Pheasant Wood Circuit: a bush track named for the Fromelles cemetery

On the morning of 20 July 1916, Corporal Herbert Thomas Bolt, known on the Sydney rugby league fields as “Nutsy”, was killed at Fromelles in the north of France. For over ninety years he had no grave, and in 2010 he was laid to rest in the new Fromelles (Pheasant Wood) Military Cemetery. That cemetery's name is now borne by a small track in the bush near Marulan in New South Wales, which the corporal's descendant, the businessman Steve Shelley, bought in 2016 and rebuilt from a plain training loop into a venue licensed by Motorsport Australia. In June 2026 Shelley sold the track, and track days for owners of ordinary cars continue.

Location	8 Prairie Oak Road, Marulan (New South Wales), about 3 km from the Hume Highway; according to the operator an hour and a half's drive from Sydney and from Canberra
Type	asphalt road circuit with a gravel section for rallycross
Length	1.6 km, 9 corners
Opening	February 2009, as Marulan Driver Training Centre
Rebuild	from the end of 2017 to May 2018, in 2018 a new name, Pheasant Wood, was announced
Lap record	53.452 s, Scott Goodsell, Porsche GT2 RS (according to the operator, no date or category)
Grounds	about 60 ha (150 acres) with a house, a guest cottage, ponds and off-road tracks
Operator	Pheasant Wood Circuit Pty Ltd
Owners	Garry and Natalie Willmington (2009–2016), Steve Shelley (2016–2026), from June 2026 a buyer whose name has not been disclosed
Events	rounds of the RXAus rallycross series (2017, 2018), races for historic cars and motorcycles, endurance races for small motorcycles, the amateur Triple Challenge series
For amateurs	open track days without timing: 195 AUD on a weekday, 225 AUD at the weekend, track day licence 30 AUD (as of 10 October 2026)
Status	active

Pheasant Wood near Fromelles

Herbert Bolt was born on 10 September 1893 in Newtown, a Sydney suburb, finished school there and worked as a brickmaker at the Bedford Steam Brickworks. From 1912 he played in the first team of the Newtown rugby league club, and in the 1913 season he appeared twice for New South Wales against Queensland; in the second match the referee sent him off for fighting. In 1914 he married Jane Hughes, known as Jennie, and in February 1915 their daughter Mary Monica was born, whom he called “little Mona”. After the 1915 season he enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force, on 20 December sailed from Sydney for Egypt, joined the 55th Battalion and on 31 May 1916 was promoted to corporal.

Fromelles was the first battle of the Australians on the Western Front. The British command had planned the attack there as a diversion supporting the Somme offensive, fought 80 km further south. According to the official website of the NRL rugby league, in a single night Australia lost more killed and wounded at Fromelles than in the entire Gallipoli campaign. The 55th Battalion was in reserve and was to cover the bled-out 14th Brigade; at around five in the morning on 20 July German counterattacks forced it to withdraw. Private Frank Johnston, who had enlisted together with Bolt, told the Red Cross in April 1917 what he had seen in a communication trench:

He got more than six of them with his bayonet and the butt of his rifle, when he got a bullet through the head. He fell instantly, being killed outright.

The body could not be recovered, so Bolt was commemorated on the Villers-Bretonneux memorial as a soldier with no known grave. The Newtown club organised a fancy-dress collection for his widow and daughter. The Germans buried the fallen in mass graves by the Pheasant Wood (literally: the pheasants' wood), and they were found in 2008 thanks to the persistence of the Melbourne teacher Lambis Englezos. The remains of 250 Australian and British soldiers were exhumed; many, Bolt among them, were identified by the DNA of living relatives. The new Fromelles (Pheasant Wood) cemetery was dedicated on 19 July 2010, on the anniversary of the battle, in the presence of Prince Charles and the Governor-General of Australia, Quentin Bryce. Corporal Bolt lies in Plot III, Row B, Grave 6; his grandchildren and more distant family attended the funeral.

On its website the operator of the track near Marulan quotes Johnston's words and writes that when the track was rebuilt it wanted to give it a name that was “something very special for all to remember a fallen digger”. Steve Shelley chose the name of the cemetery in which his ancestor lies.

Garry Willmington's Kilometre of Tarmac

Before the track received its name from France, this was the Marulan Driver Training Centre. It was built and financed by Garry Willmington, who according to the opening press release had spent fifteen years working towards a properly designed driver training centre. Willmington was a privateer in the Australian touring car championship, started at Bathurst from 1978 to 2000, and in 1987 won his class there in a Toyota Sprinter AE86, which he shared with Bob Holden and Bryan Bate. Afterwards he spent eight years managing the nearby Wakefield Park circuit. “I'd always wanted to open my own track,” he told Speedcafe in 2012. He left Wakefield Park to found the centre a little further along the Hume Highway, together with his wife Natalie.

It was officially opened in February 2009 by the federal MP Don Randall, who drove a lap of the rain-soaked track in a Proton Satria Neo. Proton was to supply cars to Safe Drive Training, which was entrusted with running courses here, mainly for young drivers. The press release promised over 2500 secondary school students a year from schools within a two-hour drive, a kilometre loop for handling practice, a skid pan with sprinklers and a gravel training track. According to the Mazda MX-5 Club of New South Wales, the first loop had seven corners taken clockwise. In 2012 Willmington described his venue as a kilometre track with a gravel oval in the middle and a skid pan; he taught children to drive from the age of eight and let them onto the asphalt from fifteen.

The MX-5 club came here for training. In a report from March 2016, a first-timer described a tight, twisty loop with a top speed of about 100 km/h, a briefing with a walk around the track and an instructor who was the first to sit behind the wheel of his car to show what it could do. In May 2017 Marulan hosted the second round of the RXAus rallycross series. Steve Glenney beat the series' founder Will Orders by 0.4 s in the final, and after the race he praised “a great little track at Marulan and a good mix of dirt and tarmac”.

A Phone Call Years Later

Steve Shelley is a co-founder of Deputy, a company producing workforce management software, and heir to the family drinks maker Shelley's. He himself raced in state-level events, including in a Mitsubishi Lancer and a Lotus Exige. He came to the track near Marulan by chance. “In 2014, I went to the facility to have a track day with some mates,” he recalled in 2025 in an interview with Region. He liked that it was a private venue, so he asked Willmington to call him first if he ever wanted to sell. Willmington called a few years later, in the evening. Shelley came the next day, and within a week or two the parties had agreed the terms and shaken hands. The deal was concluded at the end of 2016; Willmington was to stay on and help with management and the rebuild.

Shelley did not mince words when he later described what he had bought: “It was basically just a very simple asphalt strip on top of soil”, with no base, no drainage, no kerbs or gutters. The journalist Richard Craill, who visited the track in 2018, also listed a narrow, almost single-lane access road winding between private plots, and no garages or proper facilities for spectators; there was, however, a café and a spacious paddock.

Hairpins Where the Oval Was

The old track was closed at the end of 2017 and its surface was torn up. Where a gravel oval had been in the middle of the loop, a sequence of tight hairpins with pronounced banking was laid out, and the third corner was cut from the former oval. The surface was replaced and widened, the verges were asphalted, and in many places concrete walls replaced embankments of tyres filled with soil; new tyre barriers also appeared. A gravel loop for rallycross was marked out at the top of the site, and the service lane was cut above the hairpin of the first corner, in front of which an extensive asphalt run-off was built. Race control and timing were housed in commentary boxes bought, together with other temporary buildings, after the Sydney 500 street race at Homebush.

The first event on the rebuilt track was the second round of RXAus in May 2018; the four-wheel-drive class was won from pole position by Arron Windus. Craill then compared the new track, with its elevation changes and banking, to a “mini-Nurburgring”, adding that this was an over-used cliché. Shelley announced a multi-storey pit building with a drivers' club and said he wanted to see everything here, from teenage training to rallycross and karts. He did not intend to compete with the neighbouring Wakefield Park: “That's a much bigger circuit; we're much more boutique.” Together with the rebuild, a new name was announced: Pheasant Wood.

The surface was not all there was to it. In 2025 Region listed what the rebuild covered: widening and reprofiling the track, kilometres of cables, concrete walls, drainage, marshal posts, pit buildings, a kitchen and canteen, race control systems, timing, ponds and water tanks. How much all of this cost, Shelley did not say: “I've spent many, many millions that I won't disclose.” In the December 2025 sale listing, a new pit building with facilities for drivers still appeared as a project with building approval.

The Dunny and Seventeen Degrees

According to the operator, the present loop is 1.6 km long with nine corners, it is surrounded by the Australian bush, and spectators have several viewing platforms. The description of the lap on the track's website reads like instructions from an instructor. On the start straight you must keep to the left and wait patiently before turning into the first corner. At corners five and six the landmark is “The Dunny”, Australian for an outdoor toilet, and the apex of corner six is a concrete kerb over which the right front wheel is meant to pass. The last corner is banked at 17°: “Finding a late apex at 17° bank is quick and exciting way back to the left hand side of the straight or pit lane.” The operator gives 53.452 s as the track record, set by Scott Goodsell in a Porsche GT2 RS, with no date or category.

Small motorcycles also race on the short, twisty loop. In a report from December 2022, the BikeReview team described how, on a Yamaha YZF-R15 in the 150 cc class, they completed over 300 laps of a six-hour “bucket racing” race, that is, a contest on the cheapest possible production machines, and finished second. In September 2022 the All Historic Race club brought vintage cars, motorcycles and sidecar outfits. Track manager Scott Hill counted “over 60 competitors and about 500 spectators”, and for him the real attraction was the vehicles from before the 1930s.

Two Circuits, One Owner

The neighbourhood of the track has not always been peaceful. “When we first bought it, there were a lot of disputes with the neighbours,” Shelley said in 2025; he added that he had built relationships with them and introduced strict noise limits at events. He wanted to carry this method over to Wakefield Park, closed after a court ruling limiting the number of event days and the noise level. In March 2023 it was announced that the owner of Pheasant Wood was buying the track near Goulburn. “If I applied the same methodology as Pheasant Wood in regard to operations and neighbours, it could be a win-win for everyone,” he explained to the Goulburn Post. The two tracks were to work in tandem and, where needed, give the neighbours a respite. Wakefield Park came back to life as One Raceway, and Shelley spent nearly 7 million dollars on quietening and modernising that track.

In December 2025 Pheasant Wood was put up for sale. The agency Biller Property was seeking offers above AUD 10 million, and the package included a four-bedroom house, a guest cottage overlooking the ponds and an approved design for a pit building. Shelley said it was a “lifestyle choice”, that the track had become “non-strategic” for him, and that he wants to focus on One Raceway: “I'll openly admit I'm not giving her the support she needs.” The track was sold in June 2026 for over 10 million dollars; the agent confirmed the sale but gave neither the price nor the buyer's name.

Helmet, Long Sleeves and 195 Dollars

Of an amateur driver the operator requires little: a helmet, long trousers, long sleeves and closed shoes. The open track days have no timing and are, as it writes, “enjoyed by anyone with a car, no matter their experience”; they cost 195 Australian dollars on a weekday and 225 at the weekend (as of 10 October 2026). Anyone without a Motorsport Australia or AASA licence buys a track day licence on site for 30 dollars, or an annual one for 99; anyone without a national licence who wants to take part in races and events needs a track licence for events, preceded by a ninety-minute driving test under the eye of an observer. On Mondays and Tuesdays the track is closed for maintenance work. The programme for future drivers accepts young people from the age of twelve.

The Mazda MX-5 Club still organises untimed training days here, with instructors sitting in the cars of newcomers. The RaceAway Track Time team from Colo Vale also trains on the loop; in 2024 it reached the podium of the six-hour race at Bathurst's Mount Panorama, entered in class E. For those who want to race there is the Triple Challenge series for four-seat production cars from 1986–2024 of up to two litres, with a roll cage and four-point harnesses: sprints, a two-hour team race, or both at once.

The sale has so far stopped nothing. In October 2026 the track's online shop was taking bookings for track days at 195 dollars, for a six-hour race for 150 cc motorcycles on 8 November and for the last open day for cars this year, 9 December. Four days later, on Sunday 13 December, the Triple Challenge regulations set the fourth round.

Timeline

• 1916: on 20 July Corporal Herbert Thomas Bolt is killed at Fromelles.
• 2008: the mass graves by the Pheasant Wood are found.
• 2009: in February, Garry Willmington's Marulan Driver Training Centre opens.
• 2010: on 19 July the Fromelles (Pheasant Wood) cemetery is dedicated; Bolt is buried.
• 2014: Steve Shelley comes to Marulan for a track day.
• 2016: at the end of the year Shelley buys the centre.
• 2017: in May the second round of RXAus; at the end of the year the track is closed and the rebuild begins.
• 2018: in May the first event on the rebuilt track; a new name, Pheasant Wood, is announced.
• 2023: in March it is announced that the owner of Pheasant Wood is buying Wakefield Park.
• 2025: in December the track is put up for sale.
• 2026: in June it is sold to a buyer whose name has not been disclosed.