To explore Australia's Outback and discover the wildlife that calls it home, visit Mungo National Park with Australia Wildlife Journeys. Photo / Supplied
To explore Australia's Outback and discover the wildlife that calls it home, visit Mungo National Park with Australia Wildlife Journeys. Photo / Supplied
Jacqui Gibson goes on a private four-day safari where she discovers wildlife and reminders of Australia’s ancient past.
The red dirt road is flat and as straight as an arrow; a portal to another time.
My safari begins in the Australian township of Mildura, 110km from Mungo National Park in the Willandra Lakes region.
The world heritage area, located in southwest New South Wales, is a 2400sq km patchwork of dry lake beds, enduring eucalypt forest and desert that reverberates with ghosts from the past.
Mungo Dunes in the Mungo National Park, NSW. Photo / Jacqui Gibson
My guide Roger Smith of Echidna Walkabout meets me just after daybreak to show me the wellspring of this region, the Murray and Darling Rivers, brown and languid, yet abundant with wildlife under the unblinking gaze of the morning sun.
“Because of these rivers, life flourishes here,” Roger explains to the sound of a cackling kookaburra.
Thin wire fences and the scrappy limbs of endemic black box trees line the highway as we travel northeast by 4WD past shallow ponds and miles of desiccated earth.
Driving the unsealed route to Mungo Lake, our camp for the next few days, a flock of marshmallow-hued cockatoos calls our attention to the road’s edge, while the soft whiskered faces of eastern grey kangaroos, their eyes as dark as chocolate, hover in the grassland.
On the horizon, where the sapphire sky draws a line against the ochre land, stalks a line of emu, a proud male and his travelling mob.
We stop often to hike towards the park’s interior in search of wildlife.
Australia Wildlife Journeys offers trips to Mungo National Park in NSW. Photo / Supplied
Raptors such as the nankeen kestrel, parrots like bluebonnet, the carpet python, sand goanna and the long-thumbed frog are just some of the fauna that have adapted to Mungo’s cool winters and infernally hot, 40C summers.
We pick past spiny grasses, woodland and, at one point, a lumbering metal windmill, quietening long enough to go unnoticed by a pair of rainbow-coloured mallee ringnecks feeding on the desert floor.
This is ancient land.
Born of the Pleistocene era, that epoch of modern human evolution when megafauna like giant wombats roamed about, this land’s natural and human past is evident everywhere; scattered on the ground, buried in sand dunes, hanging in the air.
Our accommodation, Mungo Lodge, is a hub of activity when we arrive.
Another Echidna Walkabout tour is in camp. It’s a small group tour led by Roger’s offsider, Tim Dolby, an expat Kiwi who, like Roger, champions the region’s spectacular scenery and wildlife with an infectious fervour.
Down the road, a more than century-old woolshed made of milled cypress pine still stands, reminding visitors of Mungo’s pastoral heritage and providing another place to explore beyond the visitor centre next door.
Later, after a dinner of roo cutlets and a glass of Shiraz from the bar, we sleep well in our cosy cabins as the temperature dips to single digits and stars emerge from the frigid blackness.
“Australia’s oldest human remains were found here at Lake Mungo about 50 years ago,” Ngyiampaa elder Lance Jones explains as we walk the lake’s chalky lunettes (clay dunes) the following morning.
Studies show the remains belonged to a teenage woman (Mungo Lady) and a man in his 50s (Mungo Man) ritually buried at Mungo Lake more than 40,000 years ago.
Aboriginal rockart is found in Mungo National Park, NSW. Photo / Jacqui Gibson
Clues of early domestic life turn up daily.
Roger proffers a range of stone artefacts on our walks. Silcrete flakes suggest we’re standing in an Aboriginal workshop of sorts where tools were once fashioned.
“See that sharp, cutting edge?” he asks, picking up a worked stone and running a finger along its jagged lip.
Other remnants such as baked clay, ash and charcoal call to mind an archaic campsite, possibly made by the ancestors of Willandra’s three tribal custodians, the Paakantji, Ngyiampaa and Mutthi Mutthi people, in the days when the lake was full.
In 2003, archaeologists found evidence of 20,000-year-old human footprints here at Mungo; the only Pleistocene footprints ever discovered in Australia and the most numerous found anywhere in the world.
Such mind-boggling realities are part of life at Mungo Lake.
My four-day exploration of its many ecosystems – and the life sustained in each one – is testament to that fact.
Perhaps, then, I should be less excitable when we come upon a short-beaked echidna an hour before dusk on our final day.
The egg-laying mammaltravels long distances and has evolved to avoid the heat by digging underground and escape flash floods by using its long snout as a makeshift snorkel.
Mungo Lodge Cabin in Mungo National Park, NSW. Photo / Jacqui Gibson
It’s this kind of behaviour Australia’s spiky monotreme has been honing, in outback environments just like Mungo Lake, for an estimated — wait for it — 15 million years.
Fly to Melbourne or Sydney direct from Auckland, Wellington or Christchurch with Qantas. Then, take a connecting QantasLink domestic flight to Mildura to pick up the tour. qantas.com/nz
DETAILS
Echidna Walkabout runs the private Mungo Outback Journey tour, departing from Mildura, between March and November. australianwildlifejourneys.com
