September 2019 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 45ney in 1788. It was a cataclysm for Australia’s first in-
habitants. Within a few short decades, British explor-
ers were arriving in the Willandra area, followed by
streams of white settlers. In the 1870s, colonial police
forcibly moved Aboriginal people off the land into re-
serves and religious missions, and farmers carved out
stations (ranches). Aboriginal culture was dismissed
as primitive; the few British scientists who consid-
ered the Aboriginal people believed they had landed
relatively recently. Some 50,000 sheep were sheared
annually at the station named after St. Mungo by its
Scottish founders, and their hoofs stripped the top soil
from the dry lake floor. Imported goats devoured na-
tive trees; imported rabbits riddled the earth with their
burrows; and vulnerable marsupials like the pig-foot-
ed bandicoot and the hairy-nosed wombat vanished.
The sand kicked up by the sheep began to scarify one
lunette, stripping the native vegetation that bound it
together. The sand arc was a scenic oddity dubbed the
Walls of China, possibly by Chinese laborers.
As late as the 1960s, the region was still so little
known to white Australians that the lakes had no
names. It was simply left off maps until a geomorpholo-
gy professor flew from Broken Hill to Melbourne in 1967
and looked out the window. He saw the pale shapes in
the desert below and recognized them as fossilized lake
beds. Back at the Australian National University (ANU)
in Canberra, he suggested to a middle-aged student, a
soulful geologist working on ancient climate change
in Australia, Jim Bowler, to investigate. Bowler had no
idea that the visit would transform his life.NOW 88 AND A LEGEND in Australia, Bowler lives
in Brighton, a tidy seaside suburb of Melbourne, a city
of Victorian monuments once considered the most
stolidly “British” in the Antipodes. When I poked
my head into Bowler’s bungalow, his wife, Joan, was
surprised I hadn’t seen him sitting across the roadA cast replica of
a 21,000-year-
old footprint
found with
others near Lake
Mungo in 2003.
They are the
largest set of ice
age footprints in
the world.Mary Pappin,
an elder with the
Mutthi Mutthi
tribe, cam-
paigned for the
repatriation of
Mungo Man.