Taking up almost half of the Australian Capital Territory, Namadgi National Park is one of Australia’s greatest natural wonders.
Namadgi National Park represents 46 per cent of the ACT, lying just 40 minutes southwest of Canberra City with more than 106,000 hectares of alpine, sub-alpine and mountain areas.
Since it was first declared a national park in 1984, this immensely diverse region has been a source of great inspiration for nature lovers, offering an incredible range of landscapes from grassy pains and snow gum woodlands to sub-alpine meadows and hidden fern gullies.
It’s often unexplored because visitors are unsure of what to do with something so wonderfully vast. To help, we’ve rounded up some of the top things to do in Namadgi National Park so you can make the most of your visit to this important, largely underappreciated, part of Australia’s geographically diverse east coast.
1. Search the national park for historic huts
The Orroral homestead was built in the 1860s and has stood the test of time. (Image: Michael Maconachie)
Several historic homesteads lie across Namadgi National Park, retelling the story of colonial pastoralists and early recreational skiers. Filled with character, these homes are not only great photo opportunities but they tell the story of this region with every crack and crevice.
Gudgenby, for example, is a timber slab hut built in 1845. After serving time in a shipping container, it’s been beautifully restored and reconstructed near the Namadgi National Park visitors’ centre and can be viewed anytime. Audio features retelling tales of early settlers help contextualise the park before you set off to explore.
You’ll also want to look for Orroral, the park’s oldest original homestead which was built in the 1860s and can be found near the Orroral campground.
2. Walk to Booroomba Rocks
One of Namadgi’s best walks, hiking to Booroomba Rocks affords spectacular views. (Image: Visit Canberra)
If you’ve only got time for one hiking trail in Namadgi National Park, take the short 2.5 Booroomba Rocks tail up to the park’s most cinematic section. The 40-minute walk will take you through tall forests up to sweeping granite cliffs surrounded by big, beautiful boulders.
With great views of the Brindabella Range, this is one of the most scenic walks in the state, starting from Booroomba Park Park with clear markings along the way.
The walk is best done in spring when the area is blanketed in beautiful multi-coloured wildflowers like yellow and orange peas, daisies and flax lilies. Keep an eye out for Canberra’s signature royal bluebells along some of the wetter areas of the trail.
3. See Australia’s tallest mountain range
Mount Tennent Trail is one of Canberra’s hardest walking trails. (Image: We Are Explorers for VisitCanberra)
Namadgi National Park is notable for many reasons, though mostly because it forms the northern tip of the Australian Alps. The various microclimates created by Australia’s tallest mountain range mean the park has an incredible diversity of environments, from steep slopes and open plateaus to dramatic alpine meadows strewn with natural beauty.
The best way to experience this end of the Australian Alps is by walking the 13.7-kilometre Mount Tennent Trail. Challenging as it may be, this is one of the most rewarding walks in Australia, taking you through many of these landscapes across five hours.
4. Pitch a tent
Spot kangaroos grazing on lush green grass. (Image: Visit Canberra)
Camping in Namadgi National Park is allowed at either of three designated campgrounds – Orroral, Mt Clear, or Honeysuckle. And each offers a remarkably different experience for those who want to really give themselves over to this cinematic slice of Australia.
Orroral Campgrounds is ideal for anyone wanting easy access to the picturesque Orroral Heritage Walking Track, which is around 6 kilometres one-way and should take around 2.5 hours to complete. Mt Clear is preferred for its bounty of historic huts nearby. Meanwhile, Honeysuckle is frequented by history buffs, keen to camp at the actual spot where the world’s first vision of the moon landing was transmitted.
If you don’t want to camp, hire out the historic Ready-Cut Cottage instead. The heritage cottage can sleep up to seven and is positioned in one of the most beautiful areas of the park near the Gudgenby River.
5. Look for Indigenous rock art
See ancient Aboriginal paintings at Yankee Hat rock art site. (Image: Tourism Australia)
There are plenty of things that make Namadgi National Park one of the most historically significant regions in Australia. Although the primary reason would be more than 200 recorded Aboriginal sites, not only covered with fascinating rock art but plenty of other details best showcased by Dhawura Tours on one of their custodian-led itineraries.
6. Spot the incredible flora and fauna
Only hundreds are left of the Critically Endangered Northern Corroboree Frogs (NCF) in the wild. (Image: Visit Canberra)
Namadgi National Park is also one of the most bountiful regions of on Australia’s east coast, rivalling Western Australia when it comes to beautiful, multi-coloured wildflowers. Search the park and you might even spot the reddish-purple Brindabella midge orchid, found nowhere else on Earth.
You’ll almost certainly bump into kangaroos and wallabies but Namadgi is home to 13 threatened species so wildlife encounters are pretty much a given. This also includes wombats, gliders, lyrebirds, wedge-tail eagles and the critically endangered Northern Corroboree Frog.
Chris Singh is an arts, travel and food journalist with 17 years of experience in digital media and 4 years of experience in SEO writing. He is the former travel editor of premium men's lifestyle title Boss Hunting and currently balances his role as Deputy Editor-At-Large of the AU review with freelance travel writing gigs at Australian Traveller, Luxury Escapes, Cruise & Travel and Sydney Travel Guide. Chris holds a Bachelor of Arts & Sciences (Sociology and Psychology) from the University of Sydney and once worked as a line dancer for steakhouse chain Lone Star (no, seriously). He's always got his finger on the pulse for good live music and delicious new restaurants, has a particular love of historic hotels and is starting to see the restorative value of the ever-present wellness industry. Although he is a born-and-bred Sydneysider, his favourite Australian cities are Hobart and Adelaide. Internationally, he can never get enough of big cities like Tokyo, New York and Chicago. If you're looking for him, he's either at a concert, on a plane or behind a laptop.
The Grampians just might be the ultimate antidote for the metropolis, writes one returning Aussie ready to disconnect from the modern world and reconnect to the Great outdoors.
There are no kangaroos back in Chicago: they’re all here in the Grampians/Gariwerd . In the heart of the Grampians National Park’s main gateway town, Halls Gap, pods of eastern greys are eating grass beside my parked rental car beneath the stars. Next morning, when I see the backyard of my rented villa on the edge of town for the first time, there are kangaroos feeding beside a slow-moving creek, lined with river red gums.
Five hundred metres up the road, 50 or so of them are eating by the side of the road in a paddock. I pull over to watch and spot three emus. Yellow-tailed black cockatoos fly overhead towards the tall green mountains just beyond town.
‘Kee-ow, keee-oww’… their calls fuse with the maniacal cackle of a kookaburra (or 10). Gawd, how I’ve missed the sound of them. Far above, a wedge-tailed eagle watches, and there you go: the ‘great birds of Australia’ trifecta, all half a kay from the town limits.
Exchanging city chaos for country calm
The park is renowned for its significant diversity of native fauna species. (Image: Visit Victoria/Robert Blackburn)
I’ve come to the Grampians to disconnect, but the bush offers a connection of its own. This isn’t just any bush, mind you. The Grampians National Park is iconic for many reasons, mostly for its striking sandstone mountains – five ridges run north to south, with abrupt, orange slopes which tumble right into Halls Gap – and for the fact there’s 20,000 years of traditional rock art. Across these mountains there are more than 200 recorded sites to see, created by the Djab Wurrung, Jardwadjali and Gunditjmara peoples. It’s just like our outback… but three hours from Melbourne.
I’ve come here for a chance at renewal after the chaos of my life in America’s third-largest city, Chicago, where I live for now, at the whim of a relative’s cancer journey. Flying into Melbourne’s airport, it only takes an hour’s drive to feel far away from any concept of suburbia. When I arrive in Halls Gap two hours later, the restaurant I’m eating at clears out entirely by 7:45pm; Chicago already feels a lifetime ago.
The trails and treasures of the Grampians
Grampians National Park /Gariwerd covers almost 2000 square kilometres. (Image: Ben Savage)
Though the national park covers almost 2000 square kilometres, its best-known landmarks are remarkably easy to access. From my carpark here, among the cockatoos and kangaroos on the fringe of Halls Gap, it only takes 60 seconds’ driving time before I’m winding my way up a steep road through rainforest, deep into the mountains.
Then it’s five minutes more to a carpark that serves as a trailhead for a hike to one of the park’s best vantage points, The Pinnacles . I walk for an hour or so, reacquainting myself with the smells and the sounds of the Aussie bush, before I reach it: a sheer cliff’s edge lookout 500 metres up above Halls Gap.
Overlooking the vast Grampians landscape from Hollow Mountain. (Image: Robert Blackburn)
There are hikes and there are lookouts and waterfalls all across this part of the park near town. Some are a short stroll from a carpark; others involve long, arduous hikes through forest. The longest is the Grampians Peaks Trail , Victoria’s newest and longest iconic walk, which runs 160 kilometres – the entire length of Grampians National Park.
Local activities operator Absolute Outdoors shows me glimpses of the trail. The company’s owner, Adrian Manikas, says it’s the best walk he’s done in Australia. He says he’s worked in national parks across the world, but this was the one he wanted to bring his children up in.
“There’s something about the Grampians,” he says, as he leads me up a path to where there’s wooden platforms for tents, beside a hut looking straight out across western Victoria from a kilometre up in the sky (these are part of the guided hiking options for the trail). “There are things out here that you won’t see anywhere else in Australia.” Last summer, 80 per cent of the park was damaged by bushfire, but Manikas shows me its regrowth, and tells me of the manic effort put in by volunteers from town – with firefighters from all over Australia – to help save Halls Gap.
Spot wildflowers. (Image: Visit Victoria)
We drive back down to Halls Gap at dusk to abseil down a mountain under the stars, a few minutes’ walk off the main road into town. We have headlamps, but a full moon is enough to light my way down. It takes blind faith to walk backwards down a mountain into a black void, though the upside is I can’t see the extent of my descent.
Grampians National Park at sunset. (Image: Wine Australian)
The stargazing is ruined by the moon, of course, but you should see how its glow lights up the orange of the sandstone, like in a theme park. When I’m done, I stand on a rocky plateau drinking hot chocolate and listening to the Aussie animals who prefer nighttime. I can see the streets of Halls Gap off in the distance on this Friday night. The restaurants may stay open until 8pm tonight.
What else is on offer in The Grampians?
Travelling along the Wimmera River in Dimboola. (Image: Chris McConville)
You’ll find all sorts of adventures out here – from rock climbing to canoeing to hiking – but there’s more to the Grampians than a couple of thousand square kilometres of trees and mountains. Halls Gap may be known to most people, but what of Pomonal, and Dimboola, and Horsham? Here in the shadow of those big sandstone mountains there are towns and communities most of us don’t know to visit.
And who knew that the Grampians is home to Victoria’s most underrated wine region ? My disconnection this morning comes not in a forest, but in the tasting rooms and winery restaurants of the district. Like Pomonal Estate, barely 10 minutes’ drive east of Halls Gap, where UK-born chef Dean Sibthorp prepares a locally caught barramundi with lentil, pumpkin and finger lime in a restaurant beside the vines at the base of the Grampians. Husband-and-wife team Pep and Adam Atchison tell me stories as they pour their prize wines (shiraz is the hero in these parts).
Dine in a restaurant beside vines at Pomonal Estate. (Image: Tourism Australia)
Three minutes’ drive back down the road, long-time mates Hadyn Black and Darcy Naunton run an eclectic cellar door out of a corrugated iron shed, near downtown Pomonal. The Christmas before last, half the houses in Pomonal burnt down in a bushfire, but these locals are a resilient lot.
The fires also didn’t stop the construction of the first art centre in Australia dedicated to environmental art in a nature-based precinct a little further down the road (that’s Wama – the National Centre for Environmental Arts), which opened in July. And some of the world’s oldest and rarest grape vines have survived 160 years at Best’s Wines, outside the heritage town of Great Western. There’s plantings here from the year 1868, and there’s wines stored in century-old barrels within 150-year-old tunnels beneath the tasting room. On the other side of town, Seppelt Wines’ roots go back to 1865. They’re both only a 30-minute drive from Halls Gap.
Great Western is a charming heritage town. (Image: Griffin Simm)
There’s more to explore yet; I drive through tiny historic towns that barely make the map. Still part of the Grampians, they’re as pretty as the mountains behind them: full of late 19th-century/early 20th-century post offices, government offices and bank buildings, converted now to all manner of bric-a-brac stores and cafes.
The Imaginarium is one, in quirky Dimboola, where I sleep in the manager’s residence of an old National Australia Bank after a gourmet dinner at the local golf club, run by noted chef and teacher, Cat Clarke – a pioneer of modern Indigenous Australian cooking. Just south, I spend an entire afternoon at a winery, Norton Estate Wines, set on rolling calico-coloured hills that make me think of Tuscany, chit-chatting with owners Chris and Sam Spence.
Being here takes me back two decades, when I lived here for a time. It had all seemed as foreign as if I’d driven to another planet back then (from Sydney/Warrane), but there seemed something inherently and immediately good about this place, like I’d lived here before.
And it’s the Australian small-town familiarity of the Grampians that offers me connection back to my own country. Even in the better-known Halls Gap, Liz from Kerrie’s Creations knows I like my lattes with soy milk and one sugar. And while I never do get the name of the lady at the local Ampol station, I sure know a lot about her life.
Kookaburras are one of some 230 bird species. (Image: Darren Donlen)
You can be a local here in a day; how good is that? In Chicago, I don’t even know who my neighbour is. Though each day at dusk – when the kangaroos gather outside my villa, and the kookaburras and the black cockatoos shout out loud before settling in to sleep – I prefer the quieter connection I get out there in the bush, beneath these orange mountains.
A traveller’s checklist
Staying there
Sleep beside the wildlife on the edge of Halls Gap at Serenity .
