2.1 kilometres, flat to gently undulating, maybe forty minutes if you dawdle at the banksias. That's the stretch of bush track running off Saw Avenue that I did on a Tuesday morning in April, and I saw three people the whole way. Compare that to the lookout platform near Fraser Avenue, where on a weekend you'll queue behind school groups and couples angling for the same skyline shot of the city and the Swan River. Kings Park gets treated like a single destination when it's actually a few hundred hectares of bushland with a lookout bolted onto one corner of it.
I carried two bottles of water that day, wore the thin socks rather than the merino ones I'd normally save for the Perth hills, and left the gaiters in the car. Didn't need them. The paths through this part of the park are well formed, mostly gravel or packed earth, and nothing here asks for the kind of kit you'd want on a proper Bibbulmun Track section. That's worth saying plainly, because some of what follows sounds more remote than it is. It's still a city park. But it's a city park with enough understorey and birdlife that you can walk for half an hour without hearing traffic, which is more than most inner-city green space in Australia can claim.
The Lotterywest Federation Walkway isn't the whole story
Most people who've been to Kings Park at all have done the glass-and-steel walkway through the treetops, the one that gets photographed from below and posted with the hashtags. It's fine. I'm not going to pretend it's a letdown, because the engineering is genuine and the canopy views are real, but it's also about 620 metres long and funnels everyone through the same corridor at the same pace. If you've done it once, you've essentially done it, and I'd argue the social media attention it gets is disproportionate to how much walking it actually offers. The paths worth returning to are the ones nobody photographs.
South and east of the main visitor precinct, away from Fraser Avenue, the park opens into genuine bushland tracks through jarrah, marri and banksia woodland, the kind of remnant vegetation that gives a sense of what this ridge looked like before Perth was a city at all. These paths connect loosely rather than following one marked loop, so you're reading the junctions as you go rather than following arrows the whole way.
Where the quieter tracks actually run
Forrest Drive and the bush tracks branching off it are the obvious starting point if you want distance without crowds. May Drive on the park's western flank does something similar, running through denser bushland with less manicured edging than the areas closer to the war memorial. Neither is signposted as a flagship walk and neither turns up much in the glossy brochures, which I think is exactly the point.
If you'd rather have a loose structure, the tracks around Saw Avenue link reasonably well with the bushland paths further south, and you can string together a circuit of close to five kilometres without repeating much ground. None of it is technical. There's a bit of unevenness underfoot where tree roots have lifted sections of track, and after rain some of the clay patches get slick, but nothing that calls for more than a decent pair of trail shoes.
For something with an actual destination rather than a loop, the connection out toward Kings Park Road PSP gives you a shared path option if you want to extend a walk beyond the park boundary itself, useful if you're staying somewhere in West Perth and want to walk in rather than drive.
What the bushland is protecting, and why it matters underfoot
These remnant sections aren't incidental green space, they're some of the last intact banksia woodland on the Swan Coastal Plain, and the management regime behind that is more serious than the casual walker probably clocks. Fire regimes, weed control, and the broader bushland conservation approach used across the state's conservation estate, overseen more generally by the WA Dept. of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions, all shape why certain tracks are fenced off seasonally or rerouted after prescribed burns. If a path's closed when you turn up, it's usually for a reason that has nothing to do with foot traffic numbers.
Wildflower season changes the whole character of these quieter tracks, by the way, which is the best argument I have for going back more than once. Spring brings out species you simply won't see in the manicured beds near the Botanic Garden, and if you want a guided angle on that rather than working it out yourself with a field guide and a lot of squinting, the Pedals & Petals - Discovering Wildflowers Bike Tour Kings Park covers a lot of the same bushland by bike, at a pace that still lets you actually look at things, which walking slowly doesn't always manage when you're watching your footing.
A slower option, if the point is to stop walking altogether
Not every visit needs a destination. If what you actually want is to sit still in bushland rather than clock up kilometres, the 3 Hour Forest Bathing at Kings Park and Botanic Garden session uses some of this same quieter terrain deliberately, for people who'd rather notice the marri bark and the birdsong than hit a step count. I'll admit I was sceptical the first time I heard
