Lake Mungo
Mungo National Park, southwestern New South Wales, Australia
The dry lakebed in the Willandra Lakes Region World Heritage Area where Australia's oldest known human remains were found in 1968 and 1974, returned to their Traditional Owners in 2017 and kept privately since; the park is open, and the story the site tells now is custodianship.
Lake Mungo is one of the dry Willandra Lakes in southwestern New South Wales, its white crescent dune, the lunette known as the Walls of China, holding an unbroken record of Aboriginal occupation stretching back tens of thousands of years. In 1968 erosion exposed the cremated remains of a young woman, Mungo Lady, dated to about 42,000 years ago and widely described as the world's oldest known cremation; in 1974 the same lunette yielded Mungo Man, a man of similar age whose burial reshaped understanding of deep Aboriginal history on the continent. The Willandra Lakes Region was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1981. The discovery era also carried the harms of the science of its time: the remains were removed and held by institutions for decades while Traditional Owners asked for their return.
On November 17, 2017, Mungo Man and 103 other ancestral remains were returned to Country, received at Mungo National Park by the Mutthi Mutthi, Paakantji (Barkandji), and Ngyiampaa peoples after ceremonies along the 800-km route from Canberra. The ancestors are now kept in a secret, protected keeping place that is not open to the public and whose location is not published, and this entry respects that completely. What visitors encounter today is the landscape itself: guided walks on the Walls of China with Aboriginal discovery rangers, the Mungo Visitor Centre, and a story that belongs to repatriation and living custodianship rather than to display.
Visiting
NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service manages the park. The park is always open, with closures possible in poor weather or fire danger, and entry is $8 per vehicle per day (self-registration at the visitor centre). Walls of China access is guided; book Aboriginal discovery tours through the Mungo Visitor Centre. Drones are not permitted without written agreement, and consent requires endorsement from Traditional Owners (official park policy).
Photo: Rueparadis, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons ([source](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lake_Mungo_lunette.jpg))
Associated traditions & practices
Visitor stories