If hard bodies and fast modes of transport seem strangely outdated, you’re not wrong. Walking is the new soft pants of travel, and watching others walk is almost as good as doing it ourselves.
Example one. A grumpy old man decides to walk the Camino de Santiago in Spain. It’s hardly high concept, yet Bill Bennett’s film The Way, My Way, based on his 2013 memoir about walking the 800km pilgrimage, is one of this year’s Australian box office success stories.
This humble, rather slow-sounding narrative plugs into the global popularity of walking the Camino, the increasingly famous foot-trek that has become a spiritual and tourist experience for around six million people a year.
Example two. Over on television, Great Australian Walks with Julia Zemiro was a hit for SBS when it premiered in August 2023, becoming one of the network’s highest rating shows and a critical success to boot. Who would have guessed that walking around would make good TV? Now SBS has announced Great Australian Walks is back with a second series, premiering on 22 August.
The opposite of a glossy travel show like Getaway, the first series of Great Australian Walks featured no jet flights or luxury hotels, just an almost daggy mix of history, travelogue and gentle humour, showing the warm-hearted Zemiro doing a series of ten one-day walks around picturesque but hardly exotic locations. These included Sydney’s Bondi to Clovelly oceanside walk,Victoria’s Point Nepean and Hobart’s Mt Wellington.
In each episode, the comedian and actor talked to a well-known face from the area, touching on some difficult political and Indigenous history – but always with gentleness and her wry, signature humour.
Read: The Way, My Way hits $2m at Australian and NZ box office
More Great Australian Walks
The ten new episodes of Great Australian Walks will expand into new parts of Australia: Margaret River, Rottnest Island, Newcastle, St Kilda and Bruny Island, Uluru, Mt Kosciuszko, the rolling vineyards along the Riesling Trail and historic Beechworth.
Two new hosts will also join Zemiro this time: comedian Susie Youssef (Deadloch, The Project) and inaugural Alone Australia winner Gina Chick, whose star has risen meteorically since she first appeared as a contestant on the survival reality show, with her wide grin, woo-woo philosophy and possum-fur cloak. As the winner, it turned out that Chick actually was a wise woman. She knew what she was doing out there in the wild.
Chick is also a fan of the wide horizon as an antidote to anxiety. As she says, in her IG video below: ‘It’s hard to feel like the most important thing in the universe when we fall into a horizon. That infinite edge helps give our lives context and connect us to the web of life.’
Quoted in the SBS media release, Chick says of her first hosting gig: ‘In a culture where humans are increasingly losing connection with nature, and our world is speeding up, this show is the perfect antidote, reminding us to slow down, look up and allow a horizon to do what horizons do, which is give us a deeper sense of our place in the interconnected web of life. Or just go for a wander with some mates and let our incredible country reveal more spectacular secrets, many of which are hiding in plain sight.’
Great Australian Walks – Series 2 is produced by Mint Pictures with Julia Zemiro as Executive Producer. The guests joining the hosts this season will include ARIA award-winning musician and activist John Butler, broadcaster and writer Benjamin Law, comedians Geraldine Hickey and Rachel Berger, First Nations singer-songwriter Kutcha Edwards, award-winning authors Craig Silvey and Katherine Kovacic, and Olympic legend Kurt Fearnley.
The series also promises nostalgic archival footage of key moments from Australia’s national history, from Stuart Diver being pulled from the 1997 Thredbo landslide disaster, to the historic hand-back of Uluru in 1985, and the infamous Ned Kelly shootout – dubbed the nation’s first paparazzi photo.
Announcing the show, Zemiro said: ‘I have been overwhelmed by the enthusiastic and passionate response to Series 1 of Great Australian Walks from viewers. There is a real hunger for connection to nature and the solace that walking gives.’
Walking is the new mindfulness
Lest you’re worried that virtual walking (ie watching others walk) might replace the actual activity, Great Australian Walks is intended to inspire viewers to get out there and do the thing, with each episode featuring a separate and achievable walk that’s graded easy-moderate.
And in keeping with the easygoing tempo of the show, the Bruny Island episode shows host Gina Chick using an electric bike to tackle steep hills. With walking, there are no rules. No macho nonsense. No striving to reach Mount Everest amidst the frozen bodies of the fallen.
Many of us rediscovered the pleasures of walking during Covid lockdowns, where confinement forced us to find novelty and small escapes in the backstreets and alleyways of our permitted travel radiuses. And now that we’re allowed to travel again, amidst the unfolding climate crisis, air travel feels like a guilty pleasure – one that we might still indulge in (I confess I’m planning a Fiji getaway right now) but one that feels less right than walking, closer to home.
Great Australian Walks – Series 2 premieres 7.30pm Thursday 22 August on SBS and SBS On Demand. The ten-part series continues weekly.
