My mum grew up in the fabulously named town of Boggabilla, on the Macintyre River that forms part of the NSW/Queensland border. So the first point of call of this lone road trip was the country where she had spent her early years. From there, the plan was to join the Darling River at Bourke, follow the river down to Lake Menindee and then divert to my ultimate goal, the extraordinary Lake Mungo at the southwest corner of NSW.

The drivers for this trip were threefold: to fill in some of the jigsaw of the life she never spoke of, to see firsthand what was happening to the great river I learnt of in primary school history lessons, and to spend some quiet time on one of the great archaeological and anthropological sites of our country and the planet. I was studying both during the 1970s when the first ancient Aboriginal graves were being discovered there and had always hoped to visit and explore the place, now a national park.

My inner picture of Mum's early life were made up of fragments from her and my father, the memories of a six year old when we had taken the long train trip from Sydney to visit her parents in 1964, and the emotional and psychic impressions that surfaced over the later years of therapy. It was a picture of too big a family, impoverished, harshly Catholic and ruled by my diminutive grandmother (the Catholic witch!). She terrified me as well as my near-adult uncles, who, even through my young eyes, seemed emasculated and powerless (some of them were to die of bowel cancer).

It was a sad and toxic picture of bleak suppression and struggle and too many skeletons, with hints of unacknowledged Aboriginal blood and illegitimate children. No wonder my mum escaped by firstly becoming a nurse and then to elope with, gasp, a non-Catholic man who drank, gambled and whom she followed all over the country as he searched for work, during which she conceived a child, yours truly, out of wedlock! Some would say she jumped out of the frying pan into the fire, but it was a gutsy jump. She would also die way too young, but did much better than many of her siblings.

Just before I was to leave, I was able to make contact with a cousin and on the second day of the trip we spent three hours together in the town of Moree. And what a three hours! Her perception of the family was also fragmented and together we were able to create a much more complete picture, which included some extraordinary revealed skeletons that made so much sense. It was one of those times when something that's been murking in the subconscious for ages suddenly detaches from the subliminal layers and rises into the sunlight to be seen, recognised and acknowledged. It comes with such a profound sense of relief, on a heart and psychic level, while allowing many other connections to be made.

On the way to Moree I had detoured through Boggabilla to see it again after 45 years, but unlike my memories of a riverine community which bought out the Huck Finn in me, it was not pretty. At one time reputed to be the most racist town in Australia, it is a truly battered and neglected place, not a single shop open, all boarded up, even the pub, iron barred windows with a side door open to the intense heat. The only clean public building is the cop shop and I arrive just as the police have pulled over a bunch of resentful Aboriginal kids in an old Holden. High unemployment, no services, bored teenagers, sappingly dry heat - a repeated experience in the days to come. The old house is not there anymore, but I remember its location on the river. The memories are pungent though, walls lined with newsprint, kero lamps, cattle dung burning as mozzie repellent, cement laundry sinks smelling of decades of hand washing, the peppercorn tree over the gate, warm goats' milk, the local ABC radio. I wanted it to still be there, but am also glad that it isn't.

The experience colours my thoughts through the top end of NSW, through Walgett and Bourke, classical borderline wheat and sheep country still drought affected, and yet am stunned to find broadacre irrigated properties being ploughed for the next planting, of what I don't know but it doesn't feel good. Not family owned farms, but big commercial entities, vast areas of moist brown earth, raised levees and pumping stations.

Bourke is where many rivers have merged to become the Darling, a once big, beautiful body of water that allowed for paddle steamers and water trade, the town centre full of grand stone buildings. Now, many of them are unused and it's hard to imagine large boats here as the water line is up to 10 metres below the river's banks.

Downstream, the depth and quality of the water varies. At times, there are long deep sections, while others are shallow and a series of pools a few metres across. But every section is so far below its banks that getting down for a swim in the muddy brown water is often impossible. At some old port towns there are steel girded bridges with elevator sections that were hydraulically lifted to allow the rigging of the big boats to get through. Now, they're so far above the water levels it's ridiculous, almost Pythonesque.

As devastating as this is, the Darling is still a powerful place. The sheer grandeur of the river, the architecture of its banks and meanderings, even as expressed by the water that is not there, is so evocative, so classically Australian. Some places are so full of history, both white and Aboriginal, that you find artefacts of both in the same soil. At a tiny place called Tilpa is a memorial to Breaker Morant. Every town, however small, has its war memorial and its numbing list of tragedies, so many men.

I spend a night alone at Buckanbe Station's shearers' quarters, an experience in itself, and stumble across their family graveyard nearby. It includes a 25 year old Englishman who died while working on the station in the 1850s, all the way to the recent burial of a grandfather, a World War Two veteran. Most poignantly, there are three unmarked graves, mounds on the ground, the middle one smaller and with a toy truck embedded in its soil with fresh plastic flowers. Seeing this cracks my heart open, all the family stuff catches up with me and I sit on the ground with this little fellow and wail until there is no more.

One companion I did have during the trip was Tim Flannery's book The Explorers, a compilation of the personal journals of many of our white explorers, and of their interactions with "the blacks". It was not only a great read, but helped put what I was doing in a historical context as well as a personal one. Either side of the Darling is currently drought stricken and essentially desert, and as I move through its 40 degree heat, dust and shifting sands in the comfort of the Landcruiser, I admire the sheer courage of these men (and some rare women), however foolhardy some of them were, who moved through it on horses, camels and on foot.

Burke and Wills passed through here and I get to camp under the same trees as they did at Lake Menindee, their last place of permanent water on their way to meet their fate. William Wills' journal was found with his body and he describes his last days as he's dying of malnutrition, even though he has a full belly. Friendly Aboriginals have shown them how to make nardoo flour from a local plant, but their systems can't digest it! Despite this though, he writes clearly and beautifully and my heart goes out to him, all those years ago.

The journey following the Darling takes me along 800 kilometres of dirt road of varying quality, hard but beautiful country, sometimes not seeing anyone for hours. You always know where the river is though, by the snaking of its huge river gums, which are also under threat from lack of water. Again, I am stunned to find irrigated vineyards around Menindee on the edge of desert country when Australia has 30% too many grapes. I'm even more appalled that struggling stations are grazing goats, those great environmental vandals, to make ends meet. Nevertheless, it is a joy being here and I am filled with love for the land and its hardy people.

I leave the river at Pooncarie to head east to Lake Mungo, an ancient lake that dried out 18,000 years ago and which has evidence of human occupation going back 40,000 years. In the 1970s, it attracted worldwide attention with the discovery of two skeletons from the 25-30,000 year mark, not just the oldest human remains found on the continent, but the oldest ritual cremation on the planet. The female of the two had her body burnt, her bones crushed and marked with ochre before burial. What also stunned the archaeology community was that these were anatomically advanced humans at a time when the Neanderthals were dying out in Europe and some Asian fossils of the same period stilled showed Homo erectus traits.

It was very exciting time for a junior archaeologist and since then not only have 180 individuals been discovered, but the place was found to be almost littered with fossil remains, including megafauna, thylacines and giant muscular 'roos. On the eastern edge of the lake, is a huge crescent moon-shaped dune, a lunette 20 kilometres long and poorly named the Walls of China and it's been in this lunette that most of the major discoveries have been found. The dune is a mixture of more permanent layers along with looser beach-like sand layers, the latter of which gets moved around by winds and storms every year, revealing new fossils and finds on a regular basis.

In more recent years, another extraordinary discovery was made here, this time in the form of ancient footprints preserved in the hardened mud and concealed by sand dunes. The prints are of many, young and old, including that of a one-legged man who leads a party of men without any obvious means of support! Aboriginal trackers were bought in from the north to read them, while the local people gathered to sit with their ancestors' prints. After much examination, they were covered over with sand to preserve them, the location kept secret.

So here I am, after 30 years, stepping onto the lunette in the late afternoon (and no bull, but the full moon was rising! Honest to God, I didn't plan it!) feeling like a kid in a toy shop on one hand and awed by the beauty of the place on the other. Within a hundred metres from the main entrance point, as I was to discover in the first days, is an ancient campfire with charcoaled baking stones, stone tool fragments, extinct Hairy Nosed Wombat fossils, and, to cap it off, the remains of a Zygomaturus, a rhino-sized ancestor to the wombat. Even walking around was a challenge because you never knew what you were stepping on - stone and bone chips, fish vertebrae, shells from eaten molluscs, all in this small area alone and there is 20 kilometres of it.

The lake was originally part of a whole freshwater lake system and was up to eight metres deep, a massive fertile oasis attracting both humans and animals over the last 50,000 years. Even as it progressively dried out, it was still a rich environment. In recent times, it was straddled by two huge sheep stations and is now a well set-out national park which honours the prehistory of the place, the European history and the three tribal groups connected to it, and it's people from those tribes who make up much of the staff. There is much to see and the attitude to the fossil and tool sites is "look but don't touch, careful of where you walk".

So the next days were spend in getting up early before the November heat and flies to explore different parts of the lunette away from the main tourist zones, then retreat during the middle hours to a mozzie dome under a shady tree for lunch, reading and naps, to re-emerge in the cooler hours to go out again. These slow days were deeply replenishing, the long hours of silence, of meditation in action, moving through the dunes with great care looking for fossil and tool material, while feeling into the spirit of the place. The latter comes slowly from some deep place as my own availability improves and in the last days have a vision of the burial site of a young woman under my feet. Later, as I'm squatting by a stone tool core, I am momentarily overwhelmed by the warmth of the man who had worked it and his deep love for the boys he is preparing to take through the Law, to become true men. It fills my heart with joy and longing.

Apart from these precious moments, there were no great spiritual lightning bolts, but a more lasting form of nourishment. Experiencing on this journey the continuum from my own family history as it melds into the historical past and then to drop into a far more ancient past, somehow puts my own life in a different, more expanded context. I was to dream nightly, and gratefully, of the place for weeks after, and as the 45 degree heat eventually forces me on my way towards home, I find that my inner energies are clearer, more deeply settled. In the next three days of driving, I'm also delighted as new inspiration bubbles up, in the form of this article and the possibility of creating a walking experience through the park, following the lunette, walking the moon, in salutations to the Mothers!

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