Mother’s Day Weekend 2019 – Day Three
It’s become a nice tradition in recent years to go away with my parents for the Mother’s Day Weekend (usually somewhere south or west) because the weather, ahead of the arrival of winter, is usually still pretty nice for walking and being outdoors.
Usually, anyway.
Last year when we were down in the ACT, we had one day where the conditions weren’t great, so we visited the Namadgi National Park Visitor’s Centre, where one of the guides there enthusiastically told mum and I, separately, about the Settler’s Track, that looped around past a number of old homesteads. We compared notes on the way out, and basically decided then and there that we’d come back to the ACT in a year’s time and do the walk.
Definitely worth the trip. From Tuggeranong, we headed out of the suburbs, into the Namadgi National Park. After a morning tea stop at the epic Hospital Hill Lookout we drove south on Boboyan Road (a well-maintained dirt road) to Brayshaw’s Hut, where the Settler’s Track starts.
If you’re interested in the history of Australia’s alpine areas, this is the walk for you. It takes in three different huts and a handful of other relics (outhouses, cattle yards and the like) on a loop of about 9km – although there’s a shorter 6km loop that misses Waterhole Hut. It’s an easy walk, mostly flat aside from a moderate hill at the beginning, through copses of snow gums, across wide-open valleys and at times on fire trails, exploring long-lost pieces of our country’s past along the way, with plenty of wildlife around, too.
Can’t recommend this walk enough!
