THE Friends of the Great South West Walk are this week celebrating four decades of the magnificent 260km circuit through the south-west landscape.

President Jen Johns said it is a very special occasion for the community group, and particularly founding member Bill Golding, now in his 80s, who did much of the work to make the walk back in the 1980s.

To mark the occasion, local schools have collaborated for an exhibition at the Portland Library, with a range of works based on the walk, and the volunteers, which will be open from now until November 20, with an opening event on the Thursday.

Another event has also been organised for Saturday November 11, for those interested in going back to where the walk began.
“We’ll meet at the Cape Nelson lighthouse car park at 1.15pm, and will be walking out, after a Welcome to Country ceremony, to the historic cairns where the walk was opened in November 1983,” Ms Johns said.

“We’re going to have a little ceremony out there and a brief revisit of what happened at the opening, and building the walk before that, and hopefully we’ll hear from Bill as well.”

The walk covers a broad variety of south west landscapes– “a symphony in four movements” as Mr Golding famously calls it – through the stringybark forest in the Cobboboonee National Park, down to Nelson on the banks of the Glenelg River, across the vast beach at Discovery Bay, and around the spectacular capes and bays back around to the start/finish line in Portland.

Earlier in the year it was featured on ABC television program ‘Backroads’, which was followed by a swell of interest in the walk from outside the district.