Tyrone Thomas produced seven editions of this book over 25 years. In each edition he varied the walks and refined the format. The selection of walks covered has always been good, earlier editions featured quite a few challenging walks, but by the 1990’s, editions featured more shorter ‘family walks’. By the final edition, the walk descriptions had evolved to a fairly user friendly format, but one thing Thomas has never managed to get quite right was book design, later editions were less cluttered, but the maps, in particular, were never comfortable to read.

By now, even the seventh edition is getting a little dated, so the walk descriptions can’t be completely relied on. But Thomas’ books remain a wonderful source of ideas for hikes, throughout Australia.

Some of the maps are very confusing, particularly those of the walks around the Dandenongs. The small size of the book and the desire to have small scale maps means that sometimes it's impossible to tell which walk is which, and where they go. --© David Sisson