Mungo Outback Conservation Journey

Check in to your hotel from 2pm, with the afternoon free to walk the Murray River frontage or the town. Your guide meets the group in the hotel lobby at 6pm for a briefing that runs about 30 minutes and covers the route, the walking, the packing and the country you are about to travel through. Most groups head out to dinner together afterwards, which is optional and at your own cost. Overnight: Mildura. Meals: none included.

After breakfast, the group heads south from Mildura into Hattah-Kulkyne National Park. The park spans 48,000 ha, from the Murray floodplain to the red sand dunes of the mallee, and the ephemeral lakes at its centre fill and empty on a flood cycle of roughly two to seven years, which brings the birds. The Hattah-Kulkyne Lakes have been listed under the Ramsar Convention since 1982 as an internationally important wetland, and egrets, cormorants and darters breed there in numbers when the water is up. The day is spent noting the condition of the lakes and working the habitat for the birds that are hard to find anywhere else: mallee emu-wren in the spinifex, malleefowl on the sandy rises, and the parrots and cockatoos that move through the dryland vegetation. Reptiles are part of it too, with geckos, skinks, snakes and the shy, beautifully marked sand goanna. Late in the afternoon the route crosses the centre of the park through the dunes and open country on the way back to Mildura. Overnight: Mildura. Meals: B/L.

The morning is spent on the Murray and its billabongs, where parrots, cockatoos and other birds come in off the desert to feed and drink, sometimes in large numbers. It is the last easy water for a while. In the afternoon the route turns north into arid country and crosses into the Willandra Lakes World Heritage Area, 240,000 ha of dry lake beds inscribed in 1981. You stop to walk along Willandra Creek, the fossilised watercourse that fed the whole system and gave it its name, and which has been dry for around 18,000 years. The road then enters Mungo National Park, and the day ends watching the sun go down over the dry bed of Lake Mungo. The country is flat enough that any small rise puts a full 360-degree horizon around you. This is usually where the first desert parrots and cockatoos turn up, along with western grey and red kangaroos. Overnight: Mungo Lodge. Meals: B/L/D.

The day starts with the question the whole tour is built on: why does this dry lake matter? The answer is in the lunette, the crescent of wind-built sand and clay along the eastern shore. Wind and rain keep cutting into it, and what comes out of the sand is a record of people living beside a freshwater lake, layer on layer, for tens of thousands of years. You drive across the lake bed to the dunes and walk a story line up through those layers with your guide. Hearths and cooking places sit exposed in the sand, along with middens of freshwater mussel and the bones of animals that no longer exist. Depending on how the sand has moved that season, you may be looking at material that has come to the surface since the last group walked through. It becomes clear as you go that this arid country was a wetland where waterbirds, giant marsupials and a large Aboriginal population lived alongside each other. Between stops, the guide works the birds and the desert vegetation, so the day runs as much on wildlife as on archaeology. Where people lived, they also died, and Willandra still holds burials exposed by erosion. Traditional Owners monitor those sites, which are not accessible to the public, and the tour does not go near them. Overnight: Mungo Lodge. Meals: B/L/D.

A second full day in the park, this one weighted to wildlife and habitat. Mungo National Park covers 110,967 ha, and the drive and walk take you through dense mallee, cypress pine and buloke woodland, mulga scrub and long stretches of saltbush plain. Pink cockatoos, listed as endangered nationally in 2023, are seen regularly here, along with cockatiels, chats, arid-country fairy-wrens and the crested bellbird, which is heard far more often than it is seen. White-backed swallows nest in the eroded faces of the dunes. Four raptors are known to nest in the area: spotted harrier, black falcon, grey falcon and wedge-tailed eagle. Emus are abundant, and both kangaroo species feed out on the plain through the cooler parts of the day. Late in the afternoon there is the option of climbing high into the Mungo dune field, which is loose sand and hard work, for a view out across the desert that is worth the effort. The lodge sits under some of the darkest skies in the country, with no town lights for hundreds of kilometres in any direction, making evenings here exceptional for stargazing Overnight: Mungo Lodge. Meals: B/L/D.

A final breakfast at the lodge, then the drive back towards Mildura with a stop at Wentworth, where the Darling River, the Baaka, meets the Murray. The two rivers arrive in different colours and take a while to mix, which is easier to see than to describe. Drop-off is at Mildura Airport around 12pm and in Mildura town around 12.30pm, so book onward flights for the early afternoon. Meals: B.