John Clifton, is the President of the WA Family Bushwalkers Club. New members are welcome and further information about the club can be found at wafbc.org.au
There is something special about bushwalking as a family. You can share being taken to another place, where time itself seems to slow, your senses are enlivened and the suburban life seems a long, long way away. It’s a bit of a secret that members of the WA Family Bushwalkers Club (WAFBC) well understand.
With the hot summers a thing of the past for a while and cooler winter days here, there’s a great opportunity to get out and explore parts of Perth’s natural environment as a family or in family groups. There are many easy walking trails suited to families with young children as well as longer trails for older kids. There are several WAFBC favourite walks that I’d like to share that would be great to try on a weekend or in the School Holidays.
Right on Perth’s very doorstep is the Zamia Trail in Bold Park. This walk is very doable with young children (and prams with pneumatic tyres) and can be as short as three kilometres, with older kids able to tackle an extended distance by joining up with other trails. There is a good map available from the Bold Park website. We often start from the Tuart car park on Perry Lakes Drive. Walk north up the hill to the ridge then head south before looping back to the car park. This walking trail provides ocean views to Rottnest Island and City views across a bushland setting – we often picnic in Perry Lakes Reserve after a walk. There’s fantastic open woodland and often you will have the Reserve to yourself in the late afternoon.
For something different there is the Cape Peron Foreshore Park Walk Trail, which is a coastal walk of about three kilometres. On hotter days our Club has combined the walk with a swim after, and on a winter’s day you can be blown away and experience a wildness right in Perth with waves pounding the rocks. The trail starts from the car park and is well marked. For added interest you will also see historic World War II gun emplacements, built for defending Garden Island and Fremantle. There are many birds to be seen in this Park.
And now to the Hills. When my children were little we visited Fred Jacoby Park
(Mundaring Weir Road Mundaring) and did the Portagabra Track. It’s just one of the many tracks in the Perth Hills which really takes the family into the bush. The track is a loop covering about four kilometres and is an up and down. With smaller kids it will take a family about two and a half hours. I love this short walk as you will see granite boulders and outcrops, a bit of wandoo bushland and views to Mt Dale. Wandoo is a medium-sized tree with white or orange trunked that grows 10-25 metres tall and occurs mainly on eastern parts of the Darling Range. Wandoo bushland is quite open without thick undergrowth and great to walk through, even for little kids as well as adults. The track is well marked and you can step off it and explore if you wish. For the sake of the environment, on the other two walks I have mentioned you must stay on the track. I like to walk this track in the mornings, when you are likely to see kangaroos in the small valleys. If there has been some rain there may be streams running down the hill. Morning tea at the end is always a treat. The track goes over the Pipeline, which provides water to Kalgoorlie, prompting questions like where Kalgoorlie is and why people live there.
This year our club has families heading out from Perth for weekends and school holidays taking on south-west bushwalks in the Porongurups and on sections of WA’s 1000 kilometre Bibbulmun Track. The WAFBC has a great winter program of bushwalks, trail rides and overnight camps. In the June long weekend, the club ventured out of Perth to Dryandra National Park near Wandering and walked trails in the Wandoo forest.
Bushwalk
