There has been a need for a decent guidebook to the Snowy Mountains for many years. The old Geehi Club guidebook is now rather elderly and it has never been the easiest book to find walks in, so a new guidebook is welcome. The Daly's have improved their standards since the publication of their Victorian guide. The book design is still a bit amateurish and distinctively theirs, but it has been finessed so it no longer looks like a school essay shrunken to fit on an A5 page. It now features large photos, text boxes for side trips and stories which add background colour, and generally more information. While still fairly basic, the maps have been improved too. Overall it is a much more pleasant book to both browse and read. Most guidebooks have a few minor errors and this is no exception.

But what of the walk descriptions? Covering such a big area in detail would mean either a huge book or overly brief notes on each walk. The authors seem to have abandoned the quantity over quality approach evident in their Victorian guide and 51 walks are described in reasonable detail, averaging a couple of pages each. All but seven of the walks are day walks. Each walk description has a a difficulty rating, a distance, a time estimate and is accompanied by a gradient profile and a basic but easily read map. The walk notes tend to be a little briefer than most, but are quite adequate for the majority of walkers. Most of the better day walks in the area are covered, including a few interesting off track walks. The walks are fairly standard and there are no descriptions of interesting walks in remote and rarely visited areas, but this book aims to be a popular guide rather than a guide to difficult walks in out of the way places. The author's habitual strict adherence to park boundaries is less important here as the great majority of the appealing and popular walks in the area are inside parks. In addition to the usual table of contents, the book also includes a useful index to walks at the back.

Notes for the entire length of the Australian Alps Walking Track are a welcome bonus and occupy the last 100 pages of the book. While this section is relatively brief for a 670 km route and is not as detailed as the terrific book by Chapman and Siseman published in 2008, the Daly's give a good overview of the full walk. The description sticks to the bureaucratic definition of the route, but it does include information on side trips and alternative routes that are followed by most people who walk the full length of the track. --© David Sisson