Mutawintji National Park

Fast facts

• Mutawintji National Park
• Ancient galleries of Aboriginal art in a spiritual corner of the Outback
• 1,167 km west of Sydney, 130 km north east of Broken Hill
  

Why go there

For thousands of years Mutawintji was one of the most important spiritual meeting places in Australia. Today visitors can learn about this site in Mutawintji National Park on a tour with an Aboriginal guide.

Groups of Aborigines came from all over the country, walking for days through spinifex-tufted semi-desert and through narrow gorges filled with river red gums and twisted mulga trees until they entered the red-rust plains.

Here they camped under the stars, built ground ovens lined with termite mounds to conduct the heat, drank from deep, cold waterholes and feasted on goanna and wallaby. You can still see many of these fireplaces today, laid out like a giant map to show where each visiting group came from.

Many Aborigines painted wallaby tracks, or made handprint stencils on rock overhangs by spitting red or yellow ochre from their mouths. Others chipped abstract designs and engravings of animals and humans on the rocks with sharpened quartz tools.

Major ceremonies and initiations took place in the sacred Snake Cave, where a giant painted brown snake winds its curls around the world. The huge, coiled snake is not for the eyes of tourists, and even today it scares Aborigines who don’t have the traditional right of access.

Don’t miss

• Your Aboriginal guide telling stories of the Dreamtime as you stand beside an ancient fireplace on the arid plain.
• The giant galleries of Aboriginal hand stencils and the clumsy marks of early European station hands and explorers.
• Camping beneath the stars with stories and a slideshow in the main campground.