Lake Mungo New South Wales, 19 July 2024.

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Scrub beside the road.

Heading from Robinvale to Mungo, salt bush and eucalypts at the side of the road.  This is the first of four posts on Lake Mungo.

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The road ahead.

There are several routes into Mungo and although it is semi-desert, it does rain, and when it rains, all the roads may close.  So you have to check on the prognosis if the weather is uncertain.

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Shearing shed.

This is the shearing shed at Lake Mungo  Built in 1869, it is an ingenious drop-log cypress pine construction.

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Holding stands.

Shearers grabbed the sheep to shear from here.  Originally the shearers used hand shears to shear up to 50,000 sheep in a season.

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Stationary steam engine.

The steam engine was introduced in 1888.  It coupled to overhead mechanised gear in the shed and the increased efficiency reduced the number of stands from thirty to eighteen.  Later, the steam engine was replaced by a diesel engine and with reduced sheep numbers, the number of stands reduced to five.

In the mid to late nineteenth century, outback areas of New South Wales and South Australia were productive agricultural zones for sheep and wheat.  Drought in the 1890s wiped all that out though, lands reverted to desert or semi-desert and many never became productive again. 

In following decades, ignoring climate change is likely to bring us similar events in areas that now are productive.

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Shearing stands.

You can see here the overhead gear linking to the mechanised shearing.  The shears connected to this, the sheep were shorn underneath, and then sent through the gate and down a ramp.

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Shearing stands from the side.

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The skirting table.

This originally had more rungs and is where the fleece was sorted out.

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Near the shearing shed, we next walked the Grasslands Nature Trail.  The small shrubs in the foreground are Black Bluebush (maeriana pyramidata), one of the most common shrubs in Western New South Wales.  They are very long lived and drought hardy.  In times of drought, grazing by sheep and rabbits can make them flat-topped or umbrella-shaped.

Next we went back to the hotel for lunch and then turned up for the lunette tour.

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Lake Mungo is famous for Mungo Woman and Mungo Man, skeletons uncovered in 1968 and 1974.  They were dated as around 40,000 years old, the oldest found at that time.  It is not the kind of place you can visit archæological digs though, and the old skeletons are reburied by local tribes.  There was a display inside the Visitors’ Centre of Aboringinal history and extinct megafauna.  That included a model of an extinct giant wombat, probably Phascolonus, which weighed from 200kg to 360kg and became extinct perhaps 40,000 years ago. (Annoyingly, searching for “giant wombat” to check facts mainly turned up diprotodon, which was not a giant wombat).

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A small part of the lunette.

The lunette is the ridge around the lake, up to thirty metres high, with alternating bands of sand and clay blown up from the lake.  This was originally vegetated but laid bare by the depredations of the sheep.

There are also many traces of the many tens of thousands of years of Aboriginal occupation here.

We are on the Lunette Guided Tour, run by National Parks and with an Aboriginal guide.

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Ancient Aboriginal fireplace.

Analysing such remains reveals that the Aboriginal foods included smaller mammals such as hare wallabies and bettongs as well as golden perch, yabbies and mussels.

We are on the Mungo Lunette Guided Tour provided by the National Park.  If you’re visiting Mungo and only have time to go on one lunette tour, I recommend this one, because you get a good explanation of Aboriginal history in the area.  I also went on the other one, the Sunset Tour, and I cover that in a later post.

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Wind and rain have created many distinctive shapes on the lunette.

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Lunette and Lake Mungo

Lake Mungo in the distance has been dry for 14,000 years.

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Pink cockatoo.

Alternatively, Major Mitchell’s Cockatoo, but our Aboriginal guide called them pink cockatoos and I thought “who really has naming rights here?”.

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A sleeping cat perhaps?

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