About
What this is, and what it will not do
Public Trails computes whether the public may lawfully reach a wild place, using only records that governments publish: cadastral parcels and their tenure, protected-area estate, road reserves, watercourses, published tracks and the statutes that govern them.
Every page links here rather than repeating this. The definitions below are the same on every page of the site, so they are written down once. The two figures that are computed rather than read off a register have a page each: how the waterfall rule works and how long a walk takes.
On-ground signage and temporary closures override this page. Always.
Where this covers, and where it stops 18 council areas · 1,856 places published
Coverage is built one council area at a time, because that is the unit the state registers publish their boundaries, their estate and their tracks in. 18 of them are published, in NSW and QLD, holding 1,856 places between them. The map on the front page draws exactly that ground, which is the shortest honest answer to what is covered.
An area is published whole or not at all. Within one, every place the names register lists as a kind this site looks for is enumerated and routed — refusals included — so an area is a complete answer over its own ground rather than the parts of it that worked out.
Outside those areas this site has nothing to say, and says nothing. A place absent from here is a place outside the coverage above, and never a place found to be unreachable. Those two read alike and are opposite claims, which is why coverage is drawn as ground rather than described.
Every claim carries a grade
Grades never improve by being combined. A chain of facts is published at the grade of its weakest link, which is why a single inferred leg holds an entire route at statutory inference.
Four verdicts, two of which publish nothing
- Lawful, nothing to flag Every leg is ground the public may cross, and nothing about the chain needs a warning. Whether a built track runs along it is said separately.
- Lawful, with caveats A lawful chain with at least one thing about it that has to be said first.
- Unconfirmed No lawful chain could be established from the public record. No route published.
- No lawful route Enclosed by land the public has no right to cross. No route published.
Unconfirmed and No lawful route are results, not failures. They are published as their own pages with the reason stated, and they carry no legs, no distances and no line on a map. A refusal that leaked half a route would read as half a permission.
What this site will never do
Never place a pin somebody dropped on a map
Every fact here traces to a government layer or to a statute, and each one says which. OpenStreetMap may populate one thing only — a community name, quarantined and labelled as such. Community records never enter a tenure decision, a route, or the map tiles.
Never invent lawfulness
Where tenure cannot be confirmed from the public record, the page says so rather than endorsing the route or quietly dropping it. Where no lawful corridor exists at all, none is published: the refusal is the answer.
Never rate safety
Lawful is not safe. An access verdict is about tenure. Cliffs, flash flooding, cold water and unmanaged terrain do not appear in a land record, and nothing here should be read as an assessment of them.
Never pretend the records are current
Every page is built from dated snapshots, and those dates are published on the sources and licences page. One thing is read live rather than from a snapshot: where a land manager publishes its alerts as data, the alerts panel refreshes against that feed and says when it last confirmed them, falling back to the snapshot when the feed cannot be reached — because the failure that matters there is a closure notice replaced by silence.
Everything else, tenure included, is as old as its snapshot, and a closure published anywhere that offers no feed is invisible here. Which is why on-ground signage overrides this site without exception.
Never republish a restricted record
Aboriginal cultural heritage site locations are restricted by law to protect the sites. This project holds registered party boundaries only, and will never republish site locations, in any form, at any zoom.
Who runs this, and how it is paid for
Who publishes it
Public Trails is built and operated by National Digital, an Australian software company on the Gold Coast, which also builds other free civic tools. The verdicts, the routes and the reasoning behind them are published under CC BY 4.0; the registers underneath arrive under their own licences, each named on the sources and licences page.
How it is paid for
By National Digital. No advertising, no sponsorship, no affiliate links, and nothing for sale — no gear, no permits, no guided walks, no membership. Nothing on any page is here because somebody paid for it to be, and no page ranks a place above another for any reason except the records.
Not affiliated with anyone whose records it reads
This is not a government service. It has no connection to the departments, councils or land managers whose registers it computes from: nothing here is issued, endorsed or checked by any of them, and a verdict on this site is not permission from any of them.
Corrections
If a page is wrong, the useful thing to send is the record it disagrees with — a page in a register beats a description of one. This domain deliberately sends and receives no email; National Digital's contact page reaches the people who maintain this.