East Gippsland Wildlife & Conservation Journey

Your guide collects the group in Melbourne and heads east. The road runs through the Gippsland Lakes, the country’s largest navigable inland waterway network.

At Paynesville, a ferry crosses the 200m channel to Raymond Island. The koalas here descend from those introduced in 1953, and they sit low enough in the eucalypts to watch from the path rather than pick them out of the canopy, which is unusual for wild koalas. The group explores the island slowly, with your guide pointing out which trees are used and why. Echidnas, swamp wallabies and eastern grey kangaroos are also on the island, along with parrots, honeyeaters and seabirds.

If conditions permit, stop at Lakes Entrance to look for Burrunan dolphins and Australian fur seals. Have dinner at a beachside tavern above Lake Tyers before driving up to the homestead near Orbost, where you’ll stay for the next three nights.

Overnight: Homestead near Orbost.
Meals: L/D.

Lowland warm temperate rainforest east of Orbost escaped the 2019–20 fires, and the day starts there. Look for superb lyrebirds, topknot pigeons, brown gerygones and black-faced monarchs as well as platypus and swamp wallabies in the creeks.

Heathland and a forest-lined river make up the next walk, running along the edge of recently burnt country. 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.

Next, the group walks a rocky headland after lunch, over rock pools and past wind-cut coastal scrub. Part of the morning on the beach goes to pulling sea spurge, a weed of the European and North African coast that takes over the open sand where Hooded Plovers nest.

Dinner is at a pub above the Snowy River. After dark, the drive back to the homestead follows the river plain and waterways, where red-necked wallabies, southern brown and long-nosed bandicoots, wombats and sugar gliders forage.

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 352km from the slopes of Mount Kosciuszko to the sea at Marlo, and for decades ran at under 1% 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 are high here, while other visitors are nearly absent.

Orbost takes dinner. 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 heads west through East Gippsland, stopping at either the Stony Creek Trestle Bridge near Nowa Nowa (276m long and 20m 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, the country the tour has just spent three days in, and it holds bark canoes, fishing spears, baskets, weapons and contemporary Gunaikurnai art. From Bairnsdale, the road runs west for the drive back to Melbourne, arriving in the afternoon.

Meals: B. Lunch and dinner on the final day are not included.