Phillip Island, Australia: Koalas, Kangaroos and a Penguin Parade

Woolamai Peninsula, Phillip Island

Excerpt from my diary of our three month trip to Australia in 1999.  Our trip to Phillip Island was in late February.
On Sunday we took a day trip to Phillip Island, which is about two hours south of Melbourne.  It is mostly agricultural, but people have summer cottages there and it is also a good place to see wildlife.  By the time we arrived it was lunchtime, so we bought some food and took it to the beach on the Woolamai Peninsula for a picnic.  The long sandy beach faces the Bass Strait (the body of water that separates Tasmania from Australia) and we watched the huge waves come crashing in and the surfers trying to catch them. 

Mother and baby koala take a nap

In the afternoon we visited a Koala sanctuary, where you can see koalas both in their natural state (where they look like furry lumps high in the treetops) and up close in a special enclosure.  We also went to a wildlife park where you can walk among the kangaroos, emus, deer, and other animals.  When you buy your ticket they give you a bag of food for the animals, so if you hold your hand out, the animals will come and eat.  Some of them are more aggressive than others, and one emu actually pulled the bag of food out of my pocket when I didn’t offer it anything to eat.

A young grey kangaroo waits for a snack

We had an early supper at a supposed Tex-Mex restaurant (it lost something in the translation) and then made our way to the Penguin Parade, Phillip Island’s most famous wildlife feature.  Every evening at dusk, hundreds of fairy penguins come in from a day at sea, waddle up the beach and into their burrows in the sand dunes.  During nesting season, which is just ending now, the plump chicks wait at the entrance of the burrow for their parents to come back with dinner.

Waiting for the penguins to come ashore

Fairy penguins are the smallest of all penguins and stand about a foot high and are quite charming, especially the superfat ones which have put on extra weight to give them energy while they stay ashore for several weeks and molt.  The unfortunate thing about the Penguin Parade is that it has been over commercialized and they let too many people in to watch.  More than two thousand tourists sit on bleachers and wait for the penguins and then rush around trying to see them next the boardwalk when they come in.  Rather amazingly, and luckily, the penguins don’t seem fazed by all the human activity.  We had a nice, relatively warm evening, perfect for penguin watching and sunset at the beach, but I suspect that when the weather is less hospitable, far fewer people are willing to sit out in the cold and the birds are less bothered.

Fairy penguins return to their nests after a day at sea.