History and First Nations stories
A bicentenary gift, walked for a generation.
The Great North Walk was created in 1988 to mark the Bicentenary, linking the colony’s founding harbour with the Hunter through country that had been travelled for thousands of years before the roads it commemorates. The rock engravings, middens and shelters along the sandstone valleys carry that older story, and the walk is best understood as passing through it rather than starting at the obelisk.
National registration honours both journeys, the colonial measuring point and the Aboriginal country the route crosses, and tells them together.
Stories connected to Country are told only with, and as guided by, their custodians, under the First Nations custodianship protocols at the centre of the register’s governance.