BE A PART OF HISTORY WHEN MUNGO MAN COMES HOME

The Return to Country of Mungo Man in November 2017 represents a one-time opportunity for a long overdue and powerful acknowledgment of Aboriginal Australians as the oldest living culture on Earth. This long-awaited moment offers space for truth-telling and healing for all Australians, commemorating the oldest modern humans known outside of Africa and one of the first expressions of spiritual consciousness in the entire human journey.

The Aboriginal Advisory Group (AAG) to the Willandra Lakes World Heritage Area (where Lake Mungo is situated) have requested that this moment be commemorated with a public event befitting such a momentous occasion. They have asked this event to be free of charge for any who wish to come. This invitation from the Elders has gone out to Indigenous communities across the country, and extends to all Australians, as well as to people from around the world.   In order to make this amazing dream come true, we need your help.

Mungo Man was first discovered in 1974 by Geologist Jim Bowler working on the shoreline of an ancient lake in Western NSW. This discovery and the earlier one of Mungo Lady (1969) forever changed our understanding of the antiquity of human occupation of Australia setting it back beyond 40,000 years. The discovery of these ancient ancestors led to the 1981 UNESCO listing of Lake Mungo and adjacent lakes as the globally-significant Willandra Lakes World Heritage area. Mungo Lady and Mungo Man remain to-date the oldest human remains ever found in Australia and are the oldest modern humans found outside of Africa.

Mungo Lady was repatriated with great ceremony in 1992. Now, after 43 long years of being in the service of science at ANU in Canberra, the time has finally come for Mungo Man to return home - to Return to Country. It is the wishes of the Aboriginal Advisory Group for this to be a moment of national and even global significance, acknowledging this most ancient of human ancestors.

So, we approached the Mildura City Council, a city one hour from Mungo National Park and which has an ideal location for this celebration on the banks of the Murray at Nowingi Place. The Council have been highly supportive of this event, and with the  full approval of the local Aboriginal Action Commitee, they are providing the beautiful venue and other important elements such as event security without charge.

Through our Creative Director, Shane Howard, we approached Archie Roach, Kutcha Edwards and other Indigenous Artists who have said YES to headlining this incredible FREE event. SO WE INVITE YOU TO COME AND BE PART OF HISTORY AND JOIN THE OCCASION!

We also need your help. We need a minimum of $80 000 and then up to $150,000 in order to fully fund the event in a manner befitting such an significant and historic occasion in Australian history. All amounts – big and small – will help create this important moment together.

These funds are needed to bring important Aboriginal leaders, lore men and women from around Australia, to attend this important coming-together. The funds are also for the event itself, the stage, the sound, the lighting, the coordination, - it all costs money and to put on a great show this is the amount that is needed. Musicians and dancers need to be paid, as well as have their travel costs and accommodation costs covered. There are professional staff to work on this and put it all together. All the artists and professionals working on Return to Country are working for far below their normal rate for this project, otherwise the costs would be a lot higher than they are.

So folks, we need your support. The Aboriginal leaders want this to be a special moment in Australian history, there isn’t a lot of time to get government or institutional funding, so it’s up to us, the Australian people to open our hearts and come together to make this major healing-moment happen.

The “ancestral spirit” of Mungo Man has a message for all people today. It is a message of truth-telling, of deep healing, and of harmony with nature. The AAG want this message to be heard by everybody when Mungo Man comes home. Let's each play our part to amplify this message,  - the time for this story to be heard is now.

This is the planned allocation of funds: