When you travel, you can learn with your feet!

Back in November 2010 my wife and I made a trip to the Mungo National Park in NSW. This is an area where human remains dating back approximately 40,000 years were discovered. We travelled there from Mildura in Victoria in a four wheel drive, and the trip included approximately 100km of dirt road, so I definitely recommend not taking a regular car.

Lake Mungo is an ancient dried lake bed which until 15 thousand years ago, was a source of food and water for native Australians. As you approach from the west, it is defined by a massive 35km sand-dune that runs down the far side. The impression is of a huge dry crater when you get your first view, and it feels like a place from another time, which it pretty much is, and if you have any recollection of the 1960’s show ‘Time Tunnel’, there is a strange feeling that you just tumbled into one of their episodes.

The lake viewed from the dune

The highlight is walking around the dune on the far side of the lake, it is here that you are liable to make some ancient discoveries with your feet. The dune acts like a real-time geology class. Yep, you are actually learning about the past, as you walk over it. The wind blows the sand and dust off the dry lake-bed, and this builds up to form the dune. But with weathering, and the progress of time, the sand shifts around, and collectively travels a meter or so each year.

This movement causes the dune to churn as it moves, and the effect is that different fossils successively rise to the surface, so what is revealed one year will be different from the next. You literally have to watch where you walk, in case the reading of the past that is presented to you, is damaged by your enquiring steps. Our guide was of the opinion that with time, many more human remains will be discovered as they rise back up from the soft sand that they were originally buried in.

Ancient fire pit

Walking across the dune is a learning experience. Fossils are so plentiful, that as we walked, our guide pointed out the remains of a fire-pit recently exposed on the surface, which like the shells and assorted animal bones, dated back to when this area was a productive wetland, and frequented by the nomadic people of the time. Mungo National Park is worth a visit, the stillness and the emptiness can make you feel like you have experienced the planet in a way that is unique, and rarely possible, I got the feeling that the earth remembers all. 

Another view from the dune