In Remembrance, Dr Kerry Packer AC: 1937 – 2005

On behalf of the Bond University Council and the wider Bond Community, I would like to offer my condolences to the family of Dr Kerry Packer AC and acknowledge his enormous contribution to the University and more broadly, the Australian community at large.

Bond University Professor Steve Webb has made international headlines thanks to his role in uncovering of hundreds of human footprints dating back to about 20,000BC.

Professor Webb heads up the team that has discovered 457 footprints in Mungo National Park in western NSW. The collection is the oldest in Australia and the largest collection of its kind in the world.

“This is the nearest we've got to prehistoric film where you can see someone's heel slip in the mud as they're running fast," Professor Webb said.

"It brings that element of life that other archaeological remains can't.

“We've got 23 track-ways of men running, children walking and wandering around, and I want to find where these tracks go and what these people were doing by following them around”, he said.

Professor Webb and his team believe one set of prints was left by a 6-foot-6-inch-tall hunter who sprinted at almost 20km/hr across silty clay toward an unknown prey, mud squeezing between his bare toes.

"We know they were hunting something, probably water birds. We've got men running very fast.

"They're wonderful prints – so lifelike. We've hardly scratched the surface," Professor Webb said.

The discovery made headlines world-wide, with SBS World News, The Times, Toronto Star, Chicago Sun-Times and the Irish Examiner just a handful of the international media titles to cover the story – putting Professor Webb and Bond University in the world’s spotlight.

To read the article that appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald, click here.

(Quotes taken from Professor Webb’s interview with AAP)

At age 27, Bond graduate Chelsea McLean decided she wanted to be her own boss, and set about beginning a new venture as a freelance writer and publicist specialising in the growing health and wellbeing industry.