March 15th, 2025Walks of the Central Highlands

With Eve Lamb

Three Lost Children Walk, Daylesford, 15 km (total)

Part B

Today is the day we shoulder our packs once again to complete the final remaining half of Daylesford’s famed Three Lost Children Walk.

We start where we left off last time, in Hogans Lane at Musk Vale surrounded by comfortable homes on acreage, and it’s a couple of ks of hiking on gravel, across the Ballan-Daylesford Road blacktop, and onwards, following unsealed Hogans Lane right to its end. Then it’s right into Foxs Lane, then left into Manna Gum Track.

Here, finally, we begin to leave the lifestyle acres, goats and alpacas behind, and things start to get a bit bushy.  For a start there’s a large male kangaroo eyeing us off and making me feel just a tad nervous, recalling tales of how these fellas, who have every right to feel miffed at people invading their ancestral home, have been known to eviscerate folk with a well placed claw hook.

Thankfully the big roo merely stares peaceably. And we walk on.

We’re equipped with a well thumbed copy of the Three Lost Children Walk brochure, readily available from the Daylesford Vistor Information Centre, and my copy of Walks, Tracks & Hikes of Victoria by Derrick Stone.

The bush is dry. The day is hot.  We reach the point where the trail descriptions indicate we should swing left into Paddock Track. But a brief moment of confusion arises. There’s a marker post facing us but its face is bare, displaying no signage of any kind.

My walking accomplice, Paddy H, ever observant, takes a look and discovers that the about-facing side of the post does display the now familiar stylized Three Lost Children trail marker, confirming that this is, indeed, where we turn left. And we’re on the right track.

“That’s why I bring you along,” I tell Paddy H who accepts this as his due. As we gain a bit of elevation there are fallen eucalypts on the forest floor, relics of the famous June storm from a few years back. We’re on a rough-hewn dirt vehicle track, surrounded by the forest now. After a while, we hear the  engine of a vehicle drawing closer.

A ute appears, trawling slowly behind us.

Glancing behind me, peering back at it,  I see the occupants are a friendly-looking couple.

Paddy H stops to say G’day to the bloke behind the wheel, beside whom the female passenger grins back at me. Or is that a look of empathy?

I wait beside the track while Paddy H and the bloke behind the wheel converse. And wait. And then wait a bit more.

Finally they’re done.

“Nice bloke,” surmises Paddy H as we start moving again. “He’s concerned about climate change and the impact it’s having on the forest.”

Pretty soon it becomes apparent that our printed walk guide has failed to mention just how gnarly, and flinty this walk is. Let’s just say there are some undulations here that could bring delight to hard core theme-park enthusiasts if you ran a light rail over them.

And once again I find myself thinking of those poor three lost little tackers whose tragic 1867 meandering this walk memorializes. This is no leisurely pleasure promenade. I marvel especially, for the hundredth time or so, at how their small-child legs could ever have carried them so far.

Sweating as we tackle the dusty undulations beneath the blazing February sun we reach the almost-evaporated and rather sad-looking Specimen Hill Dam. More of a bog hole today really. History records that it was near this spot that a young man called John Quinn had encountered the lost children and (unsuccessfully) attempted to turn the three doomed smalls back for home.

“Good advice,” I reflect aloud.

“Reminds me of the bullock driver in Joseph Furphy’s ‘Such Is Life’,” muses my walking companion, cryptically.

“I’ll have to read it.” We still have a fair way to go and I need to conserve energy.

The walk description is proving fairly straightforward to follow, though, and the trail well-marked. We reach, and cross Specimen Hill Road that wends its lonely way on through the Wombat State Forest bushland as far as the eye can see from this juncture.

And from here we trudge on along the dusty and evocatively named Cockatoo Track for about 3km to finally reach the Wombat Creek Dam.

The walk officially ends here at the Wombat Creek Picnic Area. The “dam” water storage reservoir is a decent little body of water. On a hot day like today just reaching it is a very welcome reward.

Note: The first part of this walk review appeared in the January 13, 2025 edition of The Local.