MORE NEGLECTED WALKS

Hi James,

I couldn’t stop nodding my head as I read Mick Ripon’s recent piece (‘Great Neglected Walks’, Wild

# 190). In recent years I’ve seen the same pattern of neglect play out in the national parks surrounding Sydney, with considerable dismay.

Countless tracks and campgrounds that are part of the amazing natural heritage that surrounds us here in greater Sydney have been seemingly quietly abandoned. In Blue Mountains National Park, Perry’s Lookdown campground—a lovely spot on the edge of the escarpment over the Grose Valley—has been closed for years with no fanfare and no apparent plan to reopen it. The incredible Grose Valley itself, which lies at the heart of the area’s UNESCO heritage status, has had for years most of the trails heading into it off-limits “due to rockfalls and landslides”. The list goes on: Pulpit Rock? Shut for years. Many walks around Katoomba and Wentworth Falls? Long inaccessible. And plans to reopen them? None that I’ve heard of.

In Royal National Park, the story is the same. North Era campground, the only legal campground on the spectacular Coast Track, has been closed for years. Ditto large sections of the Coast Track itself. (Ed: Sublime Point, nearby in the Illawarra, too.)

Indeed, you can open the ‘current alerts’ webpage of almost any Sydney-area national park and be greeted with a list of closures as long as your arm. A list that often remains unchanged, year after year. This is not to say that I don’t respect that the National Parks & Wildlife Service has a hard job: Climate change has hammered the physical infrastructure of our national parks, and—as our politicians continue to approve gas and coal projects to support the spurious ‘clean energy transition’—will continue to do so. Nonetheless, if you have a lot on your plate, at some point, you just need to start eating.

And therein, as Mick Ripon writes, lies the rub, because funding and resources do appear to exist for projects of often-dubious value to the natural environment. A shiny new lookout at Govett’s Leap in the Blue Mountains has been built to give drive-in views over the Grose Valley that hikers can no longer access. Worse, plans to build a grotesque Scenic World-style theme park in Gardens of Stone National Park continue to march ahead.

The question is one of priorities. And when it comes to ensuring access to and preservation of our great wild spaces, it appears that successive NSW governments have had those priorities exactly backwards. Matthew Crompton

Sydney, NSW