Wide Open – Days 20-22 – Lake Mungo

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.

I’ve wanted to visit here since I first learned about it a couple years after moving to Australia permanently in 2001. It just seemed like a place of such significance for the country and its people that it should be somewhere every Australian would visit and pay respects.

And so, 25 years later, I’m here to do that. I want to absorb the geomorphology because that is where my nerdy interests lie, but I also want to appreciate and deepen my respect for the cultural history of the Barkindji, Mutthi Mutthi and Ngiyampaa peoples.

Over the next three days, I do all the walks on offer from the campground and visitor centre, I check out all of the educational displays at various sites in the park, and I do the part of the self-drive loop that is open (it has been closed for over a month beyond Red Top Lookout because of the on-going top-ups of rain making the road too boggy to open – it still remained closed even after I was home from my tour, so I didn’t miss its reopening by mere days or anything!).

On the Friday morning, the fog lies thick and stubborn. The wind flings the droplets against the tent and it sounds like light rain. Consequently, I sleep in. After so many early starts, it is nice to snooze in my tent and not have anywhere I need to be.

I then go over to the visitor information centre to look at the exhibits. It is underwhelming and presents a very ‘safe’ and conservative story of the site. (There seems to be interpretive material around the national park from about 1998 and 2010 – the latter stuff is a bit better).

Ranger Michelle sees me and says, “Hi Emily, I passed you yesterday coming across the lake about 11am and knew you’d have no trouble making it here. You are welcome to move your stuff over to the Shearers Quarters anytime. I just went and had a look and made sure everything was ready.” Two old people look at me with quizzical looks, like ‘who is she that the ranger knows her name and she gets some sort of special treatment’? Ha!

After the fog lifts, I go and do the foreshore walk that takes you along the lake floor and then up along the red dune crest on the western side of the old lake. I really enjoy the big callitris pines here – this ecosystem and these trees were such a casualty of white settlement in this area that it is a joy to see some big old ones about the place. I really enjoy that low-pitched whir sound of the wind through their needles. Wind through eucalypt leaves sounds more swishy and high-pitched. I’m super-sensitive to noise and pitch – and my preferences are firmly with ‘low’ and ‘soft’.

I talk to two ladies in the campground as I pack up the tent, and they wonder if this is my first trip. Do those panniers look like this is their first trip? I tell them, “No, this trip has a lot of logistical difficulty, it’s not what I’d do my first time out.” It shows how clueless the general public is about what it takes to go for a long ride. They then ask, “So you enjoy it then?” Well, yes, you would not ride your bike all the way out to Lake Mungo if it wasn’t something you deeply enjoyed!

Very early on Saturday morning, the walls of the Cook’s Quarters glow red through the translucent louvre window. Either there is a bushfire coming or that’s going to be an amazing sunrise. It is the latter – perhaps one of the best I’ve seen in my life.

Shortly after this, I head off on the bike to ride out to the lunette. There is rain on the radar to the south and I don’t know how fast it will move. In case it rains heaps and the roads are closed tomorrow, I don’t want to miss my chance to see it.

The lake is 10 kms across. It is silent except for the birds that flit between the saltbush and copperburr. The layers of grey clouds add more texture to the pale greys and greens of the lakebed. The lunette is a mix of creamy white, deep reds, pink and dirty grey. At times, the sky turns a darker blue in the background where clouds hold rain in the distance. It is all subtle colour that belies the intensity of history here.

There’s multiple layers out there in the lunette (research continues to add and redfine layers) that you can identify with help from the signs at the Walls of China site –

Gol Gol Unit: The oldest, orange-red basal layer of sand and soil that is over 100,00 years old.

Mungo Unit: Lower unit – quartz rich between 67,000 and 33,000 years ago formed in stable, high water phases of the lake and Upper unit – Grey, clay-and-quartz rich sediments formed between 36,000 and 30,000 years ago.

Arumpo Unit: 30,000 to 19,000 years ago – when the lake had fluctuating levels – sandy clay that is orange to grey.

Zanci Unit: Pale brown upper layers formed 19,000-16,000 years ago composed of wind-blown clay pellets from drying, shrinking mudflats, formed in the lake’s final drying phase

The Red Top lookout shows the erosion and a bit of the breadth of the lunette.

Between the Walls of China and the Red Top lookout, there are bits of the lunette that have some vegetation that grows up gentle slopes and indentations as a fuzzy green contrasted against the whites of the steeper, eroded slopes. The lunette is eroding at the rate of 1 metre per year. It constantly reveals animal bones, middens, tools and human remains (the Custodians stabilise, recover and leave these in place) from the Mungo Unit as all the sediment is blown to the top and over the lunette crest.

My early start means I have the whole area to myself and plenty of time to ponder time and scale and significance. It lets me put everything together in my head. And it lets me pay my respects to the oldest, continuous living culture on earth.

There is so much more to the geomorphology and cultural history (particularly about repatriating the remains of Mungo Lady, Mungo Man and other remains) that I haven’t shared here that I spend time getting my head around out here with no one around.

The rain does come. But not til Saturday night. It first comes as a hesitant pitter patter on the steel rooves of the Shearer’s Quarters. Then, later, it comes like a very gentle spray from a hose, mostly like the sound of ‘whiiiish’. Later, more persistent showers arrive and last into the night with heavier, larger drops. All up, they get about 4.5mm – not enough to close the roads this time. Good!

I spend some time on Sunday doing the 10km walk out to the Zanci homestead. I have a look at the woolsheds briefly.

Later, I head off to find a quiet spot in the red sand dunes that overlook the lake. I sit in the sun, out of the wind, and let myself just absorb the enormity of the landscape and its history – so little of which I’ve shared here because of the sheer volume of the history and the size of the time scale. Google is your friend, and so is annual leave – go check it out, it’s absolutely worth whatever effort it takes for you to get there.