Qualla: Willandra Lakes Region

Willandra Lakes Region: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Buaidh, CC BY-SA 4.0. Roughly 20,000 years ago, a group of people walked across a sheet of wet clay near the edge of a shallow lake - children, teenagers, and adults, some moving fast enough that the prints suggest running. The clay dried, hardened, and was buried. In 2003 the wind uncovered them again: nearly 460 fossilised human footprints, the largest collection of its kind anywhere on Earth, pressed into the floor of a lake that has been dry for millennia. This is the Willandra Lakes Region, a 2,400-square-kilometre expanse of vanished water in the Far West of New South Wales, where the deep history of humanity lies remarkably close to the surface.

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Image: Buaidh | CC BY-SA 4.0

Willandra Lakes Region: Lakes Without Water

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Department of the Environment and Energy, CC BY 4.0. 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....

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Image: Department of the Environment and Energy | CC BY 4.0

Willandra Lakes Region: A Record of the First People

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Davidspicerj, CC BY-SA 4.0. 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 l...

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Image: Davidspicerj | CC BY-SA 4.0

Willandra Lakes Region: Where the Earth Kept Notes

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit The original uploader was Longhair at English Wikipedia., CC BY 2.5. 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 ...

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Image: The original uploader was Longhair at English Wikipedia. | CC BY 2.5

Willandra Lakes Region: Visiting the Silence

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Janette M Anderson, CC BY-SA 4.0. 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 spe...

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Image: Janette M Anderson | CC BY-SA 4.0