Word: claypan
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They were in the wrong place, but Steve Webb's archaeology class decided to stay anyway. A colleague had mistakenly taken them to a site they'd never visited before, a nondescript-looking claypan lost among the pale dunes in the Willandra Lakes region of far western New South Wales. Luckily, Webb thought it would still make good practice fieldwork for his Aboriginal students after a week of classes in the nearby town of Mildura. He was walking behind one of them, 26-year-old Mary Pappin Jr., when she called out that she'd seen something. What...
...management plan is devised, Webb worries about erosion: harsh winds are already starting to damage the trackways. For now, simpler measures are being used. A group of Aboriginal women sit filling dozens of knee-high stockings with hot sand. Barefoot, they then move carefully over the dazzlingly white claypan, its surface cracked like china and scattered with cinnamon-colored sand, placing a stocking on each print to shield it from the weather. "How our people survived," says Mary Pappin Sr., "is all written here in these sands." Around her the silent dunes crouch in the sun - guardians, perhaps, of still...
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