Sealers Cove is the walk people mean when they talk about the Prom: about ten kilometres from Telegraph Saddle through tall forest and fern gullies, then a long boardwalk across the swamp, then a curve of white sand and a creek to camp beside. Three storms in 2021 broke the old boardwalk, laid in the late 1970s, and the track closed. On 18 September 2026 Parks Victoria reopened it. Crews of up to nine worked ten days straight on a rotating roster, living in a camp with a mess tent, a kitchen and hot showers, with helicopters, barges and boats from Port Welshpool bringing in the materials, and rebuilt close to two kilometres of boardwalk in fibre reinforced plastic decking that will outlast timber in the wet. They also raised it thirty centimetres above the old line so it stays dry as the sea rises. Stephen Erickson, director of Envirotechniques and the project manager, told the ABC that a large family of kookaburras put out their laugh over the camp early every morning, and that working in a place like that felt challenging and very rewarding. Brett Mitchell, the area chief ranger, calls it "a really special area of the park and a really popular area", and with the boardwalk back the southern circuit is whole again.

Wilsons Promontory, Yiruk Wamoon to its Traditional Owners, draws around six hundred thousand visitors a year, and the rebuild cost 4.8 million dollars within a 23 million dollar programme of works across the park. For walkers, the sums come down to this: the cove is a comfortable day in and a day out, or the first night of the three day southern loop through Refuge Cove and Little Waterloo Bay. Campsites at Sealers Cove are booked through Parks Victoria, and spring school holidays are exactly when the wattles and the wildflowers along the track are at their best. If you have been waiting five years for this one, the boardwalk is waiting for you.

Our short take: the full story is by Madeleine Stuchbery for ABC News (18 September 2026), with figures from the Parks Victoria announcement of the same day. Photograph: Sealers Cove, Wilsons Promontory National Park, via Wikimedia Commons (CC0).