An oasis rediscovered — finding the lost wells of the Simpson Desert

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A journey into Australia's arid heart by camel train has retraced a remarkable archaeological discovery.

One of the grand old men of Australian archaeology, Mike Smith, is chasing a discovery the old-fashioned way — with a camel train.

It's a very 19th-century form of exploration, with a very 21st-century goal: to understand the history of Australia through deep time.

He's on his way to a mikiri site: in other words, an oasis in the Simpson Desert.

A greenish-black rock stands out against the red sand and catches his eye.

"Look at this — it's a stone axe."

Professor Smith picks up the tool and runs his fingers across its sharpened edge.

"This greenstone axe has probably travelled several hundred kilometres from the Mount Isa quarries to get here in the Simpson Desert," he says.

Professor Smith returns it to the sand, and we keep walking.

As we near the oasis, there's an uncanny sense we're approaching somebody's home. Discarded stone tools lie on the surface of the sand, thought to have been undisturbed for more than a century.

Professor Smith and the non-profit scientific organisation Australian Desert Expeditions have been invited to survey the mikiri site by Don Rowlands, a traditional owner and head ranger of the Munga-Thirri Simpson Desert National Park.

Mr Rowlands is a Wangkangurru man, and it was his ancestors that made the axe that Professor Smith holds.

The Wangkangurru call the 17 million hectares of the Simpson Desert home.

The desert, which lies in the Northern Territory, South Australia and Queensland, is the driest Australian environment humans have ever lived in.

They were able to do so through a series of hand-dug wells called mikiri in Wangkangurru.

Some of the mikiri were more than 7 metres deep and only as wide as a person's shoulders.

The Wangkangurru stopped living in the Simpson at the beginning of the 20th century during the Federation Drought.

Mikiri are remembered in songs and stories, but the precise locations of some of these oases have been lost and the wells themselves filled with drifting sand.

In the 1960s, one of the last Wangkangurru to walk out of the Simpson, Mick McLean, taught linguist Luise Hercus extraordinarily detailed stories and songs about his childhood growing up among the mikiri.

Ms Hercus passed on these stories and songs to Mr Rowlands. The pair had a lifelong friendship.

In 1995, explorer Andrew Harper started walking the Simpson Desert with camels. Something about the place got under his skin, and now he considers it home.

"I added it up once and worked out cumulatively I've spent something like seven years living in the Simpson," Mr Harper says.

Today, Mr Harper runs Australian Desert Expeditions with biologist Max Tischler. The organisation is dedicated to studying arid environments.

"There's an intimacy with the landscape that you can only create when you're walking," Dr Tischler says, as he untethers a camel just before dawn.

"The desert just reveals itself with every step. You can't replicate that with a car … and we don't have to put diesel in these guys."

Last year, Mr Rowlands got a call from Dr Tischler, who said he had stumbled on a mikiri last year while leading a camel expedition.

"We couldn't cross one of the sand dunes because the camels were playing up," Dr Tischler says.

"So we thought we'd just head south. And then lo and behold, we pulled up for lunch and saw these enormous trees."

Arriving at the mikiri site, Mr Rowlands confirms the impression.

"Coming over the rise today, it was like in the Sahara seeing palm trees. That's how magical it was for me. This is a pretty special place."

Unlike the Sahara, there is no permanent surface water in the Simpson Desert. The presence of a mikiri is only given away by stands of large trees in an otherwise barren landscape. Water is there, but it's underground.

On the surface, however, are artefacts that increase in number as we approach the site until it becomes hard to step without treading on flaked tools, bones and shells.

This was once someone's kitchen.

Pride of place is a large grinding stone, the size of a serving tray. There is no true rock at all in the Simpson, so this heavy tool would have had to have been carried hundreds of kilometres into the desert.

Placed carefully next to the grinding stone is a round-top stone. The two tools sit next to each other like a pair of kitchen utensils, waiting to be put back to work.

Fanning out, the archaeologists make a poignant discovery: the skeleton of a young person, exposed in an eroding dune. Professor Smith leaves it untouched.

It's confronting proof people lived and died here.

Around the campfire, conversation turns to what we know, and don't know about the site.

There is no record of the place, in whitefella books or in Wangkangurru stories and songs.

Mr Harper surveyed the site with a metal detector and found no metal, suggesting the mikiri was abandoned before contact with Europeans.

Professor Smith says based on that survey, the site is likely to have been undisturbed for more than 120 years.

What happened to the people? Who were they? Why and when did they leave?

"Once the whitefellas came up, they would have been attracted to easy access to flour, tea, sugar, meat, so they moved out," Mr Rowlands suggests.

Then he offers a very different possibility.

"There is a story about a massacre that happened near here or further out. We've been looking for that place. Who knows what you'll find around here. Maybe you'll find the remains of bodies that have been shot."

It is documented that in the 1880s, dozens of Aboriginal people were massacred on the edge of the Simpson Desert.

We find ourselves staring into the fire.

The next morning, Mr Rowlands leads a ceremony at the site of the remains.

"Sadly, here we find an ancient ancestor of mine," Mr Rowlands says.

"This would be a Wangkangurru person. Mike's suggesting it's a young person and that makes it even sadder. Rest in peace, my family."

The bones are covered again with sand, and tree limbs placed to protect the grave from animals.

Days later the camels are saddled again, and Dr Tischler leads them over fresh dunes, searching for the corridors travelled by the people who once lived here.

Back at the mikiri, it's quiet again. All that remains of the new arrivals are the footprints of people and camels, soon to be filled with drifting sand.

Mr Rowlands heads back to Birdsville in south-west Queensland with one more piece of the puzzle in place.

"The journey isn't over, by any stretch," he says.

"But I'll tell you what. We'll come to a point where the secrets of this sandy wild-looking place, we'll know those secrets. Won't be long."

Topics: history, anthropology-and-sociology, indigenous-culture, deserts, birdsville-4482, finke-0872, oodnadatta-5734

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