Mungo National Park

On the map, the lakes of the Willandra Lakes World Heritage Area show up as big blue expanses, a deception. In reality, they are dry, salty, scrubby plains and have been thus for most of the past 10 000 years. So we didn't come here for the swimming, but instead, the Wall of China, a 33 km long white sand dune. It was very beautiful and, of course, we visited it at sunset to capture the colours.





But the thing about this outback park is not so much what you see now but the stories in it. 40 000 years ago, these were permanent lakes with huge wombat creatures, 3 metre tall kangaroos, giant Tasmanian tigers, and the ancestors of the local Aborigine groups all living here. As the winds have sifted through the sands of the dune, bones of these extinct animals, the people and their artifacts have been uncovered. Two most famous discoveries are of Mungo Women (1969) and Mungo Man (1974), two people that were buried here around 40 000 years ago in a ritualized manner. They are, as the archaeologist who found them, Jim Bowler, says, 'the earliest evidence on earth of cultural sophistication.' It just make you ponder our human history--the immensity of time we're dealing with and how very little we really know of our collective past.

The Outback

I loved the outback. It was very flat, dusty and dry with scrubby bush and a few red rocky hills amidst the sandy soil. I admit, it does remind me of my home province Saskatchewan. It's different in a lot of ways but evokes that sense of spaciousness and the wind was ever constant.




This deisel drum is one of the outback mailboxes. Remote stations (i.e. big ranches) and national parks like this one get mail delivered weekly, as long as roads are passable.

Ohh laa laa, the view from our tent in the morning at Mungo National Park. While chilly, it was at least dry enough to sleep with the fly off and the screen open--divine! Look at the red red earth!





Scrub, scrub, scrub and one very long fence just out of Silverton. Some of the stations are millions of acres big.

Interesting but sad fact: it's so dry and dusty in the Outback that kids often get ear infections that, if untreated, cause them to go deaf. In a town near Uluru, a good chunk of the little kids have hearing aids. The solution? A community salt water pool like the one in Jigaloo (a town featured in Rabbit Proof Fence). See all the interesting things you learn as a Social Studies teacher watching the weekly news program with the kids?