Lake Mungo New South Wales, 19 July 2024.

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After driving the Mungo Track, we still had time before the Sunset Tour, so we decided to return to Red Top Lookout, that we had briefly visited near the start of the track.

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Looking across Lake Mungo, lunettes in the distance.  Scuba gear not required.

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Emu in the bushes.

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Views from Red Top Lookout.

This kind of view is probably what most people associate with Mungo.  As I’ve previously related, this is a fairly recent erosion landscape brought about by sheep denuding the lunettes in the mid to late nineteenth century.  So if you set up a camera and took a photograph say every five years you would probably see quite significant changes.  There’s an irony in that because what Mungo is really famous for is the discovery of Mungo Man and Mungo Lady, establishing early Aboriginal occupation of Australia.  That occupation goes back 40,000 to 60,000 years or more, including here for much of that period, in a much more verdant landscape.

The other thing I find intriguing about these images is potential ambiguity of scale.  Some of these images and some parts of some of these images you might think are very large or very small.

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An interloper image, not from Mungo.

So I include another erosion landscape by way of contrast.  This is from Bryce Canyon in Utah and from this post.  The columns are called Hoodoos.  You can see the scale of this from the trees, and it’s quite different from the other images in this post.  This is eroding away too.  If you want to see this, you should ignore Trump and the possibility of being seized by ICE at the border and be quick, because it could all be gone in only 600,000 years.

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Admittedly, these images would look better at sunrise or sunset but you can’t be everywhere in good light (unless maybe you are somewhere like Iceland), and there are some images with better light at the end of this post and in the next one.  The erosion shapes remain intriguing.

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Back at the hotel, there are some guinea fowl wandering around.  We saw some of these at Laura, in far north Queensland, but possibly not the same individuals.  These are introduced birds, originating in Africa, as the name suggests.

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