Ulupna Island Giant Bird Sculptures

Ulupna, Victoria, Australia

Public art

Current – limited access

Checked by Project Big Things · Sep 2026

This Big Thing is still here, but public access is limited. Check the access notes for details before visiting.

A group of oversized metal bird sculptures at Ulupna Island Pastoral: three cockatoos plus a wedge-tailed eagle and kookaburra, created by Tank and Steve Tobin.

Limited access
Check the access notes for details before visiting

Private to your Passport.

PLAN YOUR VISIT

No recommended arrival yet

We have not checked a recommended place to arrive or stop here yet.

This takes you to the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.

Ulupna Island Giant Bird Sculptures

This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.

Site-level location · 35.8228° S, 145.4668° E

FIELD GUIDE

The story

Five metal birds on a working rural property: three cockatoos, a wedge-tailed eagle and a kookaburra, by Tank and Steve Tobin.

The same makers are behind the superb parrot at Strathmerton, half an hour away, which gives this stretch of the Murray a small identifiable body of work by one pair of sculptors. That is unusual in this catalogue, where objects almost never come with an artist attached, let alone a repeat commission.

The species choice is a good one because it is not a set of icons. A wedge-tailed eagle is the obvious grand bird, but three cockatoos and a kookaburra are the ordinary loud residents of river red gum country – birds nobody travels to see, which is exactly why rendering them at scale changes how they read.

Ulupna Island itself is a genuine place, not a name. It is a river red gum island in the Murray within the Barmah-Millewa forest system, formed between the river and an anabranch, and it holds one of Victoria's few free-ranging koala populations along with substantial waterbird habitat. The forest is Ramsar-listed floodplain and among the most ecologically significant stretches of the whole river.

Current Murray tourism material promotes the installation at 610 Ulupna Bridge Road. The record is careful here: it is a rural property, and access should follow the operator's guidance rather than assuming a visitor may wander the place.

Nothing found establishes a date and the dimensions.

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PRACTICAL

Plan your stop

WHAT TO EXPECT

Current Victorian and Murray tourism material promotes the five-bird installation at 610 Ulupna Bridge Road. The catalogue now uses Visit Victoria’s mapped attraction destination as a site-level anchor rather than the former coarse Ulupna locality point. Access remains treated conservatively because the sculptures are on a rural property.

ACCESS

The Ulupna Island Giant Bird Sculptures are a group of oversized metal birds at Ulupna Island Pastoral, 610 Ulupna Bridge Road. Visit Victoria’s official attraction listing maps its Directions destination to -35.8227636, 145.4667616, replacing the former locality point more than 5 km away. Because the installation contains several birds around a rural property, this is a site anchor rather than a single-object centroid. Follow current operator/visitor guidance; a separate operator-approved vehicle parking or entrance point has not yet been independently verified.

COMMUNITY

Visitor Log

WHAT'S NEXT

Find another Big Thing nearby

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Current

The Big Murray Cod

Tocumwal, New South Wales

A giant Murray cod at Tocumwal Foreshore Park, first created in 1968 and later moved from the former swimming-pool site to the riverfront.

Roadside giants

8.9 km away

TRANSPARENCY

Sources & research

Visit NSW – Ulupna Island Bird Sculptures

Visit NSW · recorded 2026-08-23

Current tourism corroboration for the Ulupna installation, artists and address.

Tourism

Visit the Murray – Ulupna Island Bird Sculptures

Visit the Murray · recorded 2026-08-23

Current regional tourism page identifies the five giant metal birds and 610 Ulupna Bridge Road visitor address.

Tourism

Visit Victoria – Ulupna Island Bird Sculptures

Visit Victoria · recorded 2026-09-11

Official Victorian tourism listing gives 610 Ulupna Bridge Road and its Directions destination resolves to -35.8227636, 145.4667616. Used as a map-checked site anchor for the multi-sculpture installation, not as an individual bird centroid or parking claim.

Tourism

What we're still checking

Current attraction geography remains locality-level because Sprint 8 did not find defensible mapped/GIS/geotagged site or object geometry.

Open-licence image search completed 24 August 2026. No defensible reusable image with file-level commercial-use provenance was verified in the completed Commons, government/open-licence and archival/open-collection sweep.

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