The Hume Highway, including sections known as the Hume Freeway, the Hume Motorway and Liverpool Road, is one of Australia's major inter-city national highways, running for between Melbourne in the southwest and Sydney in the northeast. Upgrading of the route from Sydney's outskirts to Melbourne's outskirts to dual carriageway was completed on 7 August 2013.
From north to south, the road is called the Hume Highway in metropolitan Sydney, the Hume Motorway between the Cutler Interchange and Berrima, the Hume Highway elsewhere in New South Wales and the Hume Freeway in Victoria. It is part of the Auslink National Network and is a vital link for road freight to transport goods to and from the two cities as well as serving Albury–Wodonga and Canberra. It is therefore considered to be Australia's longest highway in terms of its dual-carriageway standard retaining the M, or motorway, alphanumeric.
Route
At its Sydney end, Hume Highway begins at Parramatta Road, in Ashfield, where it is dual named Liverpool Road until Greenacrehttps://www.transport.nsw.gov.au/system/files/media/documents/2026/classified-roads-schedule_0.pdf. This route is numbered as A22. The Copeland Street section in Liverpool is also dual named alongside the Hume Highway. In August 1928 the Great Southern Road was gazetted as the Hume Highway as part of the creation of the NSW highway system.
The main Hume Highway/Motorway effectively commences at the junction of the M5 South West Motorway and the Westlink M7 at . Heading eastbound, the M5 provides access to Sydney Airport and the CBD; while the M7 provides access to Newcastle and Brisbane bypassing the Sydney CBD. Both of these routes are tolled. The section of Hume Motorway between Prestons and Narellan Road was previously known as South Western Freeway (not to be confused with the M5 South West Motorway) and was allocated route number F5. While this section later officially became known as Hume Highway, it continued to be referred to as the F5 Freeway until the early 2010s due to its renaming to M31 Hume Motorway in 2013.
Other than sections within the urban areas of Sydney and Melbourne, Hume Highway is generally dual-carriageway (with at-grade intersections and restricted entry from adjoining land), with considerable lengths which are of full freeway standard. Most of these sections are bypasses of the larger towns on the route, where the need to deviate the route to construct the bypass made it practical to deny access from adjoining land and thus provide full freeway conditions. In addition to these bypasses the sections between Casula (in southwestern Sydney) and Berrima (built 1973–92), and Broadford to Wallan (1976), which were both constructed as major deviations, are also of full freeway standard. The entire section in Victoria is categorised as a freeway by government roads authority VicRoads, although a few intersections along the route are not yet grade-separated. The speed limit on the full length of the highway is .
As Hume Freeway approaches Melbourne at the suburb of Craigieburn, north of the Melbourne central business district, the Craigieburn Bypass now diverts Hume Freeway (and the M31 designation) to the east of the former route, to terminate at the Western and Metropolitan Ring Roads. This bypass was opened in two stages, in December 2004 and December 2005.
At its Melbourne end, the original alignment of the Melbourne–Sydney route followed Royal Parade northward from where it begins at its intersection with Elizabeth Street and Flemington Road. Royal Parade becomes Sydney Road at Brunswick Road and then became the Hume Highway itself at Campbellfield. This ceased to be the designated route of Hume Highway in 1992, with the completion of Stage 1 of the Western Ring Road, at which point the designation of the southbound highway was truncated. The former highway south from the Western Ring Road to Elizabeth Street is route is now numbered as Metropolitan Route 55 and is now officially called Sydney Road.
Landscapes Heading north from Melbourne, the road passes through the hills of the Great Dividing Range, some of which is covered with box eucalypt forest but most of which much is cleared for farmland, before levelling out near Seymour to cross flat, mostly cleared farming country to Wodonga and the Victoria–New South Wales border. Victoria's landscape differs from that of the typical 'true Australian Outback', but a dry summer can leave the ground parched. Mount Buffalo can be seen in the distance to the east as the highway comes down off the Warby Range near Glenrowan, and a museum commemorating Ned Kelly is located nearby. At Wangaratta the highway passes close to the Rutherglen and Milawa wine-producing areas.
Continuing north, the Murray River, the south bank of which is the Victoria–New South Wales border, is crossed on the bypass of Albury-Wodonga. From Albury, the highway skirts Lake Hume and continues across undulating country generally north-east towards Holbrook and then Tarcutta. Just north of Tarcutta the highway encounters the first of several ranges which form outliers of the Great Dividing Range, and which are crossed as the highway climbs the slopes to the tablelands west of Yass. From here the highway runs eastward, to Goulburn where it again turns northeast. Most of the New South Wales countryside from Albury to Marulan has been developed for wool production, with Yass and Goulburn in particular noted for their fine wool.
History The coast of New South Wales, from the Queensland to the Victorian borders, is separated from the inland by an escarpment, forming the eastern edge of the Great Dividing Range, with few easy routes up this escarpment. To climb from the coast to the tablelands, Hume Highway uses the Bargo Ramp, a geological feature which provides one of the few easy crossings of the escarpment.
In the first twenty years of European settlement at Sydney (established 1788), exploration southwest of Sydney was slow. This area was heavily wooded at the time, especially the Bargo brush, which was regarded as almost impenetrable. In 1798 explorers (Wilson, Price, Hacking and Collins) reached the Moss Vale and Marulan districts, but this was not followed up. Any settlement would have to await the construction of an adequate access track, which would have been beyond the colony's resources at the time, and would have served little purpose as a source of supplies for Sydney, due to the time taken to reach Sydney. In 1804, Charles Throsby penetrated through the Bargo brush to the country on the tablelands near Moss Vale and Sutton Forest. On another expedition in 1818, he reached Lake Bathurst and the Goulburn Plains. Many of the early explorers would most likely have used Aboriginal guides, but they do not appear to have given them credit.
After Charles Throsby's 1818 journey towards present day Goulburn, followed by Hamilton Hume and William Hovell's overland journey from Appin to Port Phillip and return in 1824, development of the Southern Tablelands for agriculture was rapid. The present route of Hume Highway is much the same as that used by the pioneers.
The route taken by Hume Highway to climb from the coast to the Southern Tablelands and across the Great Divide is situated between the parallel river gorge systems of the Wollondilly and Shoalhaven rivers. This country consists generally of a gently sloping plateau which is deeply dissected by the Nepean River and its tributaries. The route of the highway, by using four high-level bridges to cross these gorges, avoids the Razorback Range, and has minimal earthworks. The climb from the western side of the Nepean River at Menangle up to Mittagong is fairly sustained, a fact that is hard to appreciate at high speed on the modern freeway. The highway climbs non-stop over a distance of from the Pheasants Nest Bridge over the Nepean River to Yerrinbool, before dropping slightly before the final climb to reach the tablelands at Aylmerton, a climb of over in .
Early road construction Governor Lachlan Macquarie ordered the construction of a road, which became known as the Great Southern Road (the basis of the northern end of Hume Highway) in 1819 from Picton to the Goulburn Plains and he travelled to Goulburn in 1820, but it is unlikely that even a primitive road was finished at that time.
The Great South Road was rebuilt and completely re-routed between Yanderra and Goulburn by Surveyor-General Thomas Mitchell in 1833. The Main Roads Management Act of June 1858 declared the Great South Road, from near Sydney through Goulburn and Gundagai to Albury, as one of the three main roads in the colony. However, its southern reaches were described as only a "scarcely formed bullock track" as late as 1858. The road was improved in the mid-1860s with some sections near Gundagai "metalled" and all creeks bridged between Adelong Creek (approximately 10 kilometres south of Gundagai and now known as the village of Tumblong) and Albury.
Mitchell's route in New South Wales, except for the current-day bypasses at Mittagong, Berrima and Marulan (dual carriageways were completed in 1986), is still largely followed by today's highway.Mitchell, T. L., The south eastern portion of Australia showing the routes of the three expeditions and the surveyed territory, Boone, 29 New Bond Street, London, 1838. Mitchell intended to straighten the route north of Yanderra, but was not granted funding, although his proposed route through Pheasants Nest has similarities to the freeway route opened in 1980. Mitchell's work on the Great South Road is best preserved at Towrang Creek (10 kilometres north of Goulburn), where his stone arch culvert still stands, although it was superseded in 1965 by a concrete box culvert which in turn was superseded by the current route of the highway when it was duplicated in 1972.
By contrast, in Victoria there was an early and major change to Mitchell's route. Mitchell's original route between Albury and Melbourne went through Mitchellstown on the Goulburn River and took a long detour to the west of Mount Macedon.Road from Jugiong Creek to Port Phillip, 12 Apr 1838, [Sketch book 3 folio 87], Department of Lands Sketch books, [Surveyor General], NRS 13886, New South Wales State Archives.
In March 1837 Charles Bonney blazed a new trail from Mitchellstown through Kilmore to Melbourne, a route that took a day and a half off the previous journey. The bulk of Bonney's track formed the Sydney Road for the next 139 years.Williams, Martin, Charles Bonney and the fertile Kilmore Plains, Victorian Historical Journal, Volume 90, No. 1, June 2019, p. 108. and was especially surveyed in 1840.
Road classification In 1914, both the Victorian and NSW sections of the highway were declared main roads by their respective state road authorities.