“The journey of a thousand miles begins with a conversion to kilometres.”
— Anon
In the month or so that it took for me to recover from hiking the Australian Alps Walking Track, two things came to me. The first was the rapid return of all the weight I’d lost. The second was the realisation that I wanted to do something like that again. I considered a lot of possible walks, from WA’s Bibbulmun, to SA’s Heysen, to a nascent proposal that carves its way from Newcastle to Queensland.
I even thought about doing the AAWT again; enough that I started planning. I’m not alone in this; two of the people I met on the trail either re-walked it or were planning to do so at the time of writing. I know some people who have walked it four times or more. It has that allure.
It wasn’t until a fellow walker on a CBC club hike suggested I might enjoy the challenging walking of Tasmania’s South Coast Track that the focus of my gaze, Sauron-like, turned southward.
240km off Wilson’s Prom is a windswept, glacially carved island half the size of England. Despite our best efforts, much of it is still densely, primordially forested and home to a range of unique and ridiculous flora and fauna. It’s left off maps nearly as often as New Zealand. Mainland Australians think about it on average once a year while sprawling hungover and bloated on the couch when the yacht race comes on the telly. For the most part, it’s a forgotten isle at the end of the world. And for the most part, that seems to be just how the locals like it.
When you start scrolling around the map, looking at Tasmania’s longer multiday hikes, the Tassie Traverse basically suggests itself. Stringing together the Penguin to Cradle Track and Overland gets you almost halfway down. The Port Davey and South Coast tracks slog their way through the bottom quarter. That just leaves about 30km of dirt road out to Scotts Peak Dam and the inconvenience of about a hundred kilometres of unforgiving, scrubby wilderness in the middle.
I’m far from being the first to puzzle these pieces together.1 I wasn’t even born when in 1972 the Federation of Tasmanian Bushwalking Clubs (now Bushwalking Tasmania) proposed a walk from the north coast of Tasmania through to the Port Davey area. That proposal resulted in the North West Walking Club building the Penguin to Cradle Track… and as far as I can tell, that was the end of it.
Not that that’s stopped anyone. In 2014 Shane Hutton ran from Woolnorth on the island’s north-west corner to Cockle Creek in fourteen days. Probably. He seems not to have finished writing up the trip [edit: I found a video he made of the run]. In 2018 the understatedly-named “Mad Belgian” Louis-Philippe Loncke did it in winter, carrying all his food from day one, over 52 days. His pack was 60kg at the outset.
In 2021 a group of Tasmanian park rangers under Brendan Moodie did a Ranger Relay to raise money for park rangers in Timor-Leste. They biked and kayaked parts of it. Of the rangers who participated, Darren Emmett did the whole thing.
In 2022 Becca Lunnon and friend Em (occasionally joined by others) walked it, and Becca fantastically blogged the experience. In 2024 Steph Brake and Lauren Thomas called it the Tassie Backbone and walked, kayaked and rode it to raise money for Movember.
For a mere $20k, Australian Walking Holidays have a package they call the Great Tasmanian Traverse, where they will shepherd you from Penguin to Derwent Bridge, then whisk you off to climb Frenchman’s Cap, raft the Franklin, and then by yacht and light aircraft get you down to Malaleuca to finish up along the South Coast Track. For that price they presumably carry your pack for you and give you a scented foot massage in your private yurt at the end of each day.
Bushwalk.com has a few threads of people pondering the walk, spaced across many years. How many people have done it with some variation or other linking Lake St Clair to Scotts Peak Dam is anybody’s guess. Dozens? More? Becca reckons she’s been contacted through her blog by up to a dozen people who were interested in doing it.
So… that’s my plan for February and part of March 2026. The base route is about 530km, and I’m conservatively budgeting forty days. I’ll balance Tasmania’s famously capricious weather against a huge heaping of potential side trips I fully intend to take advantage of, according to my mantra: “fuck it, when am I going to be here again?”. Weather permitting, I’m especially keen to peel off and tackle the Du Cane Range, Mount Anne (which conveniently circumvents about 12km of road walking) and the Western Arthurs A-K.
There’s a heap of organisation to do between now and then. There’s food to organise (and it needs to be able to pass Tasmania’s biosecurity border) and food drops to plan. There’s the fun of making and buying new gear with a particular trip in mind. There are bookings to make, and they all pivot upon the fulcrum of getting my desired Overland Track date when bookings open on July first and thousands of hikers descend upon the website like teenage girls on a Taylor Swift concert. Plus training in the lead-up. I’ve sneakily organised to lead seven CBC hikers from Thredbo to Tharwa along the AAWT in December. They think it’s for fun; secretly it’s a training hike for Tassie.
And not least, there’s acquainting myself with my proposed route. John Chapman has two excellent guidebooks that cover it (and much more); Cradle Mountain [etc], and Southwest Tasmania. The NWWC sell a booklet and maps for the Penguin-Cradle Track through Wildcare. Tasmap still sell paper topographic maps, at a very reasonable price (though only down to 1:50,000). I’ve also reached out to a number of people with on-the-ground experience; the above-mentioned Becca and some folks I know or am connected to through my bushwalking club, the CBC. Everybody’s been super friendly and keen to offer advice.
At this stage I’m feeling oddly confident about the whole thing.
- But I’m willing to bet I’ll be the first person to do it in a hammock. ↩︎
