Hahndorf's pioneer women walked 35 kilometres overnight to the Adelaide markets, baskets on their backs. Walking their trail today is the Hills' most moving history lesson.
Picture the departure. It is midnight in the winter of 1839, and at the edge of a one-year-old village in the Adelaide Hills, women and teenage girls are loading themselves like pack animals: baskets of vegetables, butter, eggs — some carried on the back, some slung from wooden yokes across the shoulders. Ahead of them lies a walk of roughly 35 kilometres, down out of the ranges in the dark, to be at the Adelaide markets by morning.
This was not a one-off heroism. It was a delivery schedule. Hahndorf's Lutheran settlers had arrived with nothing but debts and farming skill, and while the men worked the land, the village's women turned its produce into income the only way available — on foot. They did it for nearly twenty years, into the late 1850s. The return trip carried tea, sugar, needles and thread, and famously two bricks per woman, hauled uphill for the building of their church.
Rediscovering the route
The path they used was largely forgotten until 1980, when the Hahndorf and Burnside branches of the National Trust, working with Walking SA, traced and waymarked it as the Pioneer Women's Trail. The modern route runs about 26 kilometres from Hahndorf to Beaumont in the Adelaide foothills, following country lanes, bush tracks and road reserves over the spine of the ranges.
Walking it end-to-end is a solid day — most people sample it instead. The gentlest introduction is the first leg from Hahndorf to Verdun, an hour or so of creek flats and farmland with a conveniently placed pub at the turnaround. The middle sections climb through surprisingly wild country around Bridgewater and Mount George, where it is easy, for a few minutes at a time, to see exactly what they saw: stringybarks, fog, the track rising ahead in the dark.
What the trail teaches
The trail reframes everything else you do in Hahndorf. The pretty main street, the strawberry fields at Beerenberg — sixth-generation descendants of those same families — and the gracious studio Hans Heysen built at The Cedars all stand on foundations carried up that hill two bricks at a time. An annual community walk retraces the route each year, but the track is there for anyone, any day, free.
Start with our story on Australia's oldest German town, then go and walk a piece of it. Take something to carry. It feels right.
