Out Here Nothing Changes, Not in a Hurry anyway…
Yesterday we found ourselves in Mungo National Park which is one of the most interesting places I have ever visited. I could hear the hum of the didgeridoo in the distance in my mind and Shane Howard’s lyrics from Solid Rock spun through my mind all day. The photos in the gallery below don’t really do it justice, but hopefully they’ll provide some idea of what it is like out there.
In terms of landscape, Lake Mungo is pretty eerie and remote, but it also has a most interesting and long history and has been the site of some very significant archeological finds including Mungo Lady (ritually buried 40,000 years ago), Mungo Man (ritually buried 50,000 years ago) and ancient footprints of people (from around 20,000 years ago).
The Lake itself is part of a system of lakes which have been dry since about 20,000 years ago when the changing climate altered the water courses and changed the Australian coast line. I could make this an historical essay, but it probably makes more sense to add in a link Mungo National Park | NSW National Parks so that if you’re interested you can learn more from more informed scholarly types.
From Mildura, where we are staying, we had about a 90 minute drive, most of which was on a dirt road heading into what seemed like (and what turned out to be) pretty much the middle of nowhere. It was a great chance to test out the recent improvements that have been made to the dust-proofing of the canopy. Sadly the canopy pretty much failed the test, and we’ll be revisiting that with the extra seals that we bought in Shepperton (Clark Rubber is your sealing friend in Australia).
We had to leave the dog at the local vet for doggy day care while we went into the national park (cheapest trip to the vet that we’ve ever had) and so had to be back to pick him up by 4.30pm.
We cracked on pretty smartly once we arrived at the Lake Mungo visitor centre, which the kids thought was one of the best we’ve been to. It had a lot of very interesting information about the archeological finds, pre-historic animals (giant kangaroos, and other strange things) as well as some really informative and easy-to-read stories about the aboriginal history of the area.
We slurped down some morning tea and then went out for a walk from the visitor centre, which is located at the site of the shearing shed which has been out of use for some time. In the late 19th century (1869) when it was built it was a huge business and the size of the original station (Gol Gol) was astounding (200,000 + Hectares).
After returning from the walk around the red dunes, we went through the shearing shed and then scoffed down a quick lunch before heading out to the Wall of China. This name apparently relates to the Chinese workers who built the shearing shed and also because it looks like a large wall from the shed itself. I guess nicknames can stick a long time, and the origins may be unclear.
It is in fact the bank of the lake and has been eroded over the last 20,000 years to reveal some of the secrets of the ancient inhabitants from the times when there was permanent water in the lake. The lake itself only sees water now if there are significant and very local flooding rains, and even then it is nothing like what it was previously.
It seems that a large part of the significance of the site is that it shows some of what aboriginal life was like in Australia before the end of the last ice age, which was before the people of the area adapted to a nomadic lifestyle as the lakes dried up and they had to move to survive.
Of great interest to me is a culture that took care of its people enough to treat them carefully after death. This pre-dates the pyramids in Egypt by about 45,000 years.
We couldn’t actually see all of the places of interest due to some of the roads within the park still being closed after flood damage in 2019. I guess there are so many flood-damaged roads in NSW on the to-do list that the Mungo roads aren’t top priority for the State Government yet. Our doggy day care timing would have made it pretty rushed anyway if we’d had to try and squeeze everything in.
Next time we’ll leave the dog at home and camp out on site so we can visit the different sites over a few days.
Enjoy the photos!
