Air Adventure Australia

Destination Profile - Mungo National Park, New South Wales

The Willandra Lakes World Heritage area, with Mungo National Park at its centre, maintains a continuous record of human occupation stretching back well over 40,000 years. Rain and wind has uncovered ancient fireplaces and hearths, as well as calcified plant matter, artefacts, stone tools and animal bones. At the 33 kilometre long crescent of the Walls of China, erosion has sculpted the sand and clay into dramatic formations.

Mungo National Park covers most of an ancient dry lakebed. During the last ice age, Lake Mungo was one of a chain of freshwater lakes strung along the Willandra Creek.

The Walls of China are a feature of the Mungo Lake lunette. Over thousands of years, wind and water have carved spectacular formations comprised of sand and clay. Rain washes away the soft sands and muds of the lunette, creating the rilled ridges and residuals that characterise the Walls of China. The dislodged sand is then picked up by the wind and heaped into huge mobile dunes along the back of the lunette.

This erosion has uncovered extensive Aboriginal objects, which indicate a large population in the past. The bones of animals commonly referred to as megafauna that lived in the area many thousands of years ago have also been revealed.

Mungo Man

In the Pleistocene pre-history period, when these lakes contained water, people lived on the lunettes, fished and hunted near the lakes and occasionally buried their dead in the soft sand. In 1968, Jim Bowler, who was researching the development of the lakes and their associated lunettes, came across the exposed calcrete block containing the Lake Mungo 1 cremation.

Recent reassessment of the radiocarbon dates the remains closer to 17,000 years in age. Even at this younger date Lake Mungo 1 remains the oldest, reasonably well dated, human burial in Australia and possibly the earliest human cremation from anywhere in the world.

This destination is part of the Unseen Centre Australian Adventure.