Out here nothing changes
Not in a hurry anyway
You can feel the endlessness
With the coming of the light of day

Goanna Band

Goanna band’s Solid Rock and Midnight Oil’s Diesel and Dust were playing as we headed into the desert. This is spectacular country. And very very old. We follow ancient river beds and ancient lakes. Where a young soil scientist riding a motorbike across a sand dune in the late 1960s found Mungo Lady, the world’s oldest cremated person. When you think of ancient, you think of archaeology, you think of Africa. But here the discoveries re-wrote Australia's history books and added thirty thousand years or so to how long Aboriginal people have been in Australia. Aboriginal people will say that they have always been here.

Robert, a young Aboriginal (Ngyiampaa) ranger, takes us out on to the sand dunes. He shows us fish otoliths, and wombat bones, and ancient middens. Fish and wombats have not been here for thousands of years. This was the land of the diprotodon, the giant wombat, and it is now a world heritage area.

Robert tells us that every day things are lost and things are discovered as the sands of the ancient beaches blow across the landscape. One day ancient human footprints were revealed from 20,000 years ago. They have since been re-covered to protect them.

Mungo Lady has flown around the world a number of times Robert tells us and yet he has never left Australia. But she has now come home he says, where she belongs.