This website has a walk for every Canberra suburb
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Have you walked every walk you ever thought you could walk in Canberra?
If Lake Burley Griffin is starting to look a bit ‘blah’ the 100th time around, we don’t blame you. Canberra may be a big country town but sometimes it’s hard to find fun variations from our well-known walking and talking tracks.
Luckily one Canberran has done the hard work for you and found a walk for over 100 of Canberra’s suburbs.
Beginning weekly walks with friends in 2002, Rob Lundie has always enjoyed the social and physical aspect of walking.
After helping to form the Walking after Work on Wednesdays group, Rob and his friends soon found themselves doing the same popular walks two, three times over.
Then, in 2015 fellow walking friend Cathy Bryson suggested that the group walk through each of Canberra’s suburbs, beginning the Walking The Suburbs Of Canberra project.
“Originally the idea was to have a book but the further I got into it, the more I realised that walks can change,” says Rob. “Where you would walk across a reserve there might be a big building out there and new suburbs came into being like Whitlam and Denman Prospect.”
“If you put out a book it would almost immediately be out of date and also if I got some of the directions wrong or they weren’t as clear as they could be, it’s quite easy to make that correction online…I realised that just about everyone seems to go walking with an app on their phone.”
Building individual maps on Google of each walk and meticulously writing directions on the best way to go, it took Rob six years to bring the website to life.
Now alphabetically listing most of Canberra’s residential suburbs and the best walks to see their sights, Ron drew a boundary around the Capital to make sure walkers can enjoy the best of the bush landscape and the playgrounds hidden among it.
“All the residential suburbs will have playgrounds and reserves and quite often wetland but also shops where people can start and finish from,” explains Rob.
Included with each map is a small blurb about the suburb, sparked by his own curiosity of the history surrounding the names of Canberra’s streets and suburbs.
While he doesn’t have a favourite suburb to explore, Rob says there’s something good to be found all over town.
“There are things [I like] in every suburb…the suburbs vary from season to season. Like Downer is very good in Autumn.”
Suitable for all fitness levels, Rob plans to continue to add suburbs and start a new project developing and recording walks to the many memorials and monuments within Canberra such as the ACT Bushfire memorials located below Mount Stromlo and Mount Taylor.
He hopes that as the community continues to face the uncertainty of lockdown, they might be able to explore something new in their own backyard.
“There are quite a few books, websites and different walking groups that take on different walks and you know, lots of people walk up Mount Taylor….and all those standard ones.” says Rob.
“I think the one’s I’ve provided are a different type of walk that I suspect people haven’t really thought about but it’s amazing how beautiful the wetlands are and the playgrounds and the reserves once you get walking.”
“I’m just hoping people enjoy finding out more about Canberra in a way that doesn’t mean you have to drive around.”
Visit walkcanberra.com to find a walk in your suburb.
