The Sunrasia Highway is always one of my favourite ways to leave Ballarat. Despite the wonderfully twisted River Red Gum woodlands you drive through after Beafort, it's very easy to become tired of the over-travelled Western Highway, and the Calder is just a way to get from Bendigo to Mildura.

The Sunrasia, on the other hand, passes through some of the nicest small towns in Victoria (St Arnard is my favourite) and has a good variety of rolling scenery. If you live in Melbourne, try the Sunrasia next time you are going to Hattah or Mildura. On this Easter Thursday evening, as shown at left, it also offered a wonderful moonrise over the stubblefields north of Ouyen.

Finding Ned's Corner is easy. Finding the homestead on that vast property, on the other hand, needs daylight!

I'd managed to sneak out of the office two hours early, but arrived at Ned's just after 9:00 and needed both of those stolen hours to track the homestead down. Three kind locals in passing vehicles gave me directions — to three different places!

Eventually I was reduced to doing a brute-force search by elimination, driving down side roads one at a time until I struck it lucky. (In the meantime, I was treated to the sight of a pair of Spotted Nightjars hunting in the headlight beams. Many of us saw nightjars over the course of the campout: they seem to be quite common on the saltbush flats.)

Morning light revealed the Murray, and 20-odd Birds Australia people scattered along the bank (more would arrive as the day progressed). It was a delightful place to wake up in, but it turned out that almost everyone except Euan was in the wrong place.

Two points of view emerged. Theory (a) held that it was all caused by faulty navigation in the face of perfectly clear directions. Theory (b), on the other hand, claimed that BA members were perfectly capable of good navigation and the directions were ... well, a little vague. Despite the majority declaring themselves in favour of theory (b), Euan's spot was a darn good campsite, so we moved.

Ned's Corner is a vast property: 30,000 hectares in all. There are essentially just two habitat types: arid saltbush plains with only very occasional stunted trees; and the Red Gums on the banks of the Murray River.

Once you leave the river and its parched floodplains — these days starved of water by irrigation diversions and badly in need of natural winter-spring floods — it is all saltbush country: harsh, barren, and flat in both shape and colour.

It is one of the eternal Australian paradoxes, I think, that this colourless, featureless, barren landscape is host to spectacular displays of light and colour. Nowhere in the fertile south can we see the subtle interplays of sunlight and atmosphere that give rise to the picture at left, and to the others scattered through the selection below. For a photographer, it is irresistible.

On the first day, Good Friday, Euan led us on an introductory tour of the property, mainly concentrating on the areas close to the river. As always, I stuck to driving my own car on the (dubious) grounds that carting all that photographic gear around is too much trouble any other way. Elisabeth S. volunteered to accompany me and, by some mysterious form of group delegation, also seemed to have been elected chief gate shutting officer.

No matter: the company was good and the birding rewarding. This overexposed but handsome Red-kneed Dotterel was one of several foraging together with a dozen or so Black-fronted Dotterels on a drying billabong some way upstream of the homestead. Elizabeth and I spent quite a time admiring them and almost had to be dragged away by the other members.

More Melbourne members had arrived through the course of Friday, and by Saturday morning Tim and Richard were here to help Euan out with leading trips to several different destinations.

Tim's Murray-Sunset expedition got off to a bad start with two flat tyres to change — not a good sign when we hadn't even left Ned's Corner camp yet! This time John was my companion for the day. By the time we neared the Sturt Highway at the border of the property, it was already after 9:00 am, and there was only an hour of quality birding time left.

Some hurried photography of the Blue Bonnets Tim spotted by the roadside yielded only poor shots. For photography, rule one is get close to the bird: that takes time — and ideally, it takes a species less shy than Blue Bonnets: I always find them challenging. The one at left is from the other side of the Murray and pleases me much more. It was taken a few weeks afterwards, somewhere up near Moulamein.

Three hours and many birds later, we reached our destination — the camping ground on Pheenys Track — and began hunting for Mallee Emu-wrens. These were not in evidence, but we were consoled with many pardalotes and honeyeaters and a Shy Heathwren — this one a first for me. (No picture of the heathwren, alas.)

On the way back we made a lightning stop in a patch of mallee that seemed to me to be particularly bird-rich (pictured a little further below). I had to be torn away from it by main force, and resolved to return first thing in the morning.

Finally, two scenes from the drive back to camp. Both are of the wide open spaces in the northern part of Murray-Sunset National Park, with Ned's Corner in the far distance of the second shot.

Notice the wonderful colours, soft and yet rich.

The last two days had been a great education for me, and I'd met all sorts of interesting birds, but I was overdue for a proper photography fix. (Yes, I'm an addict!) Malfunctioning camera or not, I wanted to be back at the patch of mallee I mentioned above, and there at first light. With an hour of travel involved this meant a horribly early start, but the it was well worth it — and not just for the magnificent Mallee sunrise on the way.

Here is the spot.

For the first hour or so, confusion reigned — the best sort of confusion, where there are several different parties of different birds and it's hard to know which one to concentrate on. You no sooner focus on an interesing bird than a rarer or more difficult one pops up. Stay with the one you are in position for? Or throw caution to the winds and chance your luck by setting up for that second bird before it disappears? Or maybe just dither around trying to do both and wind up with shots of neither?

These special times when the birds are everywhere are more stressful than any city traffic jam, and more fun than anything you can do wih the lights out. More rewarding too, even on a bad day.

A lot of shots went begging because of the camera problem, but I was reasonably happy with this Hooded Robin — I'd wanted a male Hooded Robin shot for ages, but only had females.

There were Yellow-plumed Honeyeaters everywhere and 20-odd species all up. I have notes somewhere, but from memory they included: Spotted Pardalotes, a great many Striated Pardalotes, various thornbills (Inland and Chestnut-rumped, I think), Crested Bellbirds calling often, White-eared, Striped, and White-fronted Honeyeaters, Jacky Winters of course, four (possibly six) Hooded Robins playing complicated chasing games with one another, a Grey Shrike-thrush, and the odd Mulga Parrot passing through.

Belinda and I returned to the Sunset Country a few weeks later, and made a bee-line for this same great spot, only to discover — to my rage and horror — that it has been deliberately burned out by Parks Victoria. OK, we need control burns from time to time, but this was a very special spot and the burn itself was enormous. The blackened, lifeless mallee runs all along the northern side of Pheenys Track for mile after mile after mile.

I cannot accept the claim that burning on this massive scale is environmentally responsible or helpful. To the best of our knowledge, patchwork burning has been a part of this country's environmental heritage for the last 50,000 years. This, however, was not patchwork burning. The whole point of patchwork burning is that the burns are frequent and small, not vast conflagrations that spread half the length of the second-largest National Park in Victoria. (No picture of this: I was too sad and angry, and just drove on past with gritted teeth.)

Eventually the day warmed up and the action died away. I moved on, back to the same place on Pheenys Track we had all been to the previous day. The landscape at left should provide some sense of the scale of the Sunset Country — not a good place to get lost in! On a cloudy day, you could be utterly confused within a few hundred yards of your car.

Still no sign of an emu-wren, but more thornbills and honeyeaters, and a moderate-sized plain grey-brown bird that seemed like the oddest-sounding Grey Shrike-thrush I had ever heard. Here is the call: download the mp3. Later, I realised the reason for the oddness: it was a female Gilbert's Whistler. (Thankyou for emailing those whistler calls Tim!)

It was too late for serious birding by then. In this dry country, on a clear day it's all over by about 10:30. Those first two or (if you are lucky) first three hours of daylight are crucial. With no birding left to do, it was time to return to camp — very carefully, as I'd carelessly spiked a tyre on the way in and had used the only spare.

This spot, maybe a couple of kilometres from the bottom end of North-South Settlement Road, looked less than promising, but despite the midday heat it was well populated: mostly Yellow-plumed Honeyeaters, a smaller number of Fuscious Honeyeaters mixed in with them, pardalotes, thornbills, and — to my complete delight — a pair of Gilbert's Whistlers.

The male, in true whistler style, was only too happy to approach me when I inexpertly imitated his call, and provide an extended lesson in how this whistle thing should be done. It was the perfect photo opportunity, but two things interfered: I couldn't get far enough away from the bird to get him all in frame, and right at the worst possible moment my wonky camera decided to go into overexpose-everything mode again. Rarely have I felt so many conflicting emotions at the same time: surprise, curiosity, great delight, and utter black rage at the faulty Nikon. (That's a heavily reprocessed example shot at left, but as you can see, it's terribly over-exposed and unusable outside this context.)

I stopped for lunch, then continued north, eventually meeting, for the first time all day, another vehicle. It turned out to be Euan's party. They told me that, after a most successful morning, they too had stopped for lunch, pausing only to admire this beautiful cockroach. Having no objection to lunching twice in half an hour, I joined them. We slowly motored north together. Euan stopped at one point for something of moderate interest and then discovered instead a Cinnamon Quail-thrush — another new bird for me, and an excellent view of it too. Finally we tried the same spot in the north of the park where they had seen Orange Chats earlier, but without success this time.

Back to Ned's Corner. Saltbush ... more saltbush ... the river ... camp ... food ...

... cold beer ... good company ... and one of the best sunsets you could ever ask for.

About half the party had to head back to Melbourne on the Monday, we others planned to do a little birding and then move on to Hattah for the night before driving home on Tuesday. Geoff and Karen and I teamed up to visit the Yarrara Bushland Reserve: a magnificent stand of Calitris and Casurina forest.

Oddly, after my enthusiastic rant about the virtues of a really early start, the forest was near-silent at first light. Was this because Tuesday was cool and overcast? Or is it a peculiarity of the habitat type? A subsequent visit seems to confirm the latter. If you are going to Yarrara, don't trouble too much about getting there early. Better yet, start early but spend the first hour or two in some nearby mallee where the birds are active.

On this morning only the odd Australian Raven and a smattering of Singing Honeyeaters were in evidence. We persevered for an hour or so and, gradually, the bush woke up around us. Karen spotted a pair of Grey Fantails — a very common bird in many parts of the state, but one which had gone almost unsighted on this trip. Geoff found Eastern Ringnecks and Mulga Parrots, while I was stalking Southern Whitefaces and (to my delight) a female Crested Bellbird.

At that point we spotted the first treecreeper of the day. Brown or White-browed? We needed a better view. Here was a dilemma! Which bird to chase? We chose the treecreeper and, five minutes or so later got close enough to confirm that it was indeed White-browed. From that time on, White-browed Treecreepers were sighted regularly. They became quite bold and we had excellent views.

White-browed Babblers were plentiful (and vocal, of course), as were a number of other woodland birds: plenty of Hooded Robins and Jacky Winters, the odd Red-capped Robin, and another couple of female Crested Bellbirds.

The most memorable part of all, for me though, was a large feeding flock that I fell in with: some pardalotes, a Yellow Thornbill, a pair of Rufous Whistlers, a couple of White-browed Treecreepers and best of all, a whole crowd of hyperactive Chestnut-rumped Thornbills foraging all around me and calling all the while.

Yarrara really is a place of extraordinary beauty.

A small group of dedicated office-avoiders remained at Hattah. My highlight, as always at Hattah, was catching up with old friends.

The picture at left, kindly sent to be by John, shows me sharing a particularly greasy hamburger I'd bought in Red Cliffs with the Happy Family. (That old Queensland term for Apostlebirds always seems particularly appropriate to me.) My small grey friends seemed to have a much higher opinion of the chef's skills than I did!

Tim took us off into the spinifex looking for Mallee Emu-wrens in the evening, and again in the morning.

We didn't find any, but enjoyed an excellent patch of pristine spinifex mallee habitat and met lots of other interesting and beautiful creatures, notably more of the spectacular Striped Honeyeaters we had seen for the first time overhead in the River Red Gums at Ned's. (Well, the first time for many of us, and very welcome too — they are a particularly handsome honeyeater and their calls are delightful.)

Other birds of interest were found first thing in the morning up near the main park entrance (terrible light on that overcast day, so some of the pictures that follow are poor but I've included a couple anyway). Highlights included a good range of honeyeaters, mostly White-cheeked, but several others ...

... Jacky Winters, of course ...

... plenty of pardalotes ...

... and what is this Spotted Pardalote doing gathering bark? Surely it's not nesting at this time of year?

And this beautiful young Crested Bellbird.

Karen, Geoff and I detoured via Lake Tyrell on the way home, with the hope of finding Rufous Fieldwrens and Orange Chats. (Tim and his party had called in there on the way up and tipped us off.)

To our delight, both birds were found: the fieldwrens without much difficulty, the chats well out on the shores of the dry salt lake. I got pictures of both species but from too far away in that fading light to be worth posting here. We also found a variety of other birds, including a number of Blue-winged Parrots, the inevitable Singing Honeyeaters, and a flock of perhaps a dozen White-fronted Chats.

Geoff and Karen were particularly taken with the parrots; for me the highlight was seeing how wader-like the Orange Chats are — they are really a sort of honeyeater, after all, yet having taken to a life on the edge of the salt lakes, they have adopted the same mannerisms as a stint or a dotterel, right down to the frozen, head-cocked pauses and the rapid, stuttering runs.