By Ian McFarland

IN 1840, a Polish-born scientist named Paweł Edmund Strzelecki pushed south from New South Wales, through dense, unmapped forest, guided at every turn by Aboriginal knowledge, until he reached the shores of what is now known as Western Port.

​His expedition was one of the earliest European journeys through this part of Gippsland, and it left behind a name that still marks the ranges, a walking track, and a story that has rarely been told in full.

Almost two centuries later, a proposal has gone to Bass Coast and South Gippsland authorities to investigate a Strzelecki Way Heritage Walking Trail, a route retracing elements of that 1840 journey and linking Western Port with the Strzelecki Ranges. It's a modest idea on paper: a trail, some signage, a handful of interpretive stops.

Its authors are quick to say the trail isn't simply about celebrating one explorer's achievement. It's about telling a fuller, more honest story of this landscape — one that begins long before Strzelecki ever set foot in it.

Strzelecki wasn't the only explorer whose name is stitched into this landscape. Angus McMillan, the Scottish pastoralist often credited with “opening up” Gippsland, worked the same frontier only a few years later — and his legacy could hardly be more different.

Where Strzelecki's journals describe genuine curiosity about Aboriginal culture and his dependence on Aboriginal guides to survive the terrain, McMillan's name is now tied to some of the darkest chapters of Gippsland's colonial history. Historians link him to the violent dispossession of the Gunaikurnai people and to frontier massacres, including the killings remembered at Warrigal Creek. That history is significant enough that places once named in his honour — including the former McMillan federal electorate and the McMillan Strait — have since been renamed.

Strzelecki was no saint by modern standards; like most Europeans of his era, he believed in the inevitability of European “progress”. But there is no evidence he took part in, or encouraged, violence against Aboriginal people — and his writings record language, customs and land management with genuine interest rather than contempt. Later in life he grew openly critical of how settlement was treating Indigenous communities.

That contrast — an explorer who listened, against one remembered for violence — gives the proposed trail a rare opening: not to sanitise history, but to tell it properly, using Strzelecki's comparatively less destructive path as a doorway into the harder story of what followed.

Organisers are careful to describe the Strzelecki Way as more than an “explorer trail”. Long before 1840, the country it would traverse was already known intimately — named, cared for and travelled by Aboriginal people for tens of thousands of years. Strzelecki's expedition depended entirely on that knowledge simply to survive.

The proposal calls for interpretation along the trail to be co-designed with Traditional Owners, not developed about them from a distance. Traditional Owner groups would decide which stories are shared, how they're told, and which sites are appropriate for visitors to encounter at all.

To the west, branches could link the Lang Lang, Jam Jerrup and Grantville foreshores with a future Western Port National Park. To the north, the trail could connect with the Great Southern Rail Trail, opening a corridor through Nyora, Loch, Korumburra, Leongatha and Koonwarra to Foster and Port Welshpool. In Korumburra, walkers could follow a dedicated “Strzelecki Discovery Walk” past the town's own monument to the explorer and the Coal Creek heritage precinct.
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Further east, the vision reaches the Grand Strzelecki Track, already a 100-kilometre network linking Morwell and Tarra-Bulga National Parks through cool temperate rainforest. Stitched together, the network could eventually run from Western Port's coastline to Tarra-Bulga's rainforest gullies, a coast-to-forest journey through some of Gippsland's richest natural and cultural landscapes.

​Longer term, supporters believe the trail corridor could also support landscape-scale reforestation already being discussed for the region, improving bushfire resilience, restoring wildlife habitat and offsetting carbon, through voluntary land acquisition rather than compulsion.
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For now, though, the focus stays firmly on the walking trail itself: a modest, tangible first step that could, over time, grow into something far larger. As one supporter put it: “You have to start somewhere. A trail is something everyone can walk, long before they can picture everything it might one day connect to.”

Ian McFarland is one of those proposing a Strzelecki Way Heritage Walking Trail.