“A city is a language, a repository of possibilities,” wrote Rebecca Solnit in her 2002 book Wanderlust. “And walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities.”

Solnit was writing about the act of walking, broadly, but could have been commenting on urban walking tours which, if you hadn’t noticed, have changed.

No longer the pedestrian version of the double-decker sightseeing bus, walking tours are eschewing the major landmarks for smaller, cooler and harder-to-find spots.

Walking tours are social, active and if they’re outdoors, relatively Covid safe. You can explore your own city through another’s eyes or discover something new when visiting an interstate capital. In short – they’re very 2022.

There are First Nations-operated tours in most Australian cities. From The Rocks Aboriginal Dreaming Tour (Illi Langi) in Sydney, to short walks in Melbourne’s centre with the Koorie Heritage Trust, to Brisbane’s BlackCard cultural tours where “no subject is taboo”. In Darwin, Larakia culture comes care of a Saltwater Cultural Tour, while in Canberra Dhawura Tours focuses on the nearby mountains. Perth’s Nyungar Tours does short walks in south Perth and Kings Park, and takara nipaluna is the first and only Aboriginal tour of Hobart.

Melbourne offers the most varied perambulations. For starters, there is Fashion by Foot’s exploration of ethical independent designers. Then there’s the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art’s Six Walks, with audio guides supplied by writers including Tony Birch and Christos Tsiolkas, crafting paths around themes such as motherhood, colonisation and surveillance. But everyone already knows Melbourne is cool.

For visitors to Perth, a tour with Oh Hey WA verges on compulsory. “I only give first-hand recommendations,” says founder Adie ​​Chapman. “I am immersed in the culture, I go out a lot!”

Perth’s liquor licences which don’t require bars to serve food in order to serve alcohol, have seen small bars flourish. That is, if you can find them. You enter Alfred’s Pizza through a phone box on Barrack street, while music venue Lucy’s Love Shack is underground. The very secret bar Sneaky Tony’s (speakeasy-themed) is accessed from a grimy car park. Once there, if you quietly ask the bartender, “is Tootsie here?”, as Chapman knew to do, they’ll show you a second secret bar (disco-themed) down a dark hallway.

“Just before Covid, Perth was exploding,” says Chapman. “People were coming into the city, plus there was the new Perth to London flight. All the hotels opened and then bang! Covid. The Novotel opened up into a quarantine hotel.”

Walking tours are putting a new spin on old things too. In Canberra, She Shapes History tells you the stories of the diverse women behind Australia’s defining moments. While in Sydney, the Renaissance Tours women’s history walk wanders around Kings Cross (once called Queens Cross) – a place “most Sydneysiders think they know the story of,” says travel journalist and guide Ute Junker.

“It’s usually the male history we know, from the 1940s onwards,” she says. “A couple of blokes will spring up on today’s tour but we’ll try to keep them in their box.”

Junker does just that when we hear about writer, activist, Spanish translator, utopian socialist and $10 note model, Mary Gilmore. Gilmore was a contemporary of poets Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson. But Junker says Lawson was “often too drunk to write” and Paterson “didn’t write anything too interesting after he was about 40 or 50”. Gilmore, meanwhile, wrote a newspaper column until she was 97 years old.

As a professional tourist herself, Junker knows a good script isn’t a straight knowledge transfer. We have air-conditioned homes and Wikipedia for that. Walkers want fun, like-minded company and usually a meal and a drink. Which is another trend the new breed of walking tours has grown in synergy with: everyone’s a foodie now.

Some of Sydney’s best food tours are in suburbs that many self-declared gastronomes have likely never seen, let alone dined in. Social enterprise Taste Cultural Food Tours hosts walks such as Taste of Migration in Bankstown, Taste of Afghanistan and Syria in Merrylands, and Taste of Korea in Eastwood.

In Melbourne, a Hidden Secrets tour takes you to spots that, despite being a few years old, still feel new, as some were open just a few days between lockdowns. Foodie Trails runs a CBD masala tour, as well as trips to Oakleigh and Footscray for Greek and African cuisine.

Adelaide’s Flamboyance Tours takes you to Haigh’s and the famous central market for Adelaidean oddities such as frog cake and fritz. In the Top End the Darwin Gourmet Food Tour canvasses the city’s best restaurants, while Walk Brisbane runs a private laneways and cafes tour to prove its claim that “the best coffee is never on the main street”.

Back in Sydney, at the new Kings Cross Distillery hosted by “gin architect” Odelia Potts, Junker tells us how the artist Rosaleen Norton – who was dubbed the “witch of Kings Cross” – was hounded into homelessness by the NSW police vice squad for her apparent links to the occult.

“Rosaleen is the only artist in Australia to have her art destroyed by order of the court,” says Junker. “[Her paintings] remind me of James Gleeson’s and no one was accusing him of dark arts.”

Earlier in the tour, we’d stood before the worker’s cottage where heiress, journalist and activist Juanita Nielsen lived until her suspected murder in 1975. Of Nielsen’s involvement with the city-defining Green Bans, Junker says: “I always thought [the Green Bans] were a fight for architecture but she reframed it as a fight for community.”

It’s a simple but inspiring insight into a city where the losses to developers are stacking up.

Near the worker’s cottage a brass plaque is embedded in the footpath, stating that Nielsen was “not afraid whose toes she tramped on”. I’ve probably tramped over this plaque hundreds of times – yet never read it. But I do today.

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All walks listed should be checked by contacting the tour company as many operators are still responding to unpredictable demand and Covid restrictions. Renaissance Tours women’s history walk, Trailblazers, Renegades and Activists, is scheduled to run again in September 2022 or earlier if demand is high.