Mungo National Park and the wider Willandra Lakes Region World Heritage Area has a series of ancient lakes that once supported lush ecosystem. Today the lake floors are dry saltbush plains; on their western sides they have crescent-moon shaped dunes known as lunettes, which were formed by prevailing winds when the lakes were full. Over millennia, wind and water carve the lunettes – such as the Walls of China, pictured – into alien-looking formations. Rain slowly washes away sand and soil, creating channels and ridges. Find the full story in Nov/Dec 2014 issue of Australian Geographic.

Each dawn reveals fresh tracks on the dunes, such as these left by an emu. Mungo NP has a large variety of birds, despite its arid environment. Common species include: the galah, Major Mitchell’s cockatoo and many other parrots, finches, honeyeaters and fairy wrens. Birds of prey include: kites, goshawks, harriers, kestrels and the wedge-tailed eagle. 

Sand dunes in the Willandra Lakes can tower 50m or more above the saltbush plains. Find the full story in Nov/Dec 2014 issue of Australian Geographic.

Gould’s goanna (Varanus gouldii) is the largest reptile at Mungo NP. It burrows into clay banks or uses rabbit warrnes to shelter between bouts of hunting.

Hundreds of thousands of sheep grazed across Lake Mungo and the dunes in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; along with introduced rabbits, they contributed to the destabilisation of the dunes that created the Walls of China – now a major tourist attraction.

The wide skies and distant horizons make for sectacular sunrises and sunsets.

Western grey kangaroos (Macropus fuliginosus) are a common sight on the saltbush plains at dawn and dusk.

The eroding Willandra Lakes lunettes are littered with fossils and archaeological artefacts such as this skeleton from a locally extinct northern hairy-nosed womba. 

Mungo National Park discovery ranger and Mutthi Mutthi Aboriginal woman, Tanya Lee Charles, points of the fossilised remains of animals, stones tools and the baked hearths of cooking fires that are up to 50,000 years old.

Fossils of some of Australia’s earliest Aboriginal people, as well as the megafauna they hunted, frequently erode out of the dunes. These animals included the giant short-faced kangaroo, Procoptodon goliah, a partial toe bone of which can be seen above (compared to the much slighter bone of a modern kangaroo for scale).

In 2003, many hundreds of 20,000-year-old human footprints were found in the Willandra Lakes Region World Heritage Area. Here members of the regions three tribal groups – the Paakantyi, the Ngiyampaa and the Mutthi Mutthi – walk through the footsteps of their ancestors.

The world’s largest collection of fossilised footprints – more then 530 – has provided a rare
snapshot of Ice Age life. They were left in a kind of clay including magnesium and calcium carbonate, which sets as hard as concrete. Find the full story in Nov/Dec 2014 issue of Australian Geographic.

One series of tracks feature deep impressions left by large feet, suggesting men in a hunting party, running. A groove reveals where a spear missed its target. Incredibly, one set of tracks has only right and no left prints, which Pintupi trackers from Central Australia believe indicates a one-legged man running unaided.

Mungo National Park still has historic buildings such as the woolshed, where up to 18 shearers at a time once toiled to shear 50,000 sheep in a year.

The Walls of China are best viewed at sunrise and sunset when the sun is low in the sky and the light throws the sculpted features of the lunettes into sharp relief.

In 1974, now-retired professor Jim Bowler found the 42,000-year-old remains of Mungo Man. These are the oldest human remains in Australia, and they showed Aboriginal people had been on this continent much longer then scientists previously believed. Mungo Man and the cremated remains of Mungo Lady (found nearby by Jim in 1969) are among the world’s earliest evidence for complex funerary rights.

Willandra Aboriginal elders (L–R) Maryann Marton, Peggy Smith, Joan Slade and Roy Kennedy at the secret site where Mungo Man was found in 1974. Find the full story in Nov/Dec 2014 issue of Australian Geographic.