Exploroz Traveller App

Terryt,
Your original post suggests that you use a variety of maps for your travels and you would therefore be aware of the notation on many of them that ".. depiction of a road or track does not necessarily indicate a public right of way." Therefore the onus of determining rights of access is firmly on the traveller.

Cartographers are under no obligation to confirm the status of minor roads or tracks and I suspect they often source the location of them from information available in other government records. Undoubtedly this is the basis of your dilemma but, as many of the replies to your original post pointed out, the answer is anything but clear cut.

In NSW (and I suspect it would be the same in most other States) many of these tracks were reserved for use as possible roads early last century, but were never actually formed.Unless they have since been sold, title to them therefore remains vested in the Crown.

In this state they are usually one or two "chains" in width and bearing in mind that a "chain" is the same length as a cricket pitch, you can often easily identify them by that criteria as they march across open farmland in the form of isolated belts of timber etc. Because of overgrowth or erosion, it is often impossible to drive along them. Conversely, in less settled parts of Australia there are rarely any such visual clues.

Again in this state, because they often bisect privately held land, they are regularly leased to adjoining land-owners for grazing purposes. Often they are fenced on one side only (if at all). However, an essential condition of such leases is that the public must have access to them at all times - often an academic point if you have an irate farmer on the other side of the gate! But (and this is an important qualification) in recent years there has been a determined push by the State Government to close these roads and sell them to one or more of the adjoining land-owners, thus clouding the question of status, access and ownership even more.

Therefore, in my opinion the surest way of determining the status of an unformed road or track is to refer to the relevant Crown authority for the State in question - particularly if it has a regional office in the area of interest. I acknowledge this is not always easy but the effort involved could save you a lot of heart-ache down the track (so to speak!).

RLK.