In the land of Dreamtime

By PETER ELEY

George O'Neill, our Aboriginal guide, interrupts his patter and crouches on the red dust of New South Wales' Mungo National Park beside yet another fragment of bone.

In the past hour we've seen countless bits from the skeletons of giant wombats, 3m-tall kangaroos and Tasmanian tiger-like predators, which lived and died on the shores of this vast lake before it dried up around 16,000 years ago.

But this bone is different. It has a yellowish tinge on the inside, which leads O'Neill to believe it could be human.

Carefully, he brushes away the sand. "Yeah. Yeah. Could be a kangaroo, but I don't know." Some minutes pass as O'Neill studies the 10cm fragment. "I'll have to get it checked out," he says, and brushes the sand back into place, marking the site with a mound of dry twigs.

Evidence of prehistoric human activity is always significant, but more so in Mungo. Carbon dating of cremated human remains found here has put them at up to 61,000 years old, leading some anthropologists to challenge theories about where modern humans originated.

It may remain conjecture. The World Heritage-listed Mungo is soon to be handed back to local Aboriginal tribes, and O'Neill says local elders will stop the desecration of sites.

He has his own way of doing this in the meantime. "People who have taken things have been cursed with bad luck. Lots of them send things back, asking for them to be returned to the sacred areas."

A day later we are 150km south for a four-wheel bike adventure on Moorna Station, a 24,280ha Outback property that follows the Murray River.

Station owner Annabel Walsh makes us strap on crash helmets, shows us how to drive the 350cc vehicles, and warns us to stick to defined tracks so as not to damage any cultural sites. "We've had some problems with the conservation people."

Walsh runs cattle and sheep - about one to every 4ha on this Outback scrub, and tells us how irrigation and bad land management have altered the environment. "If I dig down to the water table, the salinity is four times that of the sea."

We take off on the bikes for a tour of the property. Soon we come to a branch of the Murray River, known as Frenchmans Creek.

Walsh points out a 240ha area of wetland, where last year she harvested a crop of chickpeas worth A$500,000 ($577,980).

We follow the creek, pausing to look at pelicans fishing in the still, jade-coloured water.

This is the home of the mighty Murray cod, which reaches 70kg. That's way too heavy for a pelican, but small, silvery fish can be seen struggling in the translucent bags that make up the birds' bottom jaws before being gulped down whole.

We move on, and soon pass a group of wild goats accompanied by a couple of emus. We see galahs, pink cockatoos and a wedge-tailed eagle. Walsh says sea eagles can often be seen fishing in the creek and nearby Murray River.

The New Zealanders in the group remark on the weather. A cold front covers much of Victoria and it is chilly out of the sun - not what we expected in the Outback.

We are soon to be chilled even more. Ten minutes or so down the track, we come to a startlingly red sand bank and stop at its base.

A round, off-white boulder protrudes from the sand, and with an almost audible sense of shock we realise it is the top of a skull. There are many more skull fragments and bones here, as well as shell middens and charcoal from campfires.

Unlike those at Mungo, these bones are a reminder of a more recent history. Walsh says they are from the 1840s and are the remains of Aboriginal children killed by diseases such as chicken pox and measles brought in by early European settlers.

The epidemics were so devastatingly sudden that the children's bodies were buried in mass graves. Fourteen bodies have been identified here and Walsh has notified tribal elders.

"What I have to do now is protect them with interlocking bags and put shade cloth over scattered bones for 10 years," she says. This will allow sand to build up over the remains.

"If we can look after their sites, they will feel that we really care."

The remains of Harry Nanya, an Aboriginal hero, have never been found. He was a Barkindji tribesman who speared a fellow shearer in a fight and managed to elude the local constabulary by living a traditional tribal life in the Outback.

Our Mungo guide, O'Neill, works for Harry Nanya Tours, which is run by an Aboriginal community trust. On the way to Mungo, O'Neill points out gum trees with large oval scars in their trunks. Some are coffin trees, from which a section of bark and wood was removed so a body could be placed inside. When the flesh had decomposed, the skeleton was removed and buried in the ground. Eventually the tree healed over.

"We took from the land while we were living, and we gave something back when we died," says O'Neill.

Other trees are scarred where bark was removed to make a simple canoe to cross creeks. Again, tribespeople were careful not to kill the tree.

That conservation principle also applied to food gathering, says O'Neill. "If we found an emu nest with 12 eggs, we would take four. We would not take more food than we needed."

We eat a substantial lunch provided by the tour company while O'Neill recites three of his poems in the tradition of Banjo Patterson. "A book's on the way when I've got a few more."

He asked us to look across the saltbush scrub of the lake bed to what seemed to be a steep wall about 18km away.

This is a phenomenon known as the Walls of China - a mirage that makes the sloping sand of the lake's edge look sheer. It got its name, O'Neill says, because it fooled the Chinese labourers who built Mungo Station in the late 19th century.

The park information office is built next to the old station's shearers' quarters, and houses a display of long-extinct giant marsupials and some Aboriginal art. We learn from O'Neill that the Tasmanian tiger is the native Australian dog, while dingoes were introduced by Indonesian seafarers long before Europeans discovered the continent.

Surprisingly, there is little mention of Mungo Man.

We get back on the bus and travel across the lake bed to a bus park at the foot of the Walls of China. A party of elderly Australians is returning from a walk up the sandhills and one of them warns us that "it's a bloody long way, mate".

It isn't, and would be worth the effort even if it were. The slope is dotted with mounds known as lunettes, although the harsh red landscape would be more at home on Mars than the Moon.

O'Neill gives us a natural history lecture on the various plants that eke out an ingenious existence, and lets us try some of the edible ones.

He shows us the remains of ancient fish, duck eggs and mussel shells from before the last Ice Age, ancient stone tools, as well as the possible prehistoric human remains.

We reach the top, and look across the empty flatness of the Murray Mallee - named after the mallee tree, which beats the arid conditions by growing its trunk underground. There isn't a hill in sight, and another guide tells us that there are no towns between here and Indonesia.

The sun starts to dip and the lunettes take on a deep red glow. It is almost otherworldly, and I have an urge to lie on my back and wait for the stars to fill this vast sky.

It is intensely spiritual, and the shamanistic rituals of the Dreamtime make perfect sense as the moon rises over the Walls of China.

Case notes

Getting there

Qantas flies direct to Melbourne from Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch. Fares start from from $669 a person, economy return. Phone Qantas on 0800 767 400.

Mildura is an hour by QantasLink or 550km by car.

Excursions

Harry Nanya Tours charges A$60 ($69) a person for a day trip. Ph 00 61 3 5027 2076

Harry Nanya Tours

Access to a self-drive 70km track is A$6 ($6.90). Four-wheel bike tours at Moorna cost A$75 ($86) for 2 1/2 hours.

Ph 00 61 3 5021 4424

Advisory

Mungo National Park is 110km north of Mildura. The last 50km of road is unsealed and difficult in wet weather. A bunk in Mungo Station's shearing quarters is A$16.50 ($19) a night, and camping is A$3 ($3.47) a person a night.

New South Wales national Parks