Mungo Magic

Mungo National Park is part of a lake system that dried up some 15,000 years ago. Locals in Balranald recount how they still get enthusiastic tourists arriving with a tinnie on a trailer, all set, but 15,000 years too late to go boating.

For our Mungo Christmas Eve, we took the corrugated 20km track from the Main Camp across the dried lakebed to Red Top, a magnificent lookout on the lunette, a crescent-shaped dune stretching round the defunct lakebed.

Ice from the Esky chilled a nice bottle of Skinny Girl Margarita and as accompaniment, we scoffed a Belgian chocolate bombe with mixed forest berries as our pudding whilst the sunset sky burst into flame clouds.

 At main camp, we had a choice site next to the shade of a fruiting wilga which attracted pink cockatoos, honeyeaters and a sociable emu who stood quietly behind my chair and then suffered a diarrhoea attack to spread berries and good cheer for Christmas.


Vigars Wells, used as a watering hole for thousands of years, has huge sand dunes rising behind where the wind whips across the crests and covers microtracks of tiny reptiles. Sunset shifts from shadows to dazzling ripples of liquid gold. Fretful emus queue at a respectful distance to visit the water.

Boxing Day, we returned to Round Top tank at sunrise.

As the sun rose, a procession of wildlife visited the tank: a huge feral cat on the prowl; flocks of budgerigars twisting in aerial flashes before dipping for mere seconds in the water; emus crouching low and shuffling forward on their long legs to scoop water into their beaks; and galahs and pink cockatoos sidling down the stems of reeds to drink upside down.