Cultural Connections

Mungo Lake

Paul with RMIT and Nelson Byrd Woltz took a guided tour of Mungo National Park with local elder Uncle Warren and his son Kenny Clark. The custodial rights to this country in Southern New South Wales are shared by the people of three tribal groups: Mutthi Mutthi, Paakantji and Ngyiampaa. Mungo is an ancient landscape that holds traces of some of the earliest human history ever recorded. The remains of three human bodies (the Lake Mungo remains) were discovered in the 1960s and 1970s and are dated back as far as 42 000 years. They are culturally significant, locally and also on a global scale, because they were interred by cremation in ceremonies involving ochre carried from sites several hundreds of kilometres away. These practices suggest the ancient people of these lands held deeply spiritual cultural practices from the earliest times in modern human history.