly those walkers who also camped, faced ridicule and prejudice almost from the beginning. What was pleasurable about blistered feet, a sunburnt nose and aching limbs? Then there was the risk of snake bite and getting lost. Why swap the comforts of home to lug a heavy pack through difficult country and sleep on cold, hard ground? What was the point? Even the most dedicated of bushwalkers can admit that it seems absolutely silly’.¹ It is an attitude that, despite the contemporary popularity of bushwalking, still lingers. It is there, for instance, in a piece of promotional literature issued by Queensland National Parks in 2006 to encourage people to go bushwalking. After outlining the pleasures of walking — the chance to see delicate ferns and towering trees, to catch a glimpse of a yellow robin and to feel invigorated — the brochure feels the need to declare ‘And remember — bushwalking is fun!’² And it is there in the digs at bushwalking in the satirical news website the Beetoota Advocate.

Similarly, the history of bushwalking has had to struggle to find its feet. Indeed, historians of walking of all kinds have faced the challenge of having their subject taken seriously. Walking, whether as transport, as work or as leisure, can seem so everyday, so natural, so mundane that its cultural significance can very easily become invisible. As Rebecca Solnit writes, ‘the history of walking is an unwritten, secret history, whose fragments can be found in a thousand unemphatic passages in books, as well as in songs, streets, and almost everyone’s adventures’. Walking, because it is both ‘the most obvious and the most obscure thing in the world’, seems to resist history.³

When bushwalkers have been given serious attention it is usually because of their relationship to something else, as a minority niche in tourism or more usually as early heroes of the conservation movement.⁴ Until this book was first published in 2007 there had been no full-length attempt to treat bushwalking as a significant cultural activity in its own right. Given that other forms of leisure and other sorts of popular culture had only fairly recently begun to gain critical attention, this lack of interest was perhaps not so surprising. But when we consider that ‘the bush’ and the relationships of Australians to it had been a continuing preoccupation in Australian history, in art, film, literature and even in music, and that bushwalking had become the most popular way that urban non-Indigenous Australians have come to know the bush, that neglect appears peculiar.

There are challenges to writing a history of bushwalking. Most walking, as Solnit points out, is simply not written about. And yet when it comes to walking for pleasure, walking and writing have developed almost a natural fit. In the late eighteenth century William Wordsworth emerged as something of a patron saint of walkers, the spiritual guide to a long line of eminent writers and thinkers (William Hazlitt, Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson and John Muir) who stood up, put their best foot forward and spoke a word for walking. There has been good Australian bushwalking writing too but how many could quote from the works of John Le Gay Brereton, William Mogford Hamlet or Robert Croll? The literary endeavours of these walkers have largely been ignored, partly because it wasn’t the sort of thing that ‘real’ bushwalkers admired. It celebrated a humanised nature, rather than the wilderness. It’s true that the swagman, the romantic figure who tramped the country in search of work, is regarded with great affection in Australian culture but his lowly social status did little to enhance the appeal of walking in the bush. Australian literature saved its reverence for the horse.

Bushwalking clubs have created a substantial archive (magazines, trip reports, minutes and annual reports) and so have many club walkers through their diaries, journals and photographs. Indeed, in their attempt to define walking in specific ways, ‘real’ bushwalkers have developed a tenacious sense of their own historical mission. Some have been almost obsessive when it comes to positioning themselves as the inventors of a new recreation and the practitioners of the most authentic way of walking. And perhaps this is another reason for the historical neglect of bushwalking. Their claims to own the history won’t be easily challenged.

Initially, I too thought that my starting point would be with the organised walking movement of the 1920s, with perhaps a nod to the development of bush tourism in the late nineteenth century. It was in the 1890s that walking began to be consciously defined as a leisure activity. But the more I looked the more I found people were walking in the bush for pleasure long before the first club had ever been thought of, or before the first tourist track was ever laid. I realised that bushwalking can be traced back to 1788.

Indigenous walking practices are not considered in any detail here. While walking their country had intense ceremonial meaning for Aboriginal people, and they could thoroughly enjoy it, walking in the bush as recreation was a European concept.⁵ Indeed, it became a crucial marker of what Europeans confidently thought of as civilisation. That Aboriginal people walked when Europeans had wheels and horses was a stark demonstration of the gulf between the two cultures. To be able to ride and to choose to walk was a conspicuous declaration of the capacity of the leisured class to determine how to spend their time.

From the earliest days of settlement Europeans can be found rambling along riverbanks, climbing mountains and descending to valley floors. Some went on made pathways, others left them behind and headed cross-country. Some walked to see and be seen, others to escape. Most walked for only a few hours, others stayed out for several weeks. People walked to hunt, to collect flowers and seeds, to sketch and to bird watch, and some walked merely for the sake of walking. The loafer, the rambler, the stroller and the tramp, these are the walkers that ‘real’ bushwalkers have been unwilling to recognise as predecessors. These are the walkers who need to be rescued from history’s dustbin.

It is a vastly more difficult task to uncover the footsteps of these walkers than of those who belonged to clubs but there are routes that can be followed. Some wrote about their walks in diaries and in newspapers, and sketches and photographs sometimes provide a visual image of the nineteenth-century bushwalker. The landscape itself also provides evidence for the practice of walking. Tracks, lookouts, signposts, even ‘walker’s graffiti’ constitute stories in themselves. Still, for all the evidence, it must be recognised that many left little trace of the footpaths they traversed. And this means that the history can only ever be a partial one.

There is another factor that obscures such walking practices. While it is true that walking is often an ordinary act, it can also be an extraordinary one, whether because of the distance travelled, or the obstacles confronted and overcome. And these are the bushwalks that are most likely to be recorded and celebrated, overshadowing more leisurely kinds of walking.

This book is interested in the ways of all sorts of walkers, from the most casual to the most dedicated, the independent and the organised, and those who stride somewhere in between. In an effort to trace the long history of bushwalking I define walking broadly, as any walk for pleasure or recreation, and I also adopt a broad definition of the bush, one that encompasses country roads, suburban bushland, rural landscapes and wilderness. Who walked and where did they go? What pleasures did they seek and what pleasures did they find? What understandings did people bring to their walking and to the landscapes they walked in, what meanings did they take away and, just as crucially, what impact did they have? How did walkers influence broader attitudes about the significance of the bush in Australian culture?

Bushwalking takes place throughout Australia but it was in the south east (New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania), for reasons of geography, climate and population, that it had the strongest and earliest following, there that it was defined, its rituals developed and a philosophy most clearly articulated. Bushwalkers drew on imported modes of walking but they reshaped them in response to local conditions to develop a variety of distinctively Australian walking practices. I am particularly interested in teasing out the process whereby the various styles or ‘versions’ of walking became the activity known as bushwalking. But my concern with the development of walking before clubs is not to analyse that diversity only as it relates to the later development of organised walking. They deserve recognition as distinctive forms of walking in their own right.

I have tried to remove bushwalking from the realm of the trivial, though not necessarily from the realm of eccentricity. Quirkiness is a thread that runs through this history and bushwalkers themselves are often self-consciously and happily eccentric. At one level I simply wanted to trace the origins of bushwalking as a recreational activity. But I have tried to probe more deeply to show how bushwalking has given meaning and shape to individual lives, to explore the physical changes that bushwalking has exerted on the landscape and, more broadly, to tease out the ways that bushwalkers have championed and sought to protect and preserve Australian nature.

I aim to show that through bushwalking settler Australians have come to develop strong attachments with the natural environment, whether to particular tracks, types of landscape or to a more amorphous idea of the bush. For its adherents bushwalking has often engendered a sense of place and belonging. While those claims rest on notions of harmonious relationships with the environment, it is also the case that bushwalking draws on a fundamentally different understanding of the land than that of Australia’s Indigenous people. Bushwalking can be at once an expression of belonging and an activity and way of thinking that displaces or denies Indigenous connections to country.

Bushwalking may appear an ordinary subject but in what follows I hope to show that it is profoundly expressive, communicating both individual dreams and desires and cultural sensibilities and aspirations.

Stepping out in Australia

In May 1788 George B Worgan wrote to his brother Dick in England of his excursions into the bush surrounding the fledgling convict settlement at Port Jackson:

We sometimes, put a Bit of Salt Beef, or Pork, Bisket, a Bottle of O be joyful, in a Snapsack throw it over our Backs, take a Hatchet, a Brace of Pistols, and a Musket, and away we go, scouring the Woods, sometimes East, West, N.S. if Night overtakes us, we light up a rousing Fire, Cut Boughs & make up a Wig-Wam, open our Wallets, and eat as hearty of our Fare as You, of your Dainties, then lie down on a Bed, which tho’ not of Roses, yet we sleep as sound as You do, on down; I enjoy these little Rambles, and I think you would, however, I think it is hardly worth your while to come and try them.¹

Of all the early encounters with the bush that I read, this was one of the more surprising. I had certainly expected to find the new arrivals moving about the wooded country on foot. After all, Australia contained no native animals that could carry a human body and only six horses had landed with the First Fleet. Everyday life, natural curiosity and the business of colonisation simply demanded that settlers walk, rather than ride, beyond the confines of settlement and into the bush that surrounded it.

Walking was a form of work. Soldiers marched alongside convicts in chains as they pulled a plough through the obstinate soil. Going on foot was also the main type of transport when moving from one end of town to the other. And walking was a mode of discovery. Finding productive land, studying the flora and fauna, examining the fertility of the soil and the usefulness of the timber, and establishing a dialogue with the Aboriginal people, these and a myriad of other rather more mundane activities depended on pedestrianism.

Then there was thirty-year-old George Worgan, a surgeon, striding out for recreation. And in spite of the difficulties — he told Dick that the bush so tore his clothes that he would have to make a virtue of necessity and go naked — the tone of Worgan’s account was downright jovial, with little sense of the alienation that might be expected from one of the first Europeans to set foot in the strange new environment. Doesn’t conventional history tell us that the bush held little pleasure for the newcomers and that bushwalking is a twentieth-century phenomenon?

AFOOT AND LIGHTHEARTED

George Worgan suggests that walking as leisure had early beginnings in colonial Australia. His letters to Dick cover the first few months of his two-year stay and in that time Worgan undertook several ‘little rambles’ through the bush, or as he called it, ‘the Woods’. On 14 May 1788, with Captain John Hunter and First Lieutenant William Bradley, Worgan rowed 20 kilometres up Sydney Harbour and then ‘walked about two Miles [3 kilometres] up the Country’. On returning to the boat the trio ate cold kangaroo pie and plum pudding and washed it down with a bottle of wine. Worgan described it as a ‘most delightful excursion’. Ten days later they went to the South Head of Port Jackson and on the 28 May to the North.

Bradley and Hunter, naval officers of the First Fleet, ventured to the bush to survey Port Jackson and the area between Botany Bay and Broken Bay. Their accounts, written for public consumption, contain none of the jollity found in Worgan’s letters. Worgan may have been curious about the geography of the colony but he had no formal obligations to perform when he went bush. He went, he said, because he had ‘an Inclination to ramble’. At North Head, while Bradley and Hunter ‘astronomised’, Worgan, with his ‘man Friday’, took a shot at the birds. He also volunteered to join a search party for two of Hunter’s servants, not out of concern for the men’s welfare but because he had ‘a Mind for a ramble’. On this excursion Worgan delighted in the opportunity to stay overnight in the bush and to sing the evening away around a fire.

Worgan’s pleasures were broad-ranging. He had an eye for Romantic landscapes and he found aesthetic pleasure in Sydney’s bushland, admiring the regular spacing of the trees and the way the ground ‘ran in easy ascents and descents’. Taking note of the quality of the soil, the vegetation and his encounters with the Aboriginal people, Worgan also enjoyed the intellectual stimulation of being one of the first Europeans to record the novelty of the new environment. At the same time, the excursions offered an opportunity for leisure, a chance to remove himself from his official duties. Perhaps, given his occupation, Worgan enjoyed being in the open air. His pleasure was also physical, the challenge of rough terrain and the hunt, followed by the comforting warmth of an open fire at the end of the day. And the walks were social, providing an easy companionship with his fellow officers, as well as serving an emotional link with his brother and home. With pleasure so central to his experience, could George Worgan have been Australia’s first bushwalker?

Asking the question raises another. When does a walk in the bush become a bushwalk? Given the frequency and the necessity of walking in the bush, many early colonists — explorers and surveyors, naturalists and collectors, shepherds and overlanders — could quite literally be considered bushwalkers. Of course, so too could the original occupants. Long before the British arrived in Australia, Aboriginal people had crisscrossed the country on foot, forging a network of tracks and pathways. Walking was a basic means of survival and a form of transport. They travelled according to the seasons, going where food was at its most abundant and also to undertake trade with neighbouring groups. Aboriginal people could move quickly and lightly over harsh terrain, in desert country that was rocky underfoot and provided little shade and through forests, strewn with low-lying and scratchy scrub. Walking also served important cultural functions. Aboriginal people periodically journeyed across traditional lands, often travelling quite substantial distances, to connect with kin and country. Walking was a spiritual act.²

To define bushwalking so loosely (as any kind of walk in the bush) strips it of its historical specificity. What we today understand as bushwalking emerged in the late nineteenth century and the word itself was only invented in the 1920s. Its adherents drew a distinction between walking for the sake of walking and walking for another purpose; between walking as leisure and walking as work. For the devotee, the definition was even narrower than that. A ‘real’ bushwalk meant being completely self-sufficient and camping out. The bush was also narrowly defined; it was a wilderness, a landscape devoid of human settlement. To adhere to such a narrow understanding is to ignore the much longer history of recreational walking that took place in colonial Australia; rambles and excursions like Worgan’s that paved the way for the modern-day bushwalker. At the same time it needs to be acknowledged that for many of those who walked in the bush in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the markers between leisure and work were not so well defined. Bradley and Hunter, Worgan’s pedestrian companions, and those like them who seemingly walked for work, should not be too easily cast aside as non-bushwalkers. Pleasure and purpose were more closely intertwined and the ‘bush’ was a more fluid concept.

THE INHERITANCE

The British were inveterate walkers. By the late eighteenth century walking in the countryside had become a characteristically English form of leisure. The turn about the garden or park, the stroll down a country lane, the ramble across the fens, the moors and the fields: walking for pleasure had moved from being a pursuit of the aristocracy to become a recreation that was part of the fabric of everyday life for the upper middle class.³ Almost any Jane Austen novel will reveal that recreational walking served as a time for conversation and for solitude, for exercise and for fresh air. It could also be a moment to botanise, an alternative and an adjunct to hunting and a means to enjoy and to cultivate a taste for nature and for landscape.

In the 1780s walking also became a mode of pleasure travel. Poor roads and the possibility of being held up by highwaymen meant that until the late eighteenth century, travel in Britain was extremely difficult and often dangerous. To travel any real distance on foot carried at best, the mark of eccentricity, at worst the stigma of poverty or vagrancy. Shanks’s pony was for those who could not afford to ride. But this negative image of walking began to shift as growing numbers among the educated professional classes — intellectuals, clergymen, students and poets — took to the walking tour as one option in the broader phenomenon of picturesque travel. Carrying just a small satchel, the pedestrian tourist rambled across the countryside in search of sublime scenery and to experience rural ways, stopping the night at an inn. It was a phenomenon made possible by safer and smoother roads and improved transport, and made desirable, even fashionable, by the growing Romantic taste for wild landscapes.⁴

Romanticism ushered in new understandings of walking, idealising it as a means to fully experience self and nature. For Romantics, walking — whether in the form of a ramble, a stroll or a pedestrian tour — emerged as a time to think, to observe, to discuss, and to philosophise. Freed from the confines of city and society, walking in nature prompted an inner search for meaning and held out the promise of communion with God. This Romantic idealisation proved a crucial turning point in the history of walking. Walking developed a substantial literature — guidebooks and handbooks that provided information on routes and means, poetry that celebrated the joys of going on foot and the walking essay that ostensibly wrote of the freedom on offer but at the same time almost strangled it by laying down rules, sermonising on the hows and whys of walking.⁵

To what extent did the British enthusiasm for walking become part of the cultural baggage that settlers brought to Australia? Just as importantly, how did the environment impact on the nature of walking?

RAMBLING WAYS

Twenty-four-year-old Elizabeth Macarthur shared Worgan’s pleasure in walking. The wife of John Macarthur, an officer of the regiment, Elizabeth walked to botanise and to ‘fill up the vacancy of many a solitary day’. In 1791 she also made two short excursions on foot, one to the farm of Captain Nepean and another to a hill situated between Port Jackson and Botany Bay, from where she could ‘command a prospect of that famous spot’. Joseph Arnold, a surgeon and a keen naturalist, commented in his journal in 1810 that ‘my greatest diversion is to run among the woods and rocks’. An excursion to the Hawkesbury saw Arnold and his fellow officers rambling about in search of birds, insects and seeds. As much as they enjoyed these excursions, both Macarthur and Arnold wrote of the obstacles that littered the path to pleasure, and they did so with a good deal less humour than Worgan. Macarthur complained about the insufferable summer heat and the ‘very narrow and very incommodious’ native paths that brought her walks to a halt. Arnold also found the bush was often ‘impassable’ and the mosquitoes, ants, spiders and snakes, the bites of which ‘could bring almost instant death’, made it downright uncomfortable, and sometimes dangerous.⁶

Accounts of recreational rambling such as these are rare but one of the difficulties with knowing for certain just how widely walking was practised in the early years