I once watched a psycho-horror-mystery called Mungo Lake, about the drowning of a 16-year-old girl on a family picnic by a waterhole in western Victoria, and the weird goings-on that ensued. The film included vistas of fabulously sculpted rocks that I never forgot. It turns out the rocks were shot not in western Victoria but southwestern outback New South Wales…

Mungo National Park is northeast of Mildura (in Victoria’s far northwest). It’s so remote that Google maps can’t work out how long it takes to drive between the two. We either had to allow another half-day to travel Google’s predicted three hours and 54 minutes for the 112 kilometres from Mildura to Mungo Lodge, or trust the Lodge manager’s estimate of one and a half hours. The first 30 kilometres along Arumpo Road is bitumen: thereafter it’s a well graded track. It took us about an hour and 15. What does Google know? It felt good to be in the outback again.

Leaving Melbourne just before 6 am, we shot up the Calder Freeway/Highway, making good progress until interesting things distracted us.

Sea Lake is a strange name for a town hundreds of kilometres from the ocean. I have read a couple of explanations, neither of which are certain or inspiring, so I prefer my first thought; which was that early explorers searching for the inland sea they believed to be at the heart of this continent, passed by en route from Melbourne and mistook Lake Tyrrell for the object of their dreams.

Around lunchtime, we turned off the Calder to more lakes. This was a planned diversion, inspired by our Victoria’s Deserts Touring Guide, to the little-known Hattah-Kulkyne National Park in semi-arid mallee country. First, we visited the excellent Lake Hattah Visitor Centre, where we learned a lot. The 21 lakes of the Hattah wetlands and Murray floodplain are Ramsar listed and an ‘icon site’ within The Living Murray restoration programme. The area is also a UNESCO biosphere reserve, an acknowledgement of an ecosystem’s outstanding natural values. It is managed by Parks Victoria.

The Living Murray programme is implemented by state governments, the federal government and the Murray-Darling Basin Commission working together to maintain an adequate supply of environmental water to the Murray and its floodplain. This involves restoring natural water cycles such as seasonal flooding of wetlands and their fringing vegetation. During the 1990s, drought and upstream irrigation demands reduced the frequency of the flooding on which the Hattah Lakes depend. Many River Red Gums, some of them hundreds of years old, began to suffer dieback, so emergency measures were necessary. The installation of a pump station and regulators – gates that are opened or closed to control flow – allow water from the Murray to be diverted into the Lakes via Chalka Creek, and held there, when river flows would not otherwise have reached them.

Red River Gums are prolific producers of seeds, which soon grow into dense stands of seedlings after flooding (below), and almost impenetrable forests of saplings (above) as they thin out.

The botanical name, Eucalyptus camaldulensis, derives from the name of a private garden near Naples (l’Hortus Camaldulensis di Napoli), where imported examples of one of Australia’s most iconic native trees were once growing. The chief horticulturalist of Naples' botanic gardens gave the Red Gum its rather exotic botanical name in 1832.

We drove on, heading for the wiggly Murray along Victoria’s border with New South Wales. I harboured a romantic notion there would be little development and lots more birds. The reality was many pumping stations draining the River for thirsty citrus fruits, (table) grapes, almonds and avos.

It had been a long day. Once settled into our cabin at Mungo Lodge, beers were in order. Our surroundings included a fine example of a White Cypress-pine, Apostlebirds, a Pallid Cuckoo, goats being goats, and a male Emu in charge of a clutch of enormous eggs.

Mungo National Park is an area of low-lying land in the Murray-Darling basin. Fifty million years ago, this region sank as Australia’s eastern highlands rose. In what was a very wet period, the region’s rivers carried large quantities of eroded materials down from the highlands on to the sinking rocky landscape, where they deposited sand and silt. Fast-forward 30 million years, and the climate became hotter and drier as the continent slowly drifted north. The ancient sands and silts were gradually cemented into a hard silica crust that was subsequently eroded by water, covered with more sediment, carved by rivers and sculpted by wind. By 400,000 years ago, shallow lakes were forming on sandy, silty plains by sluggish, winding creeks.

Those shallow lakes are today known as the Willandra Lakes Region, a World Heritage Area. Lake Mungo was filled by overflow from Lake Leaghur to the north, which was watered by Willandra Creek, a tributary of the Lachlan River (which today flows roughly between the Darling and the Murrumbidgee rivers in the same direction). By the end of the last Ice Age there was still masses of water in the system, channelling through the Lakes to the Murrumbidgee. At its fullest, Lake Mungo had a depth of six to eight metres of water and covered an area of 120 square kilometres. But it hasn’t had any water in it for 14,000 years, during which plants gradually colonised the lake bed.

Day 2 had to start by getting our bearings from Mungo Lookout, followed by the Visitor Centre.

If you strain your eyes to the eastern far shore of the lake from the lookout, you can just about make out a long white ‘lunette’, a crescent-shaped dune resembling the first quarter of the Moon, and fashioned by prevailing westerlies. The sands of the Mungo lunette were once red like the soils on the western shore, but as they were blown across the lake bed they were stripped of their clay coating and oxides. The geological history of Mungo is revealed in three major layers of sand and silt that make up the lunette. The top two layers contain bones, tools, middens and other evidence of Aboriginal life in the region.

The Willandra Lakes Region World Heritage Area was one of the first places in Australia to be added to UNESCO’s WHA list. Artefacts and human remains have been dated back at least 40,000-50,000 years, making Mungo one of the oldest places beyond the African continent to have been continuously occupied. ‘Mungo Lady’ and ‘Mungo Man’ turned Australia’s deliberately naive view of this continent’s first inhabitants on its head.

European settlers believed the continent was terra nullius; that is, land belonging to nobody. Court cases during the 1970s and 1980s that were brought either by or on behalf of Aboriginal groups challenged Australian sovereignty on the grounds that Aboriginal sovereignty was still intact. Only in 1992 did the High Court rule that terra nullius should never have been applied to Australia. The Mabo decision recognised the rights of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to the land; that those rights existed before the British arrived; and that they still exist today. The myth that Australia’s First Nations were hunter gatherers is a view still held by many white Australians today.

When we mentioned to people we were visiting Lake Mungo, few had even heard of it, let alone its cultural significance. Do the Mungo couple feature in history lessons in Australian schools? I’m unsure, but I do know that Bruce Pascoe’s concepts in Dark Emu Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident are used as part of the High School Geography teaching resource. Dark Emu blew my mind when I first read it. There are many detailed observations of how Indigenous people lived in early explorers’ logs; but an open mind is essential in a politically charged context.

In the late 1960s a young geologist, Jim Bowler, was keen to investigate a series of fossil lakes he’d seen in aerial photographs as part of his studies into the Australian landscape during the Pleistocene era (1.8 million and 10,000 years ago). He found mussel shells and what looked like stone tools in the clay and sand layers of the lunette. Subsequently, he found burnt bones and, once he’d called in some help in the form of archeologists, a human jaw, dated at 42,000 years. Interestingly, Mungo Lady had been cremated.

Bowler was still studying the lunette in 1974, when he noticed a gleaming white skull bone sticking out of the sand. Eventually a complete adult male skeleton (Mungo Man) was revealed and dated at about 40,000 years old. There is still considerable debate about the age of Mungo bones, some scientists claiming them to be more like 60,000 years old.

My friend isn’t overly impressed by woolsheds, with the possible exception of one at Jondaryan, between Toowoomba and Dalby in Queensland. His summary of the Mungo Woolshed was verged on rude: ‘One of the most significant European buildings in the Willandra Lakes World Heritage Area [said a sign]? It’s just a pile of sticks, badly put together, with no relevance whatsoever to the WHA listing.’ There were many gaps between the slats: I quite liked the graphics.

The Woolshed is thought to have been built in 1869, from locally sourced materials as much as was possible, such as the White or Murray River Cypress-pine. The corrugated iron for the roof probably came from Adelaide on a paddlesteamer as far as Pooncarie and then overlanded to Mungo.

We’re more into the natural world than recent ‘heritage’, and we didn’t have huge amounts of time, so we chose the Foreshore Walk rather than the Pastoral Heritage Walk. There was lots more to learn.

We climbed up from the bluebush plain into mallee- and pine-covered dunes, where there were many more birds – Wedge-tailed Eagles, Kites, Mallee Ring-neck Parrots and White-winged Fairy-wrens, the last two of which we hadn’t seen before.

We went from the Foreshore to the Grasslands Nature Stroll. There were many dead trees, and evidence of the collapse of extensive rabbit burrows, both probably the result of the ongoing state-wide drought. A Red-capped Robin was a striking surprise in an otherwise uninspiring landscape.

That night we did the sunset tour of the lunette: you are only allowed on the dunes by Aboriginal elders in the presence of an authorised guide. Fading and increasingly pink light lent this weird and wonderful landscape a surreal and magical quality best illustrated than described in words.

As we walked back to the minibus, visible through the camera lens but not with the naked eye, two young males were boxing into the night.