There is no water at Lake Mungo now. The lake dried out at the end of the last Ice Age, and what remains is a vast pale floor of clay and grass, rimmed on its eastern edge by a crescent of bone-coloured dunes the early Chinese station workers nicknamed the Walls of China. Wind and rain have carved the lunette into ridges, pinnacles and ravines that glow gold at dawn and burn orange at sunset. The alkaline soil that the vanished lake left behind has done something remarkable: it has preserved the past. Layer upon layer of sediment, built up over more than 120,000 years, holds ancient hearths, the bones of long-extinct megafauna, stone tools, and the traces of the people who lived here when the lake was full.

In 1968, geologist Jim Bowler noticed burnt bone weathering out of the lunette. The remains were those of a young woman - Mungo Lady - who had died perhaps 42,000 years ago. Her body had been cremated, the bones then crushed and buried with care. It is the oldest known cremation anywhere in the world. Six years later, in 1974, Bowler found a second burial nearby: Mungo Man, an elder of around fifty, laid on his back with his hands folded and his body dusted with red ochre carried from many kilometres away. These were not curiosities to be catalogued. They were a grandmother and a grandfather, buried by people who grieved them and honoured them with ceremony - evidence that the spiritual life of this continent's first peoples runs as deep as humanity itself.

The discoveries reshaped the world's understanding of how long Aboriginal people have lived in Australia, pushing the timeline back tens of thousands of years. But that knowledge came at a cost the science of the day rarely acknowledged: the ancestors were removed from Country and taken away for study. Winning them back took decades of patient, determined campaigning by Aboriginal elders. Mungo Lady was returned in 1992. Mungo Man's road home was longer - he was held at the Australian National University until 2017, when traditional owners brought him back across New South Wales in a vintage hearse, stopping for Welcome to Country smoking ceremonies in Wagga Wagga, Hay, Balranald and Mildura along the way. The reburial of the ancestors in 2022 was painful and contested, opposed by some traditional owners who felt the decision was made without proper consent. The grief and the disagreement are part of this story too, and they deserve to be heard.

Mungo is now jointly managed by the New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service together with the elders of the three traditional owner groups - the Paakantyi, Ngiyampaa and Mutthi Mutthi - whose voices guide how this place is protected and shared. Visitors can walk the foreshore of the dry lake, drive the 70-kilometre loop track that winds anticlockwise from the visitor centre, and stand at the lookouts as the Walls of China shift colour with the falling light. The dunes themselves may only be entered with an Aboriginal guide, and rightly so: this is a cemetery and a cathedral. Emus and kangaroos cross the grasslands at dusk, the silence is enormous, and the sky at night is thick with stars. To come here is to be a guest on Country that has been lived in, and loved, since the dawn of human memory.