Marilyn Humbert

Mungo Man

vernal gathering
beneath the gidgee trunks
sleeping kangaroos

I’m walking with my Barkindji guide, Ivan, down the giant sand dunes called “The Walls of China” encircling Lake Mungo. Shade is sparse in the heat of this isolated place dotted with spindly mallee scrub of Mungo National Park, southwestern New South Wales. Gusts of wind across the dry lakebed ruffle an ocean of tiny green succulent leaves; low-growing bluebush and saltbush sprinkled with watching eyes of copper-burr flowers. 

We trudge across the lake bottom and up the edging dunes of the inside banks on the far side. Ivan stops at a midden uncovered by the prevailing westerly wind and explains that the tiny blue-black flecks in the pale sand are remnants of thunder bird eggshells, the forefathers of emus.  He points to bone fragments from long ago megafauna, the ancestors of our present-day kangaroo, wombat and goanna.  Other middens contain shards of mussel shells and charred pebbles of termite mounds. The wandering people who hunted and lived around the lakes and river systems in this area were among Australia’s earliest tribes. They used the termite’s mud as fuel for their cooking fires.

Ivan tells of ancient burial sites discovered nearby and of Mungo Man. His bones preserved in sand, painted with the red ochre of a tribal elder dated over 42,000 years old.

I look back across the lake as we leave, our footprints disappearing beneath swirls of windblown sand.

intruders
waking the dead
we trace the past

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About the Author

Marilyn Humbert lives in the Northern suburbs of Sydney, Australia. Her tanka and haiku appear in international and Australian journals, anthologies, and online. Her free-verse poems have been awarded prizes in competitions and been published online and in anthologies.