East Gippsland Wildlife & Conservation Journey

Your guide collects the group in Melbourne at 8am and heads east. The road runs through the Gippsland Lakes, a Ramsar-listed wetland system of 60,015 ha that holds up to 50,000 waterbirds when inland Australia dries out, and is the largest navigable inland waterway network in the country. At Paynesville, a ferry crosses the 200m channel to Raymond Island. The koalas here descend from animals introduced in 1953, and the island is now one of the easiest places in Australia to watch wild koalas at close range from the ground. The group walks the island recording data for a wild koala study: which eucalypt species each animal is using, what it is doing, whether it can be matched to a known individual, and whether there is evidence of koalas drinking stemflow running down the trunks. Echidnas, swamp wallabies and eastern grey kangaroos are on the island too, along with parrots, honeyeaters and seabirds, and those go on the list as well. Conditions permitting, there is a stop at Lakes Entrance to look for Burrunan dolphins — a small population of about 63 animals in the Gippsland Lakes — and Australian Fur-seals. Dinner is at a beachside tavern above Lake Tyers before the drive up to the homestead near Orbost, which is home for the next three nights. Overnight: Homestead near Orbost. Meals: L/D.

Breakfast at the homestead, then out to a patch of lowland warm temperate rainforest that the 2019–20 fires did not reach. Superb lyrebirds, topknot pigeons, brown gerygones and black-faced monarchs are the birds to work for here, and the creeks hold platypus and swamp wallabies. The next walk is the opposite: heathland and a forest-lined river running along the edge of country that burnt recently. Surveys here carry real weight, because what is coming back and what is not is still being established. White-bellied Sea-Eagles, Hooded Plovers, Gang-gang Cockatoos, Turquoise Parrots, Azure Kingfishers and Jacky Lizards are all on the list. From there the group works a quiet beach with a deep dune system for shorebirds, ocean-going birds and Australian Fur-seals. After lunch there is a walk out onto a rocky headland, over rock pools and past wind-cut coastal scrub. Part of the morning on the beach goes to pulling sea spurge, a weed from the European and North African coast first recorded in Victoria in 1957. It now holds around 550 km of southern Australian coastline and it takes the open sand that hooded plovers scrape their nests into. Dinner is at a pub above the Snowy River. The drive back to the homestead takes you over the river plain and waterways after dark, where red-necked wallabies, southern brown and long-nosed bandicoots, wombats and sugar gliders come out. Overnight: Homestead near Orbost. Meals: B/L/D.

A day inland and uphill into the mountain forests behind Orbost, working both the dry forest and the wet. The Snowy River runs 352 km from the slopes of Mount Kosciuszko to the sea at Marlo, and for decades ran at under 1 per cent of its natural flow below Jindabyne before environmental water was returned to it. The walk beside a wilderness creek covers the whole gradient in a few hundred metres, from dry sunny slope to a gully damp enough to be near-rainforest, and your guide works through how these forests formed and why the species change as the moisture does. Lyrebirds, parrots, goannas, wallabies and honeyeaters are all in play, and reptile and bird numbers here are high while other visitors are close to absent. Dinner is in Orbost. If time allows and the group is willing, the evening goes to night spotting for whatever didn't show the night before. Overnight: Homestead near Orbost. Meals: B/L/D.

After breakfast, the tour leaves East Gippsland heading west, with a stop at either the Stony Creek Trestle Bridge near Nowa Nowa — 276 m long and 20 m high, built from red ironbark and grey box in 1916 — or, in season, a flying-fox camp. The last stop is the Krowathunkooloong Keeping Place in Bairnsdale, run by the Gippsland and East Gippsland Aboriginal Co-operative. It is named for the Gunaikurnai clan whose Country takes in Orbost and the Snowy River, which is the country the tour has just spent three days in, and it holds bark canoes, fishing spears, baskets, weapons and contemporary Gunaikurnai art. The tour finishes at Bairnsdale bus station at around midday Meals: B.