broad-rimmed hats nursing their beers at the bar nod
amiably to the technicolor blur of buffed men stream-
ing by in sparkly sequins, wigs and feathers.
My guide was a U.S.-raised artist named Clark Bar-
rett, who moved to Broken Hill 40 years ago so he
could fall off the map. “I wanted to live somewhere
I could see the rotation of the earth,” he explained
as we hit the road in a 4x4. He still camps in the
desert for weeks at a time, painting and observing
the sky and stars. (“The rotation of the earth makes
my day” is his favorite joke.) Outside Broken Hill,
the unpaved highway sliced without a single curve
across the lonely, existential landscape, which was
given a degree of notoriety by another Aussie movie,
Mad Max 2. Mile after mile of flat scrub was inter-
rupted only by the occasional tree rising like a stark
sculpture, a mailbox fashioned out of an eight-gal-
lon drum, or a silent township with little more than a
gas station. We were closely monitoring the weather.
Rain had fallen the night before and threatened to
turn the road into a slippery morass.
This was mythic Australia, and far from lifeless.
“Mobs” of kangaroos bounded by, along with strutting
emus. Shingleback lizards, with shiny black scales re-
sembling medieval armor and garish blue tongues,
waddled onto the road. The native bird life was raucous,
brilliant colored and poetically named—lousy jacks,
mulga parrots, rosellas, willy wagtails and lorikeets.
By the time we reached the turnoff to Mungo Na-
tional Park, the bars on our cellphones were down to
zero. We screeched to a halt before the only accommo-
dation, a desert lodge with lonely cabins arranged in a
circle. The only sound was the wind moaning through
the pine trees. At night, beneath the brilliant swath of
the Milky Way, total silence fell. The sense of entering
another era was palpable—and mildly unnerving.
WHEN MUNGO MAN WALKED this landscape
some 40,000 years ago, the freshwater lake was around
25 feet deep, teeming with wildlife and surrounded
by forests dappled with golden wattle. Like the rest of
Australia, it had once been the domain of megafauna,
a bizarre antipodean menagerie that had evolved over
the 800 million years of isolation before the Aboriginal
hunter-gatherers arrived. There were enormous hairy
wombats called Diprotodons that weighed over two
tons, towering flightless birds called Genyornis, and
Macropus titan, a nine-foot-tall kangaroo. The mega-
fauna’s fate was sealed when Homo sapiens landed on
the Australian coast sometime between 47,000 and
65,000 years ago. Scientists believe that around 1,000
sapiens traveled by boat from Indonesia—just 60 miles
away then, thanks to low ocean levels—to become the
first human inhabitants of Australia. Scholars now re-
gard the sea voyage as a major event in human history:
It was “at least as important as Columbus’ journey to
America or the Apollo 11 expedition to the moon,” ac-
cording to historian Yuval Noah Harari in Sapiens: A
Brief History of Humankind. The latest scientific theo-
ries suggest the megafauna were hunted to extinction
by the newcomers and had disappeared by the time of
Mungo Man. But the landscape was still bountiful, an
Aussie Garden of Eden: Middens reveal that residents
harvested fish, mussels and yabbies (freshwater cray-
fish) from the lake waters, and trapped small marsupi-
als, collected emu eggs and grew sweet potato.
The following millennia saw climate change on an
epic scale. The last ice age began 30,000 years ago;
by the time it had ended, 18,000 years ago, the melt-
ing ice caps had made Australian coastal water levels
rise 300 feet, creating its modern outline. The inte-
rior lakes around Willandra (there are actually 19 of
them) dried out and emptied; along each one’s east-
ern flank, the relentless outback winds created the
crescent-shaped mountain of sand called a “lunette.”
Arid though the landscape was, the nomadic Aborigi-
nal groups, the 3TTGs, knew how to live off the desert
and continued to use it as a regular meeting place.
But the speed of change accelerated exponentially
after the first British settlement was founded in Syd-“I BRUSHED AWAY THE SAND AND THERE WAS A MANDIBLE, WHICHMEANT THE REST OF THE BODY MIGHT BE IN THE GROUND.”