Lake Mungo

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The wind does the digging here. It comes off the saltbush plain and scours at a long pale wall of sand that runs for more than thirty kilometers along the eastern rim of a lake that has held no water for many thousands of years. The early pastoralists, looking at the eroded pinnacles, called the formation the Walls of China. What the wind uncovers, as it strips the dune grain by grain, is the floor of a vanished world: hearths gone to charcoal, the bones of fish and emu and giant marsupials, grindstones, and — twice, a few hundred meters apart — the dead, laid down with care in a time so deep that the cities of every other continent still lay tens of thousands of years in the future.

This is Lake Mungo, one of a chain of dry basins in the far southwest of New South Wales known as the Willandra Lakes. It lies in the arid inland, some 760 kilometers west of Sydney and ninety northeast of Mildura, a place of red earth and silver-grey scrub. The ground holds the oldest secure evidence yet found anywhere for the ritual treatment of the human dead — and it is the ancestral Country of three peoples who never left it.

The Country and its making

For most of the Pleistocene the basin was not dry. Through the long ages of the last glacial cycle the Willandra system filled with snowmelt and rain carried down Willandra Creek from the highlands to the east, and Lake Mungo lay broad and fresh under the sun. Its waters held golden perch and Murray cod and freshwater mussels; the shores drew waterbirds and emu, and the plains around carried kangaroo and the great vanished megafauna of ice-age Australia. People lived along that shore. They cooked mussels in the coals, ground seed on flat stones, took fish from the shallows, and built the fires whose ash and charcoal the dune still gives back. The lunette itself — the great crescent dune the pastoralists named — was built by the wind across those long millennia, layer upon layer of lake-clay and sand, a stratified archive forty meters high in places and stretching for some thirty-three kilometers along the old eastern shore. Around fourteen to fifteen thousand years ago, as the climate dried, the lakes emptied for the last time and did not refill. The Country became the semi-desert it is now.

For the peoples whose Country this is, the lake and its forming are not a closed chapter of geology but the work of the creation-time, the order the ancestral beings set into the land and that endures in it. This is the Country of the Paakantyi — also written Barkandji, the people of the Barka, the Darling River — together with the Mutthi Mutthi and the Ngiyampaa. Their forebears were the people who fished the full lake and lit the hearths, and the line between those people and the living communities is unbroken; the law that bound the one binds the other. Much of what that law holds is restricted knowledge, men’s business and women’s business not open to outsiders, and it is not recounted here. What can be said plainly is that the descendants of the lake-dwellers regard the ground, and the ancestors it holds, as theirs by a continuity that the science of the place has only confirmed.

That continuity is not a metaphor stretched across an empty gap. The hearths in the lunette, the fish-bone and the mussel-shell middens, the grindstones worn smooth by the milling of seed — these are the daily traces of people who lived as the present custodians’ ancestors lived, on Country read as a web of meaning rather than a stretch of dirt. In the Aboriginal understanding the land is inscribed by the journeys of ancestral beings whose tracks bind place to place across vast distances, and a person belongs to a Country as much as the Country belongs to a person. The ochre that would be carried to Mungo Man’s grave came from somewhere along such a track; the seed that was ground at the lake grew where it did because of how the creation-time had arranged the world. To call the people of the full lake “early Australians” is accurate as chronology and thin as description. They were a society with law, with ceremony, with a settled cosmology — the same kind of order, in its own forms, that any of the world’s traditions would recognize as religion.

The Walls of China, the wind-eroded lunette on the dry eastern shore of Lake Mungo. Photo by Will Hore-Lacy, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

What the dune gave up

In July 1968 a geologist from the University of Melbourne, Jim Bowler, mapping the old shorelines of the Willandra to read their climate history, came upon burned and broken human bone weathering out of the lunette. The remains, when they were studied, told an extraordinary story. They were those of a woman — the world came to call her Mungo Lady — and her body had not simply been left to the ground. It had been burned, then the surviving bones had been deliberately smashed and burned a second time, and the crushed remains gathered and buried. This is cremation as a considered rite, performed in stages, and at an age that has been placed at the order of forty thousand years and more, it is the oldest evidence of cremation known anywhere on earth.

Six years later, in February 1974, after rain and wind had shifted the sand, Bowler found a second burial a few hundred meters off. This was a man, Mungo Man, who had lived perhaps fifty years — a long life for the time. He had not been burned. He had been laid out full length on his back, his hands brought together at the groin, and his body strewn with powdered red ochre. The ochre is the heart of the matter. It does not occur at the lake; the nearest sources lie a great distance off, and the mineral had been carried — by one account more than two hundred kilometers — to be scattered over the dead man at his interment. To carry a pigment that far for the dressing of a grave is not casual disposal. It is ceremony, with all that ceremony implies: a sense of the dead as owed something, a conception of what happens to a person when the body fails. Among securely dated burials, Mungo Man’s is one of the oldest known anywhere in which the body was treated with such deliberate rite.

Set the two together and the meaning sharpens. Tens of thousands of years before the raising of the first pyramids or ziggurats, the people of this lakeshore were burning their dead in stages, crushing and burying the bone, and carrying ochre across hundreds of kilometers to anoint the body of an honored man. The mind that does this is a mind with a cosmology — a settled understanding of death and of the standing of the dead, the kind of understanding that the Aboriginal Australians carried in the Dreaming, the ever-present order that the ancestral beings laid into the world. What other traditions would later argue out in scripture about the soul and the fate of the dead, the people of Mungo had already enacted in the ground, in ochre and fire, before written language existed. The deep antiquity of the place is established fact; the inner meaning the lake-people gave to fire and ochre is theirs, and largely closed, and not for reconstruction by outsiders who do not hold the law.

The two rites differ, and the difference is itself instructive. Mungo Lady was given to fire; her bones were burned, broken, and burned again before burial — a sequence too elaborate to be anything but intended, the staged undoing of the body that cremation traditions the world over would later formalize. Mungo Man was given to the earth whole, arranged with his hands brought together and dressed in red. The same community, within the span of a few thousand years on the same shore, practiced both the consigning of the dead to fire and the careful laying-out of the body in ochre. This is not a single funerary habit but a repertoire — a range of ways of treating the dead, chosen and varied, of the kind that signals a developed sense of what death is and what is owed to those who have died. The convergence with rites that elsewhere underwrite ideas of immortality and rebirth is plain; the specific beliefs the Mungo people held are not recoverable from the bones, and the traditions that descend from them keep their own counsel. Red ochre runs through Aboriginal ceremony across the continent as the color of blood, of the body, of the ancestral beings; its presence in the oldest known ceremonial grave on earth is a thread that the living traditions still hold in their hands.

The dating itself has its own contested history, and it is worth keeping the registers apart. The first radiocarbon figures put the burials in the range of twenty-six to thirty-two thousand years. In 1999 a team led by Alan Thorne, using newer methods, proposed a far older age for Mungo Man — about sixty-two thousand years — which would have pushed the human presence on the continent dramatically back. That figure was disputed, and a major multi-laboratory restudy in 2003 brought the consensus to roughly forty thousand to forty-two thousand years for both burials. That is the figure scholars now use; the older claim stands as a contested episode, not the settled science.

The relict Willandra Lakes system from orbit; Lake Mungo is one basin in the dry chain. NASA Earth Observatory image by Wanmei Liang, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The footprints

The dead are not the only people the clay has kept. In 2003 a young Mutthi Mutthi woman, Mary Pappen Junior, walking the claypans with researchers, noticed marks set into a hardened surface. They proved to be footprints — human footprints pressed into wet clay in the last ice age and then sealed and preserved, dated to somewhere between about nineteen and twenty-three thousand years ago. More than a hundred and twenty of them have been mapped, the tracks of men, women, adolescents and children, some walking, some running flat out across the old soak. It is the largest assemblage of Pleistocene human footprints found anywhere in the world.

What makes the trackways more than a curiosity is who read them. Aboriginal trackers, heirs to a living art of reading the ground, walked the prints with the scientists and recovered from them what the marks alone could not yield to an outside eye: here a person running, there one with a load on a hip, here a child, here a group moving together at speed. The deep past and the present skill closed over the same set of prints — a continuity of knowledge across twenty millennia, the same way of reading Country brought to bear on the steps of those who first walked it. For the descendants of the lake-dwellers the footprints are not an abstraction; they are the literal steps of ancestors, the record of a morning on the lakeshore some twenty thousand years gone, and they are held and guarded as such. Where the burials show how the people of Mungo treated their dead, the footprints show them alive and in motion — the same Country, the same people, caught mid-stride at the height of the last ice age, when the lake stood low and the surface of the soak took the print of a foot and kept it.

Removal, and the long road home

The remains did not stay in the ground. When Mungo Lady was recovered in 1968 and Mungo Man in 1974, they were taken away for study — carried off to laboratories in Canberra, examined, dated, debated, without the consent of the people whose ancestors they were. To the traditional owners this was a wound of a familiar kind: their dead handled and removed by strangers in the name of a science that had not asked. The Mutthi Mutthi, Ngiyampaa and Paakantyi did not let the matter rest. Across decades they pressed for the return of their ancestors, and the campaign became one of the defining repatriation struggles in Australia.

Mungo Lady came back first. In 1992 her remains were returned, unconditionally, to the three traditional tribal groups, brought home to the Country from which she had been taken — an early and pointed acknowledgment that the dead of this place belonged to its living people. For some years she was kept under a shared arrangement, locked in a safe to which both the community and the researchers held a key, before the matter moved toward burial in her own Country. Mungo Man’s road was longer. Held for more than forty years, his remains were handed back by the Australian National University and finally returned to Lake Mungo in November 2017, carried home in a hearse along the highways of the inland in a journey that drew elders and mourners at stops along the way. The repatriation bound two things the modern record had kept apart: the antiquity the science had proven, and the claim of the people who descend from it. The same find that made Mungo Man a specimen in the literature made him, to his own people, an ancestor owed a homecoming.

It is worth marking how the standing of this place shifted over the half-century since the first bones weathered out. When Bowler made his finds, the prevailing settler picture still held Aboriginal Australia to be shallow in time and simple in culture — a picture the Mungo evidence helped to demolish. The dates established that people had lived on the continent for tens of thousands of years; the rites established that they had carried a developed ceremonial life with them from the deep past. The science, in other words, confirmed in its own terms what the traditional owners had always asserted in theirs: that this was their Country, that their ancestors had always been here, that the dead in the dune were kin. The handing-back of the remains was the institutions catching up to that fact. The campaign for return drew strength from the wider movement that gave Australia the recognition of native title and the long reckoning with the removal of children and the doctrine that had once called the land empty; the homecoming of an ancestor forty thousand years old became, by the time it was achieved, an event with national weight.

The matter is not without its living tensions, and they belong in the record too. Plans to rebury the ancestors permanently in the dunes have divided the communities — some traditional owners holding for immediate reburial in the Country itself, others for a keeping place where the remains might rest with protection and access, and arguments raised that the proper process of free, prior and informed consent among all the affected peoples was not fully observed. These are disputes among the rightful custodians over how best to honor their own dead. They turn, tellingly, not on whether the ancestors belong to the Aboriginal communities — that is settled — but on the form that honoring should take.

The lunette dunes of Mungo National Park, the protected Country of the Paakantyi, Mutthi Mutthi and Ngiyampaa peoples. Photo by Janette M Anderson, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

A place held in two hands

In 1981 the Willandra Lakes Region was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List, listed for both its cultural and its natural values — a relict Pleistocene lake system covering some two hundred and forty thousand hectares, and within it one of the longest and most legible records of human life on the continent. The land is managed today as Mungo National Park, under arrangements that give the three traditional owner groups a formal voice in the care of their Country; Aboriginal discovery officers and rangers guide visitors along the lunette and the claypans.

The dignity of the place lies in its doubleness. By the measure of the documentary record, Lake Mungo proves a human presence in Australia of immense depth, and proves that within that depth people were already performing the rites of death — the cremation, the ochre, the careful laying-out — that mark a fully formed religious imagination. By the measure of the people whose Country it is, the lake was made in the creation-time, the ancestors who lie in it are kin, and the law that governed the first fishers on its shore is the same law their descendants keep. The science and the inheritance do not compete here; they meet on the same dune. Mungo Man, carried out by strangers and carried home by his own, is the figure in whom they meet — and the wind, which uncovered him, goes on with its slow work along the Walls of China.

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