The Willandra lakes once formed a connected chain, fed by an ancient overflow of the Lachlan River system through long-dry Willandra Creek. They filled and emptied across the rhythms of the Ice Ages, and when the climate dried at the end of the Pleistocene, they emptied for good. What remains is a relict landscape of extraordinary clarity: flat lake floors fringed on their eastern shores by crescent-shaped dunes called lunettes, sculpted by the prevailing westerly winds over more than two million years. Among them is the Chibnalwood lunette, the largest clay lunette in the world. The sediments are stacked in three great layers, each a chapter in the story of how the climate and environment of south-eastern Australia changed - and each holding the evidence of the people who lived through it.

The Willandra is the traditional meeting place of the Mutthi Mutthi, Ngiyampaa and Paakantyi peoples, and its archaeology demonstrates continuous human occupation for at least 40,000 years. The land is dense with the physical memory of that habitation - hearths where fires were lit, middens of freshwater mussel shell, grindstones, scatters of stone tools, and the burials of ancestors, including those found at Lake Mungo within the region. This is one of the longest continuous records of human life found anywhere on the planet, and it belongs to living communities. The traditionally affiliated Aboriginal people proudly identify with this Country, and they help care for it today as part of the region's joint management.

The Willandra is so valuable to science that it earned a rare double World Heritage listing in 1981 - recognised for both its cultural significance and its natural and geological importance, one of only a handful of mixed sites in Australia. Locked in its undisturbed Pleistocene sediments is a continuous environmental archive that geologists read like pages. It was here that researchers documented the Mungo Geomagnetic Excursion, one of the most recent known wobbles in the Earth's magnetic field, recorded in the orientation of mineral grains laid down in the ancient lake mud. Few places on Earth combine such an intact natural record with such a deep human one. The lakebeds are, quite literally, a book the planet wrote about itself.

Most of the Willandra remains working pastoral land and Aboriginal Country, with a small protected portion held within Mungo National Park, where the famous Walls of China dunes draw travellers down the long unsealed roads. It is a landscape that rewards stillness rather than spectacle. There are no waterfalls or peaks here - only the enormous horizon, the pale floors of lakes that drained before recorded history, and the sense of standing on ground that human feet have crossed for forty millennia. The fragile fossil footprint site is protected and shown carefully, often through replicas, so that the real prints are not worn away. To grasp Willandra you have to slow down, look closely, and let the scale of the time settle over you.