Australia has quietly become the stage for a remarkable wave of long-distance walkers, with six separate trekkers either finishing or grinding through continent-spanning journeys this year. Their gear choices alone tell a story: wheeled carts, wheelbarrows, and in one case a leopard-print onesie.
Musician Britt Franzmann, aka Birdgirl, walked 3,125km from Perth to Melbourne in just over four months, pushing her belongings — including her guitar — in a cart that repeatedly broke down. Inspired by Robyn Davidson's Tracks, she set strict rules: no support vehicles, no shortcuts. She finished with a homecoming gig at Melbourne's Northcote Social Club.
Mark Gresser went bigger: 6,023km from Steep Point in Western Australia to Cape Byron in New South Wales, over 331 days, 223 of them actually walking. He averaged about 35km a day in heat that hit 50°C, pulling a 1.9m cart loaded with up to 200kg of supplies. He dehydrated hundreds of meals beforehand and mailed them to resupply points. When the Simpson Desert's dunes defeated his cart, he rerouted — but still spent 18 days dragging it through Strzelecki Desert sand, unpacking and shuttling his load over dunes too steep to roll.
Japan's Kentaro Jin, the self-styled Strange Catman, took two and a half years to walk 6,400km from Carnarvon to the Sydney Opera House, arriving in March 2026 in his leopard-print onesie, pushing a wheelbarrow — a tool he knew from six years in construction. He began the trek after a breakup left him reeling, walking 10-hour days and sleeping roadside between towns. He has since extended the trip, now cycling up Australia's east coast with the wheelbarrow in tow.
Brisbane's Simon Harvey, Captain Australia, closed the loop on a 15,000km circuit of mainland Australia in April, nearly three years after leaving King George Square. After COVID wrecked his business and he battled cancer, he called the walk his "vehicle for healing," supported by strangers who offered boots, meals and conversation. Meanwhile, One Step Max is walking with deliberately no plan and no finish line, wheelbarrow in hand, on a mission to log 700,000km for suicide awareness — roughly 18 equators — with about 155,000km already covered. And 50-year-old Steve Roberts set out in September from his hometown of Coonamble on a 4,200km walk to Perth, aiming to prove that turning 50 isn't the end of the story.
For travellers, these treks are a reminder that Australia's emptiness is the attraction: the Nullarbor, the Channel Country, the Murray River towns and the red-centre roads offer a scale of solitude almost nowhere else offers. You don't need to walk 6,000km — but the routes these walkers traced, from Perth to Melbourne or Brisbane and back, are packed with outback pubs, river towns and road-trip detours worth a slower kind of holiday.
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