12-14 June 2026 – 44 kms – Lake Mungo National Park
Barkindji, Mutthi Mutthi and Ngiyampaa Country
Hundreds of thousands of years ago, the Willandra Lakes System formed in a climate much colder and wetter than today. The large river filled about 17 basins with water from the mountains to the east. The levels of the lakes fluctuated with the climate over 100,000 years or so.
Around 50,000 years ago, First Nations peoples arrived, the ancestors of the Barkindji, Mutthi Mutthi and Ngiyampaa, and lived in the area. Around 18,000 years ago, as the climate shifted again, the lakes dried up and the First Nations people adapted to a more nomadic lifestyle that continued until squatters and pastoralists arrived in the area in the mid-1800s. In the late 1800s, drought, overgrazing and rabbits removed the groundcover and accelerated erosion of 30-km-long lunette on the eastern shore of Lake Mungo.
Then, a geomorphologist named Jim Bowler was studying the formation of the lakes and their lunettes in the late 1960s and early 1970s. While wandering around the Lake Mungo lunette, he came across part of a skull. Archeologists were called in. This was the discovery of Mungo Lady. Her remains showed evidence of cremation and is recognised as the world’s oldest evidence of this ritual.
A couple years later Mungo Man was stumbled upon. He was buried in a ritual manner with ochre and his hands folded across his lap. The remains were subsequently dated to 42,000 years ago which upended white Australia’s understanding of how long First Nations peoples have been in Australia. At the time it was thought they’d been here maybe 15,000 years. Some of the tools found here have been dated even older than the human remains.
In the early 1980s, Lake Mungo and the Willandra Lakes Region was declared a World Heritage area by UNESCO for its outstanding natural and cultural heritage. World Heritage status provides extensive and unique protections to the area. And all that science and political declaration confirmed what the First Nations people already knew – their ancestors had been here for a very, very long time. Since the Dreamtime.
And that is the very quick summary story of Lake Mungo and its significance.
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