KoonaldaCave is a protected site. It is illegal
to enter it without permission of the South Australian Protector of Relics.
TO ENTER IT MAY BE
TO DESTROY IT
Dedicated to the
memory of Peter and Keri
Chapter One: Across the
Chapter Two: Exploring
Chapter Three: The Mirning29
Chapter Four: Nullarbor Fauna
Chapter Five: Nullarbor
Chapter Six: Koonalda in
Chapter Seven: Results
Chapter Eight: The Ritual
Art of Koonalda125
Chapter Nine: Good-Bye
to the Gurneys150
(A Selection Can be Made From These)
1. “The true treeless Nullarbor….” As my
shadow indicates, I am clinging to the windmill, the supplier of water for the
Koonalda Station sheep.
2. The Eyre Highway with its undulations.
3. “We stopped at a set of Government tanks…to
fill water containers.”
4. Filling the water containers: “Even a
little lizard poked out its head to welcome us.”
5. “A street
light burns all day outside” the Nullarbor Station store.
6. The Koonalda sinkhole: “I am always
unprepared for a crater four kilometers from the Koonalda Station homestead.”
7. “Disfiguring graffiti…on the wall above the
“squeeze” at the end of the upper chamber.”
8. “In 1952,…the
Gurneys still pumped the water up the 85
meters to ground level to water their stock.”
9. Over 1959-60, “Adrian Hunt discovered the line markings
on the Cave’s walls.”
10. “The Koonalda markings must be
prehistoric and of a considerable age.”
11. “Scratches on the floor boulders.”
12. “A twisted piece of mallee root, charred
at one end, sat on a high stone.”
13. “Over one hundred and ninety centuries
past, Aborigines perhaps drew on…the walls…of KoonaldaCave.”
14. “They…lived off scraps from White
15. “Flowers flourish for a short time after
16. The Koonalda sinkhole. Note the Gurneys’
17. “We set up our camp on the surface beside
18. “Large spiders…inside the sinkhole
discouraged our camping” there.
19. Our kitchen in the sinkhole.
20. “We lowered provisions and kitchen
equipment one bucketful at a time by rope through a meter-wide hole in the
21. At the Koonalda sinkhole: Sandor Gallus,
Neil Chadwick, Christine Kortlang, Kevin Mott, and Ian Lewis.
22. Christine “Kortlang was to observe and
draw the shapes of the marks and their intersections with each other.”
23. Ian Lewis, a surveyor with a “passion for
caving in the Nullarbor.”
24. “Neil Chadwick…assisted with the
25. “I found the crumbling remains of [a
cockroach] in the upper chamber of KoonaldaCave.”
26. The remains of a cave cricket in the
27. The Nullarbor Plain
has many myths surrounding it.
28. “The land abruptly ended.”
29. “The surf raged below the stark cliffs.”
30. “John Muir…considered this stretch of
country one of the finest in Australia
and admirable for grazing when water is found.”
31. “A steel ladder starts its 15-meter descent.”
32. “The floor drops to the Gallus Site, 120 meters from the entrance and its ceiling
75 meters underground.”
Looking back to the entrance from the toe of the slope.
33. “A backwards scramble over large rocks
interrupts the slide and leads to a short steel ladder that sits at an angle on
34. “A shaft of light touches [the Gallus
Site] from the entrance.” I stand halfway down the entrance slope.
35. Sandor Gallus has found “what he
considers a prehistoric mining trench…with sculptural concretions shaped like
birds and other animals.” In the center-foreground is the sculptured boulder in
Plate 37, and in the
center-rear is the mining trench in Plate 36.
36. Sandor “Gallus has marked out what he
considers a prehistoric mining trench with ceremonial picks, points down, at
37. Sandor Gallus has identified “a stone
with a human shape [,which] sits propped-up on the surface together with
sculptural concretions shaped like birds and other animals.” The scale is in
38. “Sculptural concretions shaped
39. “Sculptural concretions shaped like
birds.” The scales are in centimeters.
40. Looking from the toe of the entrance
slope across the Gallus Site to the upper chamber and the ascent to it. I made
the trail of light when I traversed the Gallus Site with the flash gun.
41. The 30-metre
high cliff to the upper chamber lit by an ascent.
42. Neil Chadwick and Christine Kortlang
descending from the upper chamber.
43. From the high pint of the upper chamber
looking towards the “ramparts.” Note the difference between smooth and rounded
boulders and those rough and jagged.
44. From the high point of the upper chamber
looking in the direction of the “squeeze”. All the boulders here are rough and
45. Christine Kortlang lying in the “squeeze”
entrance under the engraved wall.
46. Sandor Gallus at work at his card table
on the Gallus Site.
47. From the “ramparts” of the upper chamber
looking at the Gallus Site lit by the glow filtering from the Cave entrance and
by Sandor Gallus at work at his table.
48. Trench III. Note the top white deposits,
the level water-lain intermediate red zone, and the bottom white where Neil
Chadwick and Sandor Gallus are at work.
49. “At the back of the upper chamber of the
Cave, covering large expanses of the soft, chalky, limestone walls scrawl
masses of marks, stroked into the receptive medium by human fingertips or
scratched with sticks or stones.”
50. “Perhaps the most striking symbol near
the “squeeze” is a set of large and curved parallel lines in a rainbow shape.”
51. “The marks range from two simple lines
that run parallel down a rock face….”
52. “…to meshes of lines as tangled as the
wrinkles on an old face.”
53. The “elephant head” rock and “trunk.” The
engravings were so thick that they resembled hide. The next three plates are
from this boulder.
54. A portion of the “trunk” connecting to
the “elephant head” rock.
55. A portion of the “hide” of the “elephant
head” rock. The scale is in centimeters.
56. A detail of Plate 55. Note the association with the natural holes in the
surface of the limestone boulder.
57. “Smooth boulders, whose inner surfaces
usually show engravings, define the edges of the ritual floors or activity
areas.” The scale rod is in half-meter sections.
58. “Stones pile up against some human line
engravings.” These are from the activity area pictured in Plate 57. The scale is in centimeters.
59. Line markings on a boulder in the upper
chamber (see Figure 15).
60. “The upper chamber shows that people
engraved lines and, at the same place, cleared floors of rubble. They cleared
them for specific purposes.”
61. “I found the skull of a kangaroo, without
its mandible, among the bones on one activity area. It sat on a rock not far
off the floor…” next to the centimeter scale ruler in Plate 60.
62. Neil “Chadwick later discovered a small
flake of flint on the same activity area [as in Plate 60], perhaps an engraving tool.” The scale is in
63. “Bats swished past our ears and stars
thickened the canopy as we sang ‘Happy Birthday to You.’”
64. “We invited Cyril Gurney to the party.”
He sits with Sandor Gallus on the left.
65. “Warbla is near Coompana not far from
Koonalda and enters…from a large sinkhole 40
meters in diameter that opens up suddenly into the Plain.”
66. Ian “Lewis abseiled down into the
spruced myself up with a plunge into the tank of Cave water that the windmill
68. “The Gurneys’
Koonalda home sits in the midst of the Nullarbor.”
emus, four wallabies, two dozen goats, and two horses occupy the yard.”
overlander on the Eyre Highway every so often drives up the double-sided drive to buy gas at Gurneys’
hand pumps.” Cyril Gurney and Sandor Gallus.
71. From the Gallus Site looking at the climb
to the upper chamber. I squat in front of the central flash of light.
72. A portion of a marked boulder in the
upper chamber of KoonaldaCave.
73. A portion of the “head” and “trunk” of
the “elephant head” boulder in the upper chamber.
1.The Nullarbor Region, with locations mentioned
in the text.
2.Australian non-Nullarbor locations mentioned in
3.KoonaldaCave, plan and section of the Northwest
Passage (after J.B.Hinwood, 1960;
see Richard Wright, ref. 294).
4.KoonaldaCave, Northwest Passage
(after I.D. Lewis and K.R.Mott, 1976).
A.The Gallus Site.
B.The Upper Chamber.
C.The squeeze area.
5.Geological and archaeological time scales.
6.Richard Wright’s sections through the
excavations in Trench III of the Gallus Site (see Richard Wright, ref. 294).
7.Diagram showing terms used for flaking
8.Features of the inner face of a flake.
9.A battleaxe or pickaxe found by Sandor Gallus
near the “squeeze” (after Sid Fetter; see Alexander Gallus, ref. 102).
10.An indication of the land surface lost after 20,000
years ago (after Richard Wright, ref. 293).
11.Expected stages in the weathering of boulders by
12.Walbiri symbols, men’s ancestral designs,
showing the range of meaning (after Nancy
Munn, ref. 216).
13.A cylcon (after Lindsay Black, ref. 38).
14.A schematic rendition by Alexander
Marshack of a meander with its subsequent additions: one
attached laterally, five crossing over and two outside (after Alexander
Marshack, ref. 197).
15.Line markings from a boulder in the Upper
Chamber (see Plate 66). Scale
Many people and organizations have
contributed to the two Koonalda expeditions that form the basis of this
account, and to the preparation of it. My thanks go to Christine Sharpe who not
only was my companion, but also assisted with research and writing; to Ian
Lewis, Kevin Mott, Neil Chadwick, and (especially) Sandor Gallus, who also were
on the second visit to Koonalda; to the South Australian Museum (especially
Graeme Pretty), the National Geographic Society (especially Mary Griswold
Smith), the South Australian Protector of Relics for permission to enter
Koonalda Cave, and the Gurneys of Koonalda Station; to Mary
Lacombe for invaluable assistance in editing, the interloan
personnel of the University of Auckland Library, and Sandra Meyer. Many others,
of course, have contributed invaluably.
AR02\C01.doc2563 words13 June 2003
ACROSS THE NULLARBOR
[Along the Eyre Highway,]
the trackside began to be littered with discarded tyres, witness to the
sufferings of the less provident of those who had gone before. Many of the old
covers appeared to have received no more than might have been expected, for
they were worn and thus quite unfitted to the journey they had been expected to
accomplish. However, here and there were strong specimens, pierced by
protruding roots, or ripped by sharp rock.
Soon one began to feel that
the route should be called “Tyre” and not Eyre
The Nullarbor is a deadly place. An earnest,
desolate and apparently endless plain, its white limestone crops up everywhere
and in every direction like dried bones. The explorer Ernest Giles, writing in 1857 after trekking across it, felt the
region to be unknown to any human being and forsaken by God.
I drove into the Nullarbor on two
occasions to look at one of its caves, Koonalda. Its prehistoric art and
archaeology interest me. I believe it contains a key for helping us to
understand the nature and history of what makes us human.
The Nullarbor Plain in South and Western
Australia is one of the world’s largest expanses of
limestone. It is the largest sub-tropical arid area of limestone karst. It is
also flat. A section of the railway that zippers it runs unbending for 479 kilometers—the world’s longest straight.
Captain E. Alfred Delisser coined
“Nullarbor” in 1886 from
the Latin words nullus arbor, meaning “no tree”; the Nullarbor grows no
trees. The Aboriginal word nulla also means “not any” or “none.” The
Nullarbor can sometimes deceive its travelers into thinking they do see trees.
Lofty pines appear to clothe distant encircling hills. The levelness of the
Plain reduces sight to about six kilometers, and the pines, as approached,
dwindle in size to a half-meter-high thicket of broom. Atmospheric refraction
plays tricks on the eye. This deception can bring death; in 1878 Professor Ralph Tate used it to
explain why the two explorers Fairie and Woolley lost themselves on the
Nullarbor and perished. They stumbled toward mirages that vanished.
Bat- and owl-haunted caverns dot the
Nullarbor. Caves undermine it. Its climatic and geological characteristics
render it a piecrust, mostly hollow underneath, which every now and then
collapses into the cavities to form surface-openings called dolines or sinkholes.
At the bottom of the sinkholes often open entrances into the Nullarbor
underworld. Prehistoric Australians knew these caves.
Nowadays, the train journey across
the Nullarbor takes 29 hours.
The Plain extends from 300
kilometers west to 250 kilometers
east of the South Australian-Western Australian state border, with a maximum
width of 250 kilometers from
the coast. The present Nullarbor Plain is smaller than
the limestone formation, which covers more like 200,000
square kilometers and which sand and sea cover in places. This enlarged
Nullarbor Region, about the size of Colorado
or Great Britain,
includes three main features: a series of coastal plains up to 40 kilometers wide, a cliff line 40 to 75
meters high, and a plateau running inland from the top of the cliffs. At the
foot of the cliffs, lies the ocean or the coastal plain. A wooded belt some
twenty kilometers wide runs along the coast.
Roy Gurney, the grazier of
Koonalda Station, encountered ancient stumps when rounding up stock. Perhaps
some areas skirting the Plain grew trees. Perhaps Aborigines burned them off to
help their hunting.
Very large stations, such as
those of the Gurneys, farm sections of the Nullarbor with few sheep—and
sometimes none—per hectare. The graziers’ forerunners believed in the rich
pastoral potential of the Nullarbor. Delisser, a squatter and surveyor and the
person who coined the name “Nullarbor,” searched for good grazing land. He left
Fowler’s Bay in South Australia and skirted north of Eucla, in both July 1861 and June 1865, and returned with overly optimistic reports
about the Plain’s farming prospects. This excess and romanticism is common in
the face of the Nullarbor’s desolation.
The sheep and cattle properties occur
every 60 to 100 kilometers along the Eyre
Highway, the only east-west road that crosses the
Nullarbor. The abrupt cessation of towns and people on entering the Nullarbor
matches the abrupt rediscovery of them on the other side, as in an ocean
crossing. The settlements perch like islands. The railway line paints a similar
picture: maintenance depots, stations, and human habitations cluster beside the
line at similar distances. These, plus itinerant rabbit trappers and moteliers,
break the otherwise uninhabited region. The only settlement of any size is
Eucla, and less than 200
people inhabit that. World maps sometimes include Eucla.
The road passes the Nullarbor sheep
Station and its store, a couple of near derelict buildings, in the midst of the
Plain and 25 kilometers west
of the Great Australian Bight. A
street light burns all day outside this, the
Plain’s “Capital,” the only thing for hundreds of kilometers. “It stands in
desolate surroundings,” writes the overlander Basil Fuller. “Approach at dusk
and you feel that perhaps after all the world is flat and that here is its
edge.” Most of
the road passes within a narrow and lusher coastal belt, apart from around the
Nullarbor Station where it passes through a short and tree- and bush-less
stretch, the typical Nullarbor.
I drove along the Eyre
Highway to visit Koonalda as a member of an
expedition that the SouthAustralianMuseum and the National Geographic
Society sponsored. I spent three weeks in Melbourne
and Adelaide conferring with
authorities and gathering what we needed for the trip, including items of
photographic, camping, and caving equipment, and an unrefrigerated menu for six
people for three weeks. The SouthAustralianMuseum provided a Toyota
Landcruiser and other supplies. I met the expedition members at the museum and
we set out toward the Nullarbor from Adelaide
on the first Sunday in January. Permission to enter KoonaldaCave arrived at the last minute
from the South Australian Protector of Relics.
Highway connects the 790 kilometers between Colona in South
Australia and Balladonia in Western
Australia. Its construction started on Anzac Day (25 April) 1941
and follows an Aboriginal trade route and the course John Eyre traversed on his
journey across the Nullarbor. A more defined trail developed with the movement
across the Plain of pastoralists and settlers, telegraph workers and gold
miners, their stock, supplies, and communications. Camels bore explorers and
pulled heavy trains of goods. A cyclist, A. Richardson, rode over it en route
from Coolgardie to Adelaide in 1896. The impetus for the 1941 construction came from World War II.
Four hundred men cleared, graded, and laid gravel over the Eyre Highway and
kilometers of road altogether. The route gradually saw reconstruction and
paving until completion in the late 1970s¾engineers
added kinks to minimize driver boredom.
We spent a night at Ceduna. This
fishing port, a little east of the Nullarbor, ships out grain and gypsum. It
was hot, dry, and dusty. We pitched our tents with difficulty in the hard
ground of a caravan park whose consolation was a battery of showers (an oasis
for those returning from the Plain), and a fish-and-chip caravan. “No Swimming—PollutedBeach” notices barricaded the park
from the sea of MuratBay.
That night we broke the glass of a gas lamp—the first of the many problems that
hampered our ability to illuminate KoonaldaCave. The next morning, after
taking down the tent, we waited for breakfast at the service station where we
had waited for hours for the previous night’s dinner. We then hunted to find
liquid petroleum gas and kerosene for our lamps. The first we eventually
procured, but the second we gave up on. This added to our cave lighting
Our two-vehicle cavalcade thus set
off late. We drove westwards through hundreds of kilometers of wheat fields and
scrub. The road was fairly good and paved at the start, with little traffic.
Highway was mostly unpaved on my previous journey
onto the Nullarbor. Invisible potholes dotted the nearly straight road, holes
so large they threatened to swallow my orange VW Beetle. Circles of tires lay
around the holes as warnings. I contributed a muffler and a hubcap to the parts
that littered the roadside. Red dust streamed from my tires. It wafted across
the road in fine white puffs, which dissolved into wisps as we entered them,
increasing to tree-high clouds that obliterated the foliage. It seeped into the
tightly closed doors and windows¾irritating noses, throats, and eyes. The limestone
powder of the Nullarbor can create the worst discomfort of travel across the
The early Nullarbor settler,
surveyor, and Justice of the Peace, Tom Brown, writes that all the roads and
tracks on the Nullarbor are good and suitable for driving along fast. He is
right if only one vehicle at a time uses the dirt road. Problems arise when two
or more do. Drivers overtake blind in the pall of dust that the car in front
kicks up, convinced no vehicles are coming in the opposite direction because of
the small number that use it. The Nullarbor dirt road saw a disproportionately
large number of fatalities.
We traveled on 150 kilometers of new paving before entering
the dust. The potholes weren’t as bad this time as on my prior visit. On the
other hand, with constant vibration from its undulations, the dirt road made
for more hazardous driving. I nearly lost control of the van because of sliding
and wheeling on loose stones and dust. The other vehicle, the Landcruiser,
drove more sedately. The car wrecks had largely vanished and the land was greener,
but the boredom for the passengers still pervaded. The true treeless Nullarbor
Plain provides more interest than those portions of the road that
pass through scrub and bush. Writes Benjamin Disraeli: “A forest is like an
ocean, monotonous only to the ignorant”¾to which Fuller adds that
the Nullarbor is only tedious to the imperceptive.
We stopped at a set of Government
rain collecting and storage devices¾to fill water containers. Useable water doesn’t exist at
Koonalda: no fresh water river or lake or stream. Its underground reservoirs
are too saline for human consumption.
The lack of surface water on the
Nullarbor contrasts with other portions of Australia.
Numerous sandy and wide watercourses, which run swiftly in the rare torrential
rainstorm, interlace the driest parts of the continent. The Nullarbor holds no
active surface watercourses, however, even any that might flow on the odd
occasion. Aerial photographs do chart relic river courses. These primeval
remains of rivers occur in northern and western regions and appear to continue
now-inactive headwaters outside the Nullarbor; they didn’t reach the coast even
when they flowed. Geologist J. T. Jutson thus considers the Nullarbor one of
the geographic wonders of the world. The Nullarbor isn’t waterless
rainfall-wise, for it receives more precipitation than most of South
Australia. It lacks water because of its limestone
composition; riddled with holes, it rapidly drains water from the surface. The
Nullarbor resembles more a wilderness than a desert.
The tanks the Government erected to
counter the lack of consumable water sit in pairs every 50-90
kilometers along the Eyre Highway.
Each holds between 20,000 and 60,000
liters. The corrugated iron roof that more than covers each pair rises a little
at each side so that water from rain and dew flows into a central guttering and
from there to the tanks. A high, wire-mesh fence with a barbed wire cap stands
around the perimeter of the covered area, presumably to keep animals and humans
from polluting the water. From each tank a tap projects through the wire.
Fuller found this water unsuitable
for human consumption, even when boiled. He saw a possum floating bloated on a
scummy surface in one of a pair of tanks. The feed pipe to the other tank had
rusted through and the tank was empty. We had better luck when we sought water
from the tanks. Even a little lizard poked out its head to welcome us.
The tanks of water can save lives.
The previous time I traveled toward Koonalda, abandoned car bodies lay beside
the road rotting in the sun. Hundreds of wombats, which we ordinarily never
see, also lay dead beside the road. Some call the wombat a living fossil. It
loves the desert and looks half-pig and half-bear, with a large bulk, dark fur,
strong legs, and powerful shoulders. The Nullarbor sheep Station is the only
place where wombats are plentiful, according to Brown, a surveyor who lived at
the Station for about thirty years at the end of the nineteenth century. Fuller
said the same thing in 1970.
I could see beside the road around the Station, among the sparse saltbush and
bluebush, mounds of freshly turned yellow soil that mark the presence of the
nocturnal hairy-nosed wombat. Aborigines in Brown’s time walked to the Station
from hundreds of kilometers to feast on the marsupials. Sometimes they spun the
fur into a thread using two sticks and from this they wove garments. The wombat
bodies weren’t victims of hit-and-run drivers, but of the drought the Nullarbor
experienced that year.
The drought also killed the sheep of
the stations. The grazier at Koonalda had no live sheep left on his land and
worked on a road gang. Slowly rotting carcasses lay everywhere. Daisy Bates
describes a similar situation in 1918: dead sheep lay around wells of
brackish water that windmills pump from underground. The land, she writes, was
bare and lifeless, ravaged by the drought that ended in 1915.
Rabbits are the last creatures to
leave or die during a drought because they crop closer to the base of grass
stalks than can most other animals. Bates recalls the time when rabbits were
migrating across the Nullarbor into Western Australia.
They so easily devour the bark of sandalwood and other trees in the worst
droughts and dig up the roots of smaller bushes, she writes, that they adjust
to almost any condition. She saw them climbing mulga trees to nibble off young
shoots. I lay in my sleeping bag on the hard ground for the first few nights of
my earlier Koonalda expedition. I then found it more comfortable to sleep on
the rabbit droppings (up to 30
centimeters in places) with a ground sheet over top.
When I visited Koonalda three years
later, the fully stocked and grassed stations showed no sign of the
devastation. The same contrast between good and bad years strikes Bates as
well: herbage covers the countryside in good seasons to create excellent land,
ideal for sheep.
The Nullarbor, at first sight featureless and aggressive,
grew on me. Its animals, plants, and geology¾and its people¾fascinated
me. What I saw in KoonaldaCave
offered me something also unexpected and unique.
It took three days to drive from Adelaide
We left the road at the Koonalda homestead
70 kilometers or so before
the town of Eucla, and bumped
across the Plain toward the Cave. The track passes the occasional stunted
mallee and samphire trees. The gray of bluebush, saltbush, and tufted spear
grass blends with the dull gray of the limestone earth. I am always unprepared
for a crater four kilometers from the Koonalda Station homestead, hidden from
my view by a rise in the ground. The Koonalda sinkhole descends, about 60 meters across and 30 deep.
KoonaldaCave branches off in three directions.
The first to enter, the northwest passage, descends from the base of the
northwestern end of the large crater-like doline or sinkhole punched into the
Plain. It becomes a stadium-like 90
by 60-meter chamber with a
flat bottom. It then ascends a vertical 30
meters to the “upper chamber”: a 60-meter
long, boulder-strewn and undulating passage, which concludes with a low
“squeeze.” The north passage leads off from the northwest passage near the toe
of the entrance slope, runs for around 540
meters, and contains a number of lakes up to 27
meters deep. The west passage leads off from the second passage along its
length and culminates in a lake. Over this lake vaults a dome, which the end of
the “squeeze” of the northwest passage perforates high up.
Ralph Tate reported the existence of
caves from his 1878
Nullarbor expedition, and James Jones from his in 1880. The surveyor Arthur Mason and his companion
trekked 260 kilometers on
foot to Eucla after their camels were stolen near Boundary Dam in 1896. He passed the Koonalda sinkhole on
his way. A kangaroo shooter named Bob Scott rediscovered the sinkhole several
years later. He fashioned a ladder from kangaroo-hide ropes, ingenuity and much
labor, and climbed down not only to the bottom of the doline but into the Cave.
He may have been the first European to try drinking from the Koonalda lakes. L.
A. Wells found from inquiries in 1904
that kangaroo hunters, with the assistance of Aborigines, often carried water
to the surface. Disfiguring graffiti shows names and dates (“J. Broughton 1907”) on the wall above the “squeeze” at
the end of the upper chamber of the Cave. Casual visitors¾tourists,
kangaroo hunters, dingo trappers¾ventured into the Cave and placed their mark.
R. McCullough was probably the first
to undertake a scientific visit to Koonalda. The government employed him to
search for water. Descending onto a ledge of the doline by means of a rope
attached to a secured iron bar, and then inching his way down below, he noted
and later reported on the water and rock strata inside the Cave. G.
W. Hunt, an inspector of stock roads, tested the salinity of the Cave’s water
in 1904. Hunt also mentions
that G. W. Murray of Yalata Station and Butler
of Nullarbor Station tested its water about four years previously. Wells, an
inspector and valuer for the South Australian Survey Department, descended into
the Cave in June 1904 and
describes its interior and the existence of water, as well as Murray’s
earlier water inspection. He also mentions that a government boring party
(perhaps McCullough’s) visited the Cave some years earlier too.
Daisy Bates used a rope to help her
visit the Cave in 1914. She
describes the Koonalda lakes as a huge reservoir of excellent quality and adds
that every rainfall in the north refreshes it. It becomes brackish, she writes,
during long periods of drought.
George Woolf was minister of the town
of Ceduna and a missioner in the
Far West Mission of the Diocese of Willochra for nearly three years in the 1930s. His parish included the treeless Plain
and he loved to couple his parish visiting with his favorite leisure activity:
J. Maitland Thomson first organized a
cave exploring trip to the Nullarbor in 1932
and at least nine more times from then until 1960.
The Captain, as others knew him, noticed the name “Caves of the Catacombs” when
he looked at a map of the Nullarbor. The name enticed him and the idea of
caving attracted him. (The first European to see the Caves of the Catacombs was
the surveyor Jones who helped in the fruitless 1879 search for the explorers Fairie and Woolley, lost
on the Nullarbor.)
A 1936 article refers to the Captain as the harbormaster
at Port Lincoln, South Australia. He found his element on the Plain. Low scrub
renders potholes and blowholes invisible to anyone in the driver’s seat. The
Captain therefore piloted his vehicle from the bridge, seated on top of the
cab, the driver responding blindly to the tapping above. One thump from the
Captain’s boot meant “steer to port,” writes Douglas Kemsley in his account of
a 1957 Captain-led
expedition for boy scouts, two thumps meant “steer to starboard,” and three
“steer dead ahead.”
Oceanographic imagery befits the
Nullarbor. K. Peake-Jones, a master of a school group the Captain led on a
Nullarbor caving expedition, recounts:
I have seen a squall
approaching my ship across the Indian Ocean,
and a squall rushing towards our lines across the Nullarbor, and they are the
same, if you replace spindrift with red-brown dust. The Nullarbor even has
waves on it; little, choppy tussocks and rabbit mounds, and a broad, shallow
swell which makes it difficult to detect objects on the ground until you are
right on them.
picturesque nature of this imagery belies the danger: from sinkholes,
blowholes, rabbit and wombat warrens, it is not easy to extricate one’s
vehicle, and a rock noticed too late could quite easily disembowel vital
The Captain’s 1939 trip joined with the Spencer Gulf Aero
Club for an aerial reconnaissance in the Nullarbor Station area. They
discovered 43 caves in a
flying time of two-and-a-half hours with three small planes. (Three decades
later, Jo Jennings and others employed a parallel technique of examining
stereoscopic aerial photographs of the Nullarbor in a successful effort to
locate sinkholes.) The Captain’s squadron next touched down at Koonalda.
The articles retelling the Captain’s
caving exploits include incidental snippets. He recounts that in 1940 Roy Gurney heard that KoonaldaCave held water and climbed in to
test it. He then obtained a lease for the land around the Cave and he and his
younger brother lowered in an engine and pump. The Captain wrote in 1952 that the Gurneys still pumped the
water up the 85 meters to
ground level to water their stock. They continued to do so, though with
different equipment, on my two visits.
Cave explorers (or speleologists)
also visit KoonaldaCave.
The South Australian Cave Exploration Group formed in 1955 and organized an Australian Speleological
Federation expedition to the Plain for December-January 1956-1957.
Over 60 members of many
caving clubs took part in the cave exploration and scientific research.
Speleological societies organized a number of other expeditions to the
Nullarbor over the following years. They discovered and explored new caves,
surveyed and mapped caves (including J. B. Hinwood’s 1960 plan of Koonalda), and made scientific
observations. Many of these expeditions included stops at Koonalda.
Alexander (or Sandor)
Gallus’s interest in the art and archaeology of KoonaldaCave began when he refereed the
prehistory section of the 1956-1957 cavers’ expedition to the Nullarbor.
Gallus commenced his excavating in Koonalda, according to one account, because
he found there a large upright rock that supposedly couldn’t have fallen
naturally into that position. He thought that a group of people must have
intentionally stood it up on end. He also came across two fireplaces: one
surrounded by flat limestone blocks in the twilight zone of the Cave, and the
other further into the dark zone. Ted Lane conjectures that stone-age
toolmakers sat on the flat blocks warming themselves by the fire, while
chipping at lumps of flint they had struck off the wall.
Previous discussions between Gallus
and Norman Tindale, then Curator of Anthropology at the SouthAustralianMuseum
in Adelaide, centered on artifact
finds from the Nullarbor. The presence of such artifacts on the surface around
the Koonalda doline confirmed for Gallus his decision to explore inside the
Cave for signs of human occupation. His preliminary survey revealed several
sets of small stone tools scattered about the floor of the main entrance
chamber of the Cave. He investigated seven sets in 1957 and an eighth in 1959. Lane’s report also mentions finding in the Cave
a bone awl and a bracelet made of wooden ornaments with kangaroo hair linking
The 1956-1957 prehistory section of the cavers’
expedition came across a dramatic scene in another cave: the solitary skeleton
of an Aborigine lay face down in the powdery surface, with one arm
outstretched. A lone wanderer, perhaps injured or searching for water, he must
have lost his way. A 1959SydneyUniversity expedition stumbled upon
a similar scene. The bones of a 27-year-old
Aboriginal woman lay scattered through an extension of BildooljaCave. Some bones were missing,
probably scattered by flooding, and two small unnatural holes perforated her
thighbone. She had received a blow on her head about 18 months before she died. The expedition also found
flint implements in the Cave.
Over the 1959-1960
summer, Gallus and three student assistants undertook a second session of
excavations in Koonalda. Adrian Hunt discovered the line markings on the Cave’s
walls during this time. Gallus noted the resemblance of the drawings to the
“macaroni” that supposedly characterize the beginnings of cave art in Western
Europe and concluded that the Koonalda markings must be
prehistoric and of a considerable age. A prehistoric workbench marked the
center of excavational activity during this session in the Cave. The flint
miners of Koonalda used this stone bench to rough out implements from the flint
they quarried. Gallus and his team spent a week of days as long as 15 hours to uncover the workbench and the
material scattered about.One of
Gallus’s three student assistants for this session was Graeme Pretty, a
teachers’ training college student from Sydney.
He became Senior Curator of Anthropology at the SouthAustralianMuseum.
Further Gallus-led expeditions
to Koonalda continued the excavations over the following years. The Australian
Institute of Aboriginal Studies (A.I.A.S.) sponsored the 1965-1966
visit and sent Jo Jennings and Richard Wright as observers. The A.I.A.S. then
organized a 1967 expedition
of specialists in art, fauna, flora, sediments, and archaeology, which Wright
led and which resulted in the milestone 1971
publication on Koonalda that he edited. Gallus contributed to this
investigation, but archaeologically took a secondary role to Wright.
Documentary crews shot two films in Koonalda over this period.
Gallus revisited the Cave regularly
from 1967 to 1976, extending his excavations and piecing
together his understanding of the prehistoric activities there.
My assignment from Gallus in 1973, on my first visit to Koonalda, was to
record photographically and in detail the well-known wall markings: the finger
scrawls and lines engraved with a hard object, fanning out over large areas at
the back of the upper chamber. The first few days I spent trying to decide
where to start and how to proceed. I worked with Christine Kortlang, whose job
was to draw the markings.
Kortlang’s mother led a troop of girl
scouts to visit Gallus’s excavation site at Keilor, just out of Melbourne.
Kortlang went along too. The romance of archaeology inspired her. This, and the
fact that she attended an art college prompted Gallus to ask her to spend her
Sunday afternoons drawing cross-sections of the excavations.
Kortlang chose prehistoric Australian
art as the subject for her degree thesis. What looked like engravings appeared
on a small piece of rock unearthed at Keilor; she also heard of prehistoric
markings on the walls of a cave in the Nullarbor Plain,
another site of Gallus’s investigation. Their abstract art could tell more
about ancient Australians, she felt, than could bones and stone tools. I joined
the dig at Keilor during this time.
Gallus invited Kortlang and me to
join him in KoonaldaCave
on his 1973 expedition.
Kortlang noticed, while picking her
way between large boulders to reach the art area, fine lines on some of them.
On the second day of recording, she looked more closely at the markings. The
first stone stands halfway along the path through the upper chamber. It is
smoothly rounded and buried deep into the cave floor, but its striking feature
is some half-dozen deeply cut, parallel lines. They stand at a slight angle to
the vertical, at twenty-five millimeter distances from each other, and 150 to 175
millimeters long. The ancient red dust that fills them suggests their
antiquity. They appear too definite to be part of the limestone’s structure,
too ordered to be animal claw marks, and they show the same style as the larger
scratches on the walls.
I joined her. She blew away some of the
dust that fills the markings and her eyes wandered to the stone behind. She saw
more lines. Blowing on the second stone, we saw markings finer and more complex
than those on the first. Another marked stone stands ahead of this, and yet
another. We announced our find to Gallus.
I abandoned the recording of the wall
markings and spent the rest of my time on that visit discerning the extent of
the scratches on the floor boulders. I found marked stones when I explored
crevices under the boulder floor.
We found other things besides the
lines. A twisted piece of mallee root, charred at one end, sat on a high stone:
the remains of a torch, sprinkled with dust, resting in the same place someone
put it perhaps 19,000 or more years ago. Clusters
of charred twigs sit in cup-like depressions, perhaps the remains of another
kind of torch of twigs bound together, dipped in animal grease, and lit. I
found the cranium of a giant kangaroo. I uncovered, under a loose and flat
stone in the floor, a curved stone “cache” containing vertebrae.
Did Aborigines make the marks and
leave the torches? They visited KoonaldaCave up to relatively recent years,
though infrequently and with trepidation.
The same with other Nullarbor caves.
WeebubbieCave¾also known as Weebabbj-Junnaaibil, which means
slippered or hidden feet, or Weebabbie
Karroo, “the place of the hidden feet”¾lies 15 kilometers northwest of Eucla. The name
suggests the soft shoes of dry grass or feathers that Aborigines strapped to
their feet to disguise their tracks. Bates notes that the Aborigines feared the
which they believed lay in wait in WeebubbieCave. W. C. Evans,
in the early part of the twentieth century, couldn’t entice his Aboriginal
friends to enter what he calls Wee-BubbeeCaves. They believed that too much
devil or Muldarbie waited in it. This
terrified them. Yet, Evans found in the Cave
old pieces of charred wood (fire sticks) associated with a ridge of flint.
Don Lawler recounts a story about the
drought-stricken Eucla tribe and WeebubbieCave. The shaman or medicine man
would perform his ritual to relieve the thirst of his watching tribe and then
ducked down into WeebubbieCave
to emerge with a bag full of icy-cold water. He never told his tribe about the
underground lake. Much of this story could come from the imagination in
countless retellings. Bates, on the other hand, also mentions WeebubbieCave¾also known as Weebagabbi (gabbi meaning water)¾and that older men of the local Mirning tribe entered it, though rarely. They brought out water in bimpi (deep wooden water scoops) for
relatives who paid them. The younger people stood some distance away,
The naturalist Charles Barrett
visited the Plain during the 1930s,
its wonder and loneliness luring him, and tells a story about MeregudaCave similar to the one about WeebubbieCave. He found the Aborigines
feared the Cave as haunted. It provided some years earlier a wooden
waddy-shaped weapon, he writes, studded with the teeth of dingoes and
representing the nose and eyes of a distorted human face. He considers it a
relic of some vanished tribe. Barrett also explored the Dingo Donga Sinkhole or
the Cave of Bats
(subsequent expeditions failed to locate it until 1967) to search for such things as eyeless beetles. He
writes of the Cave as a vast hole punched into the limestone, large enough to
hold a battalion of soldiers or a circus arena. Yet Aborigines fear the Cave,
he adds, as the haunt of “debil debils” and won’t enter it despite the way it
beckons into its underworld.
On my 1973 visit to Koonalda, I could stay for a week
because I was traveling to the U.S. Kortlang and I encountered the boulder line
markings that week, we explored their cave environment, we examined the other
line markings in the Cave, we discerned something of the extent of all the
markings, and I took many photographs. We then drove back to Melbourne,
leaving the other members of the expedition to continue their excavation work.
A priority for my three days in Melbourne
was to develop the films. I printed them once in the U.S.
KoonaldaCave’s prehistoric art and
archaeology presents a challenge: the art comprises lines in more or less
straight and parallel sets, drawn either with fingers or with some sharp instrument
like a stick or broken stone on the walls and boulders at the back of one of
the Cave’s chambers. A large volume of prehistoric art and engraving offers
itself. What does it reveal about the engravers? What might it teach about
human development and human nature? I speculate that these findings are from
rituals people performed in this Cave 19,000 or more years
ago. Over one hundred and ninety centuries past, Aborigines perhaps drew on and
engraved the walls and floor rocks of KoonaldaCave with sharp objects and with
fingers, and extracted flint to fashion stone tools. They engaged in these
activities to the light of torches whose remains still sit on the rocks from
where they illumined the scene. Are my speculations correct? Might the marks be
natural: animal scratches or geological? Moreover, if humans did create the
While living in the U.S.,
I met Alexander Marshack. Marshack is a rock
art specialist who records and analyzes Koonalda type of markings found in Europe.
He developed a technique to look at the lines and he shared this with me. It
provides a starting point. I wanted to return to Koonalda to try it out.
The National Geographic Society
sponsored my next visit, not only financially but also with guiding concern and
assistance with photographic strategies. I crossed the Nullarbor for the second
time, enthused about what lies beneath its surface.
AR02\C03.doc3105 words13 June 2003
The inhabitants of this country are the miserablest
people in the world…, and setting aside their human shape they differ but
little from the brutes. They are tall, straight-bodied and thin, with small
long limbs. They have great heads, round foreheads, and great brows. They have
great bottle-noses, pretty full lips, and wide mouths. They are long visaged
and are of very unpleasing aspect, having not one graceful feature in their
faces. The [color] of their skins, both of their faces and of the rest of their
body is coal black, like that of the Negroes of Guinea. They have no sort of
clothes but the piece of the rind of a tree, tied like a girdle to cover their
nakedness. They have no houses, but lie in the open air without any covering:
the earth being their bed and the heaven their company.
Sooner than we think the last dark dwellers of these
regions will vanish from the country which was theirs and their peoples’ from
time immemorial, but in which they are now aliens, unwanted by the strange
[White people] who have taken possession of their ancestral waters and bring
them but death and disease as payment.
Richard Leakey extols the hunter-gatherers’ way of life as
the most efficient method of existence and land use. We may, like William
Dampier in the quote above, think of Aborigines in their original state as
poor, culturally and materially. We may, superficially, imagine a gaunt people
who spent all their time scavenging from a barren and forbidding land for the
nourishment necessary to survive. In reality, the women gathered the required
amount of vegetables in perhaps two hours per day, and the men mounted hunting
expeditions perhaps two times per week. The rest of their time was free for
cultural pursuits and childcare. The life of hunter-gatherers leaves them more
spare time than the life of agriculturalists.
I spent a night on my return journey
from Koonalda asleep outside a gas station on the edge of the Nullarbor. In the
morning, a group of Aborigines sat beneath the trees on the other side of the
road. They sold boomerangs to tourists and lived off scraps from White
I wondered whether these Aborigines
were the Mirning tribe
who originally lived on the Nullarbor. But there are no more Mirning. The Mirning belong to the large number
of distinct tribes of Australian Aborigines who have died out.
The Mirning (or Meening)
who lived in the vicinity of KoonaldaCave were, more specifically, the Yircla Mirning. Yircla (or Yerela, Yerkla, Yer Coloya) means the morning star (Venus) as it
rises over the sand hills of Eucla and Wilsons Bluff, 20 kilometers northeast of Eucla. The word Yircla became Eucla, the White
settlement of the region. Mirningmeans “man” or “men.” The Yircla Mirning were, according to A. G.
Howitt in 1904,
medium-sized, small-boned, slender, athletic, with a dark copper complexion and
black bushy hair. Their territory extended along the coast about 150 kilometers east and 60 kilometers west of Eucla, and north to the
Nullarbor Plain proper.
The story of the Mirning must include
the observations of Daisy Bates. It must also include a mention of her
compassion. Bates was an Edwardian woman who immigrated to Australia
from the gentry of Ireland.
She married a drover but, disillusioned, soon left him and her son and went to
live with the Aborigines. Though she spent 50
years in a tent in the desert, she remained a lady, even to her high collars,
long skirts, and white gloves. Her high-heels left tracks in the sand well
beyond her tent. She shared life with “her” Aborigines, who came to call her Kabbarli (grandmother).
Bates camped within the border of the
Nullarbor so she could intercept the Aborigines who emerged from further inland
and try to persuade them to keep their own style of life. This was their only
chance, she believed. If they insisted on going to White outposts, she could
help them by introducing them to European food, principally warm tea and
damper, and finding them clothing. She writes: “Guileless they stood to be
buttoned into the skirt and trousers of civilization.” From her own resources
she ministered to their basic needs: she fed them, clothed them, dressed their
wounds, cared for their babies, and held the hands of their dying. She wanted
to comfort this race she believed was disappearing. The most extreme of
Aboriginal ways, like blood drinking and infanticide, she accepted and tried to
change without condescension or criticism. She thought, she said, as an
No branch of religion could claim her
adherence, but she displayed deep faith: “The secret of my lightness of heart
is that every night I lie down and commit my soul to God.”
Critics reprimand her for helping to
forge the myth of “the dying Aboriginal race that needs the compassion of
do-gooders.” True, such a belief can obscure the problem and can hinder a just
solution because it fails to confront head-on the causes of social injustice.
But we misjudge Bates if we blame the creation of the myth on her. I say this
for three reasons. Her times produced her; she probably couldn’t see the
underlying issues as clearly as we think we can now. Moreover, the political
and ideological causes did concern her¾only she felt powerless to
change them. Third, she did do good for the Aborigines because they may have
received no relief had she worked only at a political level and failed to
convince the holders of power.
Aborigines also criticized her,
especially those familiar with White settlements. “Too much plurry Jesus,” one
said; “not enough tucker.”
Whites then and now find it easier to
shun Bates’ example and to approach Aborigines on a level other than personal¾as
statistics or as objects of scientific study. The easiest way both to uphold a
wish that they survive and yet to reject their culture, Terry Widders suggests,
is to study them as objects.
Anthropologists visited Bates’ camp
in 1930 and offered her
money. Upset, she threw their money back at them. Professor A. P. Elkin was one
of the anthropologists. His review of The Archaeology of the Gallus Site, KoonaldaCave,
ends with an account of their meeting. He called on her out of duty and
courtesy, he says, not to learn about Aboriginal life and custom; she couldn’t
tell him anything worthwhile. He found her disgruntled about seeing him. Later,
he helped her obtain money to organize her written material¾“a
veritable ethnographic mine,” he calls it.
A picture of Mirning life emerges from
Bates’s writings. This information may in turn help us picture the life
of the people who frequented KoonaldaCave. Not that we can say the Mirning
descended from the Koonalda people. No skeletons of the line markers have
emerged and nothing else suggests their physical characteristics. Culturally,
however, we can say something. The research of an archaeologist who surveyed
the region in the late 1960s
and early 1970s, Ljubomir
Marun, indicates a social continuity on the Nullarbor over at least the last 25,000
years. This implies that the Mirning descended culturally from
the line markers in Koonalda.
The Nullarbor creates one of the
largest and most inhospitable areas that any Australian tribe occupied, the
largest piece of Australia
where Aborigines couldn’t live. Little wonder that the Mirning only
infrequently ventured inland from the coastal tree and scrub belt, and then
probably only after heavy rains or to chase game. Yet, they lived like an
inland tribe because of the inaccessible shoreline of pounding surf.
The Mirning menu listed
wallaby, accompanied with snakes, iguana, wild dog, plus berries, and baked and
pounded mallee bark spiced with white ants. They also ate the hairy-nosed
wombat and, where they could scale the cliffs, various sea animals. The
Koonalda people probably added megafauna to this diet, including giant but now
extinct forms of today’s kangaroos and wombats.
Water concerned the Mirning
its availability largely dictated their movements. Rock holes called “gnamma”
holes trapped rainwater and provided one source. S. P. Stevens noticed them
loosely filled with limestone boulders; the fill retarded evaporation,
prevented animals from falling in and contaminating the water, and restricted
the consumption of the water by what Stevens calls “long-necked visitors” such
as emus and kangaroos. The Mirning
also sunk wells in the coastal dunes. They drew from cave lakes for short
periods, possibly the less salty few centimeters on the surface. Sap water from
rootlets of a variety of mulga species provided another source. The Mirning
gathered a quantity quickly, broke them into short lengths, and allowed them to
drain into a vessel. Six hundred milliliters of this clear, woody-tasting white
liquid collected in a few minutes. They also mopped with bunches of dry grass
the copious dew that falls in the night on the coastal Nullarbor, and then
wrung the grass out into wooden containers.
The Mirning’s tools
included hand-held knives, mounted adze flakes, spears, throwers, and
boomerangs. Wilsons Bluff provided the flint. No record exists of their mining
flint in KoonaldaCave,
though people did millennia before.
Medicine men headed the tribe: they
decided disputes, set combat formalities, conducted initiation ceremonies, and
arranged marriages. The Mirning usually married within
their tribe. They promised girls to their future husbands as children and beat
them if they eloped. Unfaithfulness constituted a severe misdemeanor. They
strictly observed initiation rites and circumcised 18 year-old men¾subincision in some cases.
The Mirning treasured
their children and cared for them well. They practiced infanticide to limit
They feared the dead. They never
buried or disposed of corpses but left the dying, returning when the corpse had
decomposed unrecognizably. All people spiritually entered a cave on their
death. Through it, they could pass out to sea and into the after-life where
they hunted in similar grounds to those of their present life; the caves formed
sacred passageways for their spirits. This may explain the Mirning fear of
entering deep caves.
Their art¾or at least the little
that we know about it¾consisted of a few simple design elements now lost to
history. We don’t know how these relate to the Koonalda markings.
I mentioned in Chapter One that,
possibly because of fire, the Nullarbor Plain proper may
extend further now than in the past. Natural lightning may have set the Plain
alight, though thunderstorms would soon drench any fire their lightning strikes
ignite. Aborigines may have set the Plain ablaze, though they may have visited
the Plain proper only during a wet season. The Mirning carried fire
with them (burning dry and resinous woods) when they moved. They lit fires for
a number of reasons: to cook, torch a camp on someone’s death, create smoke
signals, combat evil powers, hunt, and help foods grow. Harvey Gurney noticed
that fires in the coastal bush or mallee happen only in very hot weather and
then they burn only a few hectares. Whatever their origin, fires over a long
time altered the Plain’s vegetation (and therefore fauna). Excavations in the
drier segments of the Roe Plain portion of the Nullarbor Region document this
for at least the last 6000
Firings of the Plain by Europeans to
produce more land for sheep devastated it worse than pre-European fires. They
wiped out several species of marsupials. The more times a piece of land burns,
the more thorough and destructive the incineration. Plants and animals face
less and less chance of survival.
The change in flora and fauna didn’t
factor in the obliteration of the Mirning tribe of about 150 people from 1870 to the early 1900s.
“Despite the scarcity of food and water,” writes Marun, the Mirning
“proved once again and for the last time during their final decades in
existence, that they were still masters of survival.” White settlement caused
The local Aboriginal population
usually extended friendship to the early White explorers of the Nullarbor.
Readily and eagerly, they pointed out water sources. Frequently they guided
them long distances in intense heat and thick scrub. “We were indebted solely
to the good nature and kindness of these children of the wilds,” writes Edward
John Eyre. “Unsolicited they had offered us their aid, without which we could
never have accomplished our purpose.”
The explorer Edgar Warburton spied
smoke rising from the scrub and sent one of his companions, O’Shanahan, “to
catch a [B]lack.”
He soon accomplished this. The Aborigine, though unwilling to stay, guided them
to water the following day. The Europeans resorted to “a little coercion” because
they felt he misdirected them through thick scrub. They felt even more
infuriated when he left wearing two coats¾he was naked and shivering
from the cold. “The travelers appeared to have ventured their rage in
denunciation of the whole race of [B]lacks in general and of their guide in
particular,” the chronicler adds, “for whose behoof the stockwhip was kept in
Perhaps the Mirning’s belief
in the existence of an evil spirit called Burga started with their experiences of European explorers. Burga
could harm unseen. He was white, always lurked around intending to hurt, and
accosted people anywhere after sunset.
White settlers arrived next to
establish farms. Aborigines irritated them¾by slaughtering sheep, for
one thing. The first White settlers of Eucla were the Muir brothers at Moorpina
Station. Their only way to communicate with the outside world for their first
two years was via the nearest outpost, Yalata, 770
kilometers away. An Aborigine on foot took three weeks to carry letters there
and back. Anthony Bolam, a long-time resident of Ooldea and its Station Master
from 1920 to 1925, considered Aborigines “highly
intelligent and in many respects vastly superior to their [W]hite detractors.”
Bolam saw many Aborigines who had
walked from the Macdonnell, Musgrave, and Everard ranges in the north, up to 700 kilometers away. They lived during their
long trek by obtaining water from their wells and from roots of trees, and they
arrived, in Bolam’s words, “wonderfully bright and clean.” They then donned
“filthy cast-off” clothes, became “dirty,” and succumbed to colds and runny
with Whites brought diseases: alcoholism, venereal disease, and measles proved
deadly. So did missionary benevolence: Aborigines had to wear clothes, they got
wet when it rained and, too frightened to remove their soaked apparel, they
become chilled and died of pneumonia.
Those who subsisted beside the
railway quickly learned that the “big train” trailed chocolates and coins. The
journalist Ernestine Hill saw travelers amuse themselves by leaning out the
windows of their carriages to watch “a cannibal scramble for a pink-topped”
“denizens of the central desert” became parasites, writes W.
Charnley, “the poorest” of all the Aborigines who ever lived.
Some Whites shot Blacks for target
Ooldea Soak was one of the
largest and most important watering places on the edge of the Nullarbor.
Pre-European Aboriginal tribes walked long distances to attend initiation
ceremonies there and, in severe drought, to bargain for water.
White travelers left a track back to
their starting point at Ooldea, along which curious young Aborigines trekked.
White civilization magnetically drew them. Thus began the exodus of Aborigines
from their own groups and totem waters, to which they never returned. Each
permanent source of water had its group of Aborigines. They cared for it and
adopted as their relatives the creatures that lived by it. The old waters
around the edge of the Nullarbor fell bereft of their group owners and thus
orphaned. The Aborigines had come to Ooldea and its Whites, and the Ooldea
water became Weedula Gabbi (orphaned
water) for the now-derelict tribes.
The engineers who constructed the
railway saw the water of Ooldea Soak as a gift; it provided the only adequate
supply for thousands of kilometers. They took charge of it, ran pipes to the
new siding nearby, and soon drew off tens of thousands of liters each day to
satiate the demands of the steam trains. The Aboriginal population had to
obtain their water from taps in the station.
Five years after the railway opened
to passengers in 1917, it
needed more water. Engineers sunk extra bores. Ooldea was a natural reservoir
in a blue clay bed; clumsy calculations and the drilling broke through this
bed. Brackish water from the bore beneath streamed up into the fresh water of
the soak and spoiled it forever.
Many generations of Aboriginal people
had tasted the sweet and plentiful water of Ooldea Soak, maintained by a
natural balance. Upsetting this struck a double blow for them: not only did
they lose an important source of water, but a ritual center too. Aborigines are
conceived spiritually at water holes. From there also come their blood
relatives, their other selves, and their totem animals. To destroy the
ancestral water destroys the soul of its people.
The young Mirning tribespeople
left their traditional areas and gave up their skills and laws in favor of the
European way. They found it hard adapting to it. The old customs bonded the
people together, gave them ancestral beliefs, the feeling of belonging, and the
self-confidence necessary to learn a new life. White males freely abused
Aboriginal girls and women, so their moral code broke down and eroded away with
their traditional way of life. In 1912,
only the old people remained alive. Writes Bates:
[They] had no meat. They existed on Government rations
of tea, flour and sugar. When these ran out they drank water until the next
They are in their Wommoos [brush shelters], these old
people waiting unconsciously though it be, for the mysterious end they know as
“nalba” (death). Their contact with the [W]hites has destroyed their beliefs
and now they are undecided as to whether they are going up into the sky or
under the ground¾or
just becoming Kambu (skeletons) like the animals they have killed and eaten.
Six more years completed the
genocide. Jinjabula, the last Yircla
Mirning man, died in 1918.
Fire, herds of camels, and other natural means then erased almost every other
trace of his people.
S. A. White calls the local people of
Ooldea, “wonderful.” He
writes as they died off. Another person writes of their soon being “as rare as
“Aborigines, when properly handled, can be of great help,” another writes of those
Aborigines who were station hands at Mundrabilla Station on the Nullarbor.
“They are naturally slow, but patient; and the lowness of their wage-rate makes
them a great saving for certain work.” This
dominant attitude decided their fate.
words13 June 2003
NULLARBOR FAUNA AND FLORA
After [a 50 kilometer] ride the travelers encamped behind
a [23 centimeter] high bit of saltbush, and in great
difficulty collected sticks enough to boil a pot of tea. To make a [campfire]
was impossible. The horses drew stunted saltbushes to which they were tethered,
and gave no small trouble in their recapture.
The Plain around the Koonalda sinkhole was very dry and dusty on my
previous visit. The saltbush and bluebush seemed ready to die. I saw no live
sheep and an extended drought pervaded. Now, I saw a little greenery. The
drought had broken. The rabbit plague had ended and the amount of rabbit
droppings around the sinkhole had decreased markedly. Sheep made their way to
and from the water trough. Yet, the area around KoonaldaCave remains arid despite the comparison between drought and plenty, despite
water in its lakes, and despite lying 23 kilometers from the coast.
A belt of vegetation for 16 kilometers from the coast enjoys evening
dews and a higher rainfall than further onto the Plain. Sea breezes mean that it
also enjoys lower temperatures in the summer. A small increase in the rainfall
would probably widen this belt. Ralph Tate in 1878
called this coastal wooded or scrub belt an “oasis.” Small eucalyptus trees
dominate it. Mulga, myall, and mallee species also grow here, sometimes
densely. Strong and persistent winds from the Southern Ocean dwarf and shear
the vegetation in places.
The number and density of the scrub
trees gradually reduces away from the coast, until, at the Cave itself, the
saltbush, and samphire¾dominate. The two groups (shrubs and scrub) show
opposite patterns of distribution. Botanist Helene Martin
calls the belt of mixed shrubs and scrub, the “arid scrub zone.” That sheep
constantly move about the Koonalda sinkhole and its adjacent watering troughs
lessens the height and density of plants there.
The shrub vegetation of the treeless
portion of the Plain phases in 10
to 16 kilometers north of the
Cave. “The uniform color of blue-gray of the bluebush and saltbush stretches out
as far as the eye can reach,” writes S. A. White. The
hardy bluebush covers a large area to the exclusion of everything else, and
then links to a large colony of even hardier saltbush. Trees and large shrubs
are rare in this third vegetation zone.
Saltbush rises no more than a meter
and is stiff and papery. It can absorb moisture from the atmosphere through its
leaves rapidly enough to drink the equivalent of its own weight in a day. It
doesn’t need rain to reach its roots, unlike other plants; dew alone can water
it. Bluebush has similarly adapted, but to a lesser extent. Both thrive on the
Nullarbor by default.
Flowers bloomed and insects danced
around and in the Koonalda sinkhole after a rainstorm when I was there.
Grasses, herbs, and flowers flourish for a short time after rain. “Miles on
miles of plants in flower,” writes Charles Barrett, “with barren red-brown
areas here and there, and islands of light green on the limestone, that were
bushes with clusters of orange-[colored] fruits: a picture of the Nullarbor
after generous rains.” Large
numbers of insects attend the flowers and fill the transient pools of water
with their nymphs.
The floor of the Koonalda
sinkhole supports a wide variety of
vegetation. The Gurneys planted fruit trees here. A large fig tree offered ripe
figs and an apricot tree too many apricots: their Garden of Eden filled the
sinkhole. It always appears green, even at the height of drought. Plants
flourish here compared with on the open Plain because of the difference in
their climate, shelter, and water resources¾a cool and damp breeze
blows from the Cave into the sinkhole. Botanist J. H. Willis wrote in 1951 of the welcome greenery he encountered
in the sinkhole of what he called Kunalda. He found the dark-green Black
Nightshade flourishing in 1963
on the shaded sides and floor of the sinkhole. Alien plants like this could
derive from seeds in sheep droppings washed down or from seeds that human
visitors unintentionally introduce.
A wider variety of animals live in
the sinkhole than up on top too.
For this reason, we set up our camp
on the surface beside the sinkhole. The thought of poisonous snakes, large
spiders, and bats inside the sinkhole discouraged our camping down there. We
had to pitch our tents, which took a while because a strong wind blew.
Nullarbor winds can behave strangely: a gale can suddenly spring up from the
northwest and die in 15
minutes, and, after a short time, similar gusts may blow from the southeast for
their allotted 15 minutes. A
previous group of visitors tried harnessing the wind to fly on their camp
stretchers. Chilly and dewy nights drove us to sleep in our tents. Except
Sandor Gallus; he preferred to retire early, sleep alone under the stars, and
next appear at breakfast time.
We dug our toilet in the heat and
flies: a grave-sized pit just over the brow of the slope that leads down to the
rim of the sinkhole¾a
hill by Nullarbor Plain standards. We attempted privacy
by hanging a hard hat on a pole planted nearby. Vulnerability is using the
Koonalda pit, enclosed by the sky and the horizon, and visible from all points
of the compass.
The coolness and shade of rocks
that overhang the sinkhole provided a store for provisions and a good place to
cook and eat. A cool breeze from the Cave entrance also refreshed. We tried to
ignore Gallus’s comment that more of the overhang had fallen since his last
visit. We lowered provisions and kitchen equipment one bucketful at a time by
rope through a meter-wide hole in the overhang. The person below had to be wary
of falling items. Ropes frayed and, with this long and hard work in the full
sun, so did tempers.
We finished setting up camp and
turned more consciously to our tasks over the next few weeks. Christine
Kortlang and I returned to Koonalda to look at the line markings in the light
of Alexander Marshack’s ideas. We shouldn’t
philosophize on their meanings, he says, but closely study their structure.
Kortlang was to observe and draw the shapes of the marks and their
intersections with each other. I was to take photographs to support
her observations. I also had questions about the geological development of the
Cave. I wondered, for instance, when the rockfalls in the upper chamber
occurred in relation to the human activity, and what smoothed and rounded the
smooth and rounded boulders on the floor.
Four others accompanied Kortlang and
me. We needed a detailed survey of the upper chamber. Surveyors Kevin Mott and
Ian Lewis accomplished this and, at the same time, satisfied their passion for caving
in the Nullarbor. The two (whom we called “troglodytes,” or “trogs” for short)
each day carried their heavy equipment into the upper chamber, set up their
theodolite on piles of boulders, worked feverishly, and then stayed up half the
night in a large tent to compile their drawings.
Neil Chadwick from the SouthAustralianMuseum
assisted with the archaeological investigations. He carried out minor
excavations in the upper chamber and squeezed his small frame into all manner
of crevices to explore areas beneath the floor.
Any team to Koonalda must
include Gallus. The area of excavation in the main chamber of the Cave is
called the Gallus Site¾an indication of his close association with the Cave. He
and his teams have performed most of the work here; the depth of his trenches
testifies to hours and hours of patient excavating over many years. He spent
this time at Koonalda checking his observations and results.
Five members of our expedition had
before. The exception, Chadwick, had yet to enter any cave. He quickly found
warmth and interest in this chamber beneath the Nullarbor.
The Nullarbor resembles a piecrust
with hollow spaces under the surface. It can collapse where the limestone crust
becomes thin, such as at Koonalda, to expose the caves, tunnels, and galleries
of its interior. This sometimes creates a seemingly bottomless hole¾a
sometimes a doline or sinkhole. Over 130
sinkholes perforate the Nullarbor, ranging from 2
to 35 meters in depth and
from 10 to 240 meters in width. Most occur within 60 kilometers of the coastal cliffs, but a
few exist beyond the railway line. Some are elongated and some circular. About
one third retain sharp features with their sides not weathered back and their
bottoms not filled. Undercut scarps or lips of limestone feature commonly (we
ate our meals under one at Koonalda). So abruptly do sinkholes breach the
Plain, most remain invisible until at their rims.
I mentioned that the climate in the
Koonalda sinkhole offers better conditions for life than on the Plain. It also
provides one of the few sheltered sites in the vicinity for birds. Welcome
Swallows emerge in the evenings and flit about. Nankeen Kestrels hover above
the sinkhole, floating on the updrafts the swallows dart around in. The
kestrels hunt the swallows and their nests.
I occasionally saw a lone owl nesting
in the crevices high up under the lip of the sinkhole. The Cave Owl of the
Nullarbor is a large bird with snowy white feathers, an expressive face with
large eyes, and brown eyebrows ringed all the way round with light brown. Brown
peppers its wings as well. It often nests on ledges in the walls of blowholes,
sinkholes, and caves, and preys on small birds, lizards, and mammals. Appearing
only at night, it impresses observers when it perches on a limestone rock or
scrub in the moonlight. Barrett writes that it isn’t a distinct species, but a
pale version of the Barn Owl, or Delicate Owl, commonly known throughout Australia.
On a day in January 1917, White only saw a brown hawk¾and
he had come to the Nullarbor to collect birds. He feels that, in all of Australia,
this area supports the least number of them.
However, the day he saw only one bird was extremely hot (47°C) and he describes everything as tinder
the bluebush appeared to wither. Few birds would venture out in such
conditions. Whether White is right or wrong, not many birds live on the
Nullarbor. Hardly any roosting places exist. Hardly any of their normal prey
still exists there.
Like its birds, the native mammal
population of the Nullarbor has decreased dramatically, probably most intensely
in the late 1930s when
farming and settlement intensified. Few of the previously recorded species¾from
either cave deposits or earlier accounts¾now exist here. “The
mild-eyed hordes of kangaroos have been slaughtered in their thousands by
[W]hite hunters who drank themselves to death on the proceeds,” writes Daisy
the rifle didn’t kill off native mammals the most. Neither did the grazing of
domestic animals, nor droughts. Rather, a combination of factors caused the
tragedy: grazing by rabbits, increased burning of the Plain, and hunting by the
introduced cat and fox. The fox first appeared in Eucla in 1911 and reached the railway line after 17 years. Whites brought the domestic cat to
the southern edge of the Plain in 1899
to control rabbits, and to Eyre by 1896.
European animals and practices broke the natural balance of the Nullarbor
The Government established a number
of conservation reserves in the region. It plans to set up more. Yet,
previously common species have little chance to recolonize the reserves from
isolated populations or by re-introduction from elsewhere, warns M. G.
Brooker, while rabbits, foxes, and cats remain.
Rabbits, foxes, and cats¾plus
other European and native animals such as caterpillars, grasshoppers, and
in plagues and then disappear. An animal multiplies rapidly when conditions
become ideal. Then food runs out, a disease becomes rampant, or a predator,
which has also multiplied, decimates the population. The pest dies out or moves
on and leaves a residual population ready to take advantage of the next ideal
Conditions became right, mice
multiplied, and many millions of them entered Loonagana, a small settlement on
the railway line, during a night in 1931.
The inundation ate almost everything for miles around and disappeared as
quickly as it appeared. It wasn’t the last.
Eucla first reported rabbits in
1894 and Eyre in 1896. They reached the northern extremities
of the Plain by 1900. From
the air in 1932, white
patches marking their warrens reminded the geologist W. G.
Woolnough of a much-shelled battlefield or of the alluvial workings of an old
gold field. They became so numerous that 35
commercial trappers in the Cocklebiddy area caught 20,000
rabbits per week in 1947.
Rabbit numbers can vary considerably, however. The density of predators such as
the fox and cat plays a part. The disease myxomatosis, a distorting and deadly
virus peculiar to rabbits and introduced into Australia
to help control them, also contributes.
Rawlinna residents reported
numbers at around 3,500 per square
kilometer during 1975, the
third consecutive year of above-average rainfall. The plague drastically
declined from February 1976
because of the rapid increase in the numbers of foxes. Rabbits became so thin
by autumn that residents found them worthless to eat, and by May, they were
scarce. Many of the rabbits migrated elsewhere. Others died for lack of food
and water. In September, their dry skeletons littered the Plain. Three meters
of dead rabbits filled a dug well on Seemore Downs. Rabbits died in their
millions in the drought prior to 1918
and, at many of the railway sidings, residents collected the bodies together
for health reasons.
Droughts don’t push rabbits
into oblivion. They survive and breed through long and severe droughts, in deep
warrens capped with limestone, ready to rejuvenate when good seasons arrive.
Rabbits, the Nullarbor’s most common grazing animal, constitute its most
consistent and worst pest.
The camel roams in large numbers
north of and on the southwestern edge of the Plain. They wandered all over it
not so long ago. First imported to Australia
in 1840, by 1866 they commonly transported goods into
the interior. James Jones employed them for his 1880 examination of the Nullarbor: in harness they
drew wagons laden with two tonnes over soft sand, and heavier loads on the
rough but one-in-six gradient road up the Nullarbor cliffs to the table land.
Many became trans-Nullarbor carriers. An estimated 20,000
camels inhabited Australia
by the end of World War I, many pulling wagons of wool. Camels can plod slowly
and steadily for 16 waterless
days in temperatures over 38°C
(100°F). When they drink,
they drink: one can down 200
liters at a time. Today’s wild descendants of the domesticated workers are
pests or tourist attractions.
The wild dog or dingo, which arrived
in Australia a
few thousand years ago, appears on the Plain only occasionally now. It camps in
caves and dolines, and pastoralists and Government doggers trap or poison it
because it preys on stock. The Western Australian Government used to pay a
reward for the scalp of a wild dog. D. R. Nicholls writes that, in some
districts, scalps were good currency and storekeepers would accept them over
the counter either for cash or in exchange for goods. One dogger tended nearly 600 traps and made his rounds in an ancient
motor vehicle that bumped over limestone boulders and rolled down saltbushes as
if they were thistles. The Dingo King knew every trick of the trade and could
outwit the most cunning dog. Barrett describes the Nullarbor in 1930 as dingo land.
Not only do some introduced animals
become pests, but some of the native ones do as well. One insect causes as much
nuisance today as years ago. Writes Barrett:
You drink flies on the
Nullarbor; breakfast and dine with them; and in hosts they come uninvited to
tea. From dawn until evening star the miserable insects annoy; clinging to
hands and face, clustering on your back, and flying about your head when
disturbed. They are maddening until you become philosophical about the plague
of the Treeless Plain.
My impression of Nullarbor insects
grew negative, what with the flies and the large spiders that webbed the trees
in the sinkhole. I make an exception: a group of troglodytic insects that only
live below ground in caves and have no eyes.
The zoologist Aola Richards
recollects that science knew of no cave fauna from the Nullarbor before 1966 and that, within a few years,
researchers had described 114
species from 47 caves. Six of
these are troglodytes and all of the six are blind. Five are rare. One is a
centipede, one a cockroach, three are spiders, and the sixth an isopod. Apart
from the cockroach, each exists in only one Nullarbor cave. None live anywhere
else in the world.
P. Aitkin collected a male nymph of a
blind cockroach in KoonaldaCave
The hunt began for other specimens: “Wanted¾A Cockroach,” advertised
Elery Hamilton-Smith in a speleological journal. Other
specimens, living and dead, male and female, adult and nymph, appeared from
eight other caves widely distributed across the southern Nullarbor. From them,
scientists erected a new genus, Trogloblattella
nullarborensis. Its antennae are considerably longer than its body, it has
long slender legs, vestigial wings, smoothness in place of the eyes, but it
isn’t depigmented. The females grow larger than the males. It doesn’t react to
light because of its blindness; however, it shows great sensitivity to
vibrations and moves quickly. Scientists consider it one of the most
specialized cave cockroaches in the world, with many structural modifications
of insects confined to the cold, damp, still, and totally dark interiors of
limestone caves. Trogloblattella
nullarborensis is the only known troglodytic cockroach in Australia.
I found the crumbling remains of one in the upper chamber of KoonaldaCave.
If blind insects live in Nullarbor
caves, why not blind fish in Nullarbor lakes? Species of blind fish do exist in
cave lakes: Milyeringa veritas, for
example, some distance away in the Northwest Cape of Western Australia. An
unsubstantiated story says a mining engineer found blind fish in Nullarbor cave
pools in the 1920s. They
tasted like mud. Another unsubstantiated story says a caver found 50 millimeter-long blind fish in Nullarbor
cave pools in 1968. They
looked like eels. Stories aside, nothing lives in the known Nullarbor cave
waters. We don’t know why.
The harshness of the Nullarbor nurtured a rich and subtle
yet sensitive and small array of life. Small flowers bloom after the rare rain.
Unique insects subsist in the dark underground. All of its native fauna and
flora depend on fragile chains of interconnections. The European cat, fox, and
rabbit eradicated many surface species of animals. The boot of a cave explorer
can eradicate subterranean species of insects. To reverse the destructive
intrusion of European animals, curiosity, and greed will be difficult, maybe
The same applies to the cave markings in Koonalda. Explorers
have and will destroy them and the delicate environment that safeguards them.
We could easily lose a unique insight into ourselves.
AR02\C05.doc4043 words 13 June 2003
It gives you an eerie feeling that there is
something uncanny about the kindly solid earth beneath your feet when you place
a hat over a hole in the ground and see it carried into the air by a current
coming from below. It recalls too vividly the theories of those philosophers
who hold that the earth is a living, breathing animal, which may some day shake
off the beings who swarm like parasites upon its surface.
Tom Brown, an early surveyor of
the Nullarbor, found the Aboriginal people reluctant to set foot on the Plain.
Women would cry and men look glum when accompanied to it. They preferred to
skirt the Nullarbor rather than cross it and shorten their walk by many days.
To chase kangaroos or emus, they might venture beyond the edge some 30 kilometers¾but return to their camps
in the coastal belt when evening fell. They knew little about the Plain itself.
James Jones, hoping to find water suitable for stock, tried to obtain the
services of an Aborigine as a guide and tracker. The locals were loath to face
the Plain, much to Jones’ surprise, though elsewhere they would willingly
accompany most parties and walk a great distance alone to deliver a letter.
They felt afraid because they
believed that a monstrous and hideous serpent, exceedingly destructive,
occupies the country beyond the coastal belt. As big around as a house and of
untold length, the magic snake Ganba
(or Ganbaa, Gauba, Dijarra, or Jeedarra)
makes his home (Jeedarra ngoora)
under the Plain.
Douglas Kemsley suggests that
the Pleiades constellation inspires legends for many indigenous peoples.
Australian Aborigines tell of the sisters Yugarilya (the Pleiades) who chased Ganba, the Devil Snake of the Plain, with their digging
sticks. Ganba pushed up
the cliffs of the Great Australian Bight on his first
flight. Then he slid into hiding in holes in Kattaoondiri (Bald Head on the Nullarbor Plain).
An old man told Daisy Bates that the sulky snake of the Plain pushed up the
land with his shoulders so he could swim under the cliffs.
Several old men from Bight Head said
they often saw Ganba
playing about in the sea. They would hear a roar and a hiss from a moonyungarra (blow hole) after a
while, which indicated that he had arrived back fresh from the ocean through
passages and caverns underground. Some versions of the legend have two
monsters, a sea inhabitant who visits his terrestrial brother.
Ganba not only created the tunnels beneath the Plain and the
cliffs at the Bight. He also lashed about when angry to cause the dust storms
that sweep across the land.
A great serpent that swallowed two
men left a track now a dry creek bed just beyond the Plain near Ooldea. The
locals dreaded it and wouldn’t venture near it. The people of Tigamba (Bight Head) hung closely
to Arthur Chichester Beadon on his 1860s
south to north crossing of the Nullarbor. They were terrified that Ganba
would eat them. Ganba devours anyone who comes onto the Plain within
range of his coils and jaws¾which could engulf “an old-man kangaroo as easily as a
piccaninny swallows a witchetty grub.”
Trees face the same fate. Ganba ate or burned all the trees
that grew on the Nullarbor in the dhoogoon
times (which Bates translates as “dream” or “ancestral” times, the Alcheringa of the Arunta people).
The old men who told this to Bates showed their children pieces of dead or
fossilized wood or wood from a tree they weren’t familiar with. They found the
wood, they said, as near the home of the snake as they had dared go. One old
man presented her with a piece of unidentifiable wood and told her that it
originated way north of the coast and wasn’t from any tree that grew in his own
country. The sample was lost on its way for analysis.
So large and constant is Ganba’s thirst, that he sucks down
all of the water laying on the surface as soon as it rains. Brown writes that 40 hectares of water 60 centimeters deep disappeared six hours after 125 millimeters fell in 24 hours. The next day he put his ear to a
blowhole and heard the water flowing in rivers below. Ganba was drinking again.
Ganba emerged to eat people through gates that were also his
breathing holes. These blowhole orifices dot the Plain.
Blowholes range from the size of a
fist to a couple of meters in width. Professor Ralph Tate probably wrote the
earliest account of them: in 1878
he describes them as perpendicular vents up which a violent wind rushes on hot
days. They breathe in or out for long periods. The direction of their breathing
often shifts at sunrise and sunset, twelve hours in then twelve hours out.
Blowholes generate a range of noises
as they suck in air or blow it out: like tumbling water, steam, thunder, or a
train at full speed. Sometimes they screech, whistle, roar, hiss, sigh, or go
boo-boo. Such noises can startle a person when a bird or the wind usually
produces the only sound. Horses bolt before their riders hear anything¾only
the initiated observer concludes that a blowhole blows in the vicinity.
The expelled or inhaled air can rush
at 30 or 45 kilometers per hour. A blowhole can tear
away a cloth stretched over its entrance. It can throw back dirt tossed in it.
It can throw back in splinters a tree tossed down it. It can disperse the
contents of a water bottle into a fine spray. It can keep a hat or an open
umbrella suspended. It can force birds trying to fly out to go nowhere. It can
carry cavers’ hair straight up and tear their clothes off.
A hot Don Lawler stood atop a “desert
refrigerator” blowhole and thought he faced an Antarctic blast.
You must watch out for blowholes when
you walk on the Plain, especially at night and especially in grass. A hollow
sound beneath your feet indicates that only a thin slab of limestone separates
you from a cave or blowhole. Bates tells that the hooves of horses sometimes
pierce the crust and open up yet another blowhole. She found a wombat skeleton
in one of these caves, evidently the victim of a sudden subsidence and unable
to climb back out again. A posthole digger chipped into the limestone with a
heavy, sharp crowbar. It slipped through his fingers and clattered its way on
A few unexplained disappearances of
they fell down dolines or blowholes to their death¾possibly created the fear
of venturing too far onto the Plain. The story of Ganba could thus develop. Aborigines avoided with terror the moonyungarra¾“having many evil spirits,” referring to blowholes.
Bates authenticates a similar connection between legendary magic disappearances
Graeme Pretty and Sandor Gallus
remind us that fears such as this didn’t prevent the ancient people of the
Nullarbor from entering and using KoonaldaCave. Given the terror of the Mirning
for the Nullarbor and the caves, they probably didn’t create the lines. The
people before them must have thought differently and felt less fearful.
A scientific account of blowhole
breathing also reads differently from the Mirning legend. Experiments
and mathematical theory suggest that air moves through small tubes in the rock.
Variations in the atmosphere set up differences in air pressure that cause the
blowhole air currents. The in-out cycles match the pressure changes: air enters
with high outside pressure and issues with a fall in the outside barometer.
This can happen around sunrise or sunset or with a change in the weather.
Blowholes needn’t indicate the presence of caves.
Before the prosaic explanation,
Europeans preferred imaginative accounts of blowholes similar to those of the
nineteenth century Aborigines. One writer interprets the wind rushing through
blowholes as the sighing of a giant. Woolf populates the region with lost,
disembodied, earthbound spirits who go their way sighing and wailing, seeking
they know not what. Some perceive a dark smell they describe as the unhealthy
fetid breath of the earth. Bates smells the sea, especially in the hot summer
months and in the rage of a hot north wind. She writes in another place of
ocean winds sweeping violently out of blowholes. The draughts of blowholes emit
a strong salty smell, even a seaweed odor, writes Captain S. A. White. He
suggests that incoming and outgoing ocean tides pass under the Plain to cause
the air currents. His writings indicate that he probably visited the Nullarbor
only at the Ooldea end of the railway, over 100
kilometers from the sea¾a far reach for the tide. Perhaps the Ganba myth, depicting his travels
to and from the sea via the underground passageways, helped inspire the tide
KoonaldaCave, unlike Ooldea, is close to
the sea. We decided to take a rest from caving and visit the ocean. We climbed
into our four-wheel drive and drove past the Gurney homestead back to the road.
Then off the road again and across trackless land of scrubby vegetation that
became lower and lower the further we went.
The land abruptly ended. The surf
raged below the stark cliffs. Distant bastions stretched out of sight both
ways, contrasting with the sky. I sat on the edge of the flat world with my
feet dangling, aloof to the ocean that pounded below. The explorer John Forrest
looked cautiously over the precipice and reeled back in terror. He suffered
The rollers that ceaselessly march
from the Antarctic ice bite the southern Australian coastline. The 60-meter escarpment starts at Point Culver in
the west. It continues for 150
kilometers to Twilight Cove. Here the wall recedes inland for 240 kilometers, to lie about 45 kilometers from the sea at Madura. It
swings back seawards from this point to front the ocean again after passing
behind Eucla. Sand drifts eventually cover and end its 650-kilometer continuity at the head of the Great
Australian Bight. The cliffs gradate in color from shades of
purple at their base to dark blue and brilliant white. The sea contrasts with a
deep blue. The marble rim of the Nullarbor Plain is the
longest unbroken cliff-line on our planet.
The first Europeans to see the
succession of towering cliffs from the sea found them formidable: Pieter Nuyts
in 1627, Brury
d’Entrecasteaux in 1792
searching for La Perouse, and Matthew Flinders in 1802 who, from the deck of his ship the Investigator, exaggerated their
height by a factor of three.
The height, length, and uninterrupted
nature of the cliff line generated another series of Nullarbor legends.
Nuyts (or Nuijts) commanded the ship Gulde Zee Paert (or Gulde Zeepaard, the Golden Seahorse) in which he
voyaged further than anyone in his day. The ship blew off course in 1627 and accidentally followed the
coastline of the Great Australian Bight, probably as far
as the Nuyts Archipelago. The Dutchman had found the GreatSouthLand.
He planned a colony here. Writings to tempt prospective Dutch settlers extolled
Nuyts Land: “one of the best countries in the world, the land abounds in milk
and honey and in all those things capable of gratifying the senses and enabling
one to live delightfully; a land full of festivity and good cheer, which is
fertile and without much labor produces easily and cheaply all that is
necessary for life.” Any
settlement, continues the advertisement, must first disembark 500 or 600
good, well chosen soldiers to spy out the land. After all, the local
inhabitants may have fortified towns and weapons of war more terrifying than
bombs and cannons. Giants of extraordinary strength and knowledge lived in
parts of the world before the deluge and great flood of Noah’s time and perhaps
they now live here.
Lilliput, the land that Gulliver found in his
travels is, according to the longitude and latitude given, in the middle of the
Rear Admiral d’Entrecasteaux, aboard La Recherche in 1792, was next to sail past the Nullarbor.
He described it as so barren, sterile, and forbidding that it seemed
unprofitable to spend time and energy exploring it. Still, the French planned
to annex it. They called it “Terre Napoleon.”
John Eyre in 1841, the first European to cross the
Plain, looked for grazing land and a route for overlanding stock. His 1,600
kilometers journey led him from Fowler’s Bay to Albany.
He concluded that the land was useless. He nearly died from thirst. Sand hills
held the little water that he found, but keeping to the sandy areas provided
its problems. He writes that sand “floated on the surface of the water,
penetrating into our clothes, hair, eyes, and ears, buried our provisions when
we lay down at nights, it was a perpetual and never-ceasing torment, and as if
to increase our miseries we were again afflicted with swarms of large
horse-flies, which bit us dreadfully.” He
counted 23 of the bloodsuckers
at one time on a 50
centimeter-square patch of his trousers.
The first Whites to venture onto the
Nullarbor proper were Miller and Dutton in 1857.
They looked north of Fowler’s Bay for sheep pasture.
Next, Major Edgar Warburton in 1860 followed Eyre’s route to 130 kilometers west of Fowler’s Bay. He
considers this “coveted land a desolate wilderness fit for neither humans nor
beasts”; it will remain according to its title, “No Man’s Land.” It’s
not worth being given, he says, and couldn’t for 500 years fetch the £1
per acre that Sydney dealers ask
for it. His diarist suggests that some traveler will cross the Major’s Desolate
Plains by a different route and discover a fertile region beyond it. (Nearly 150 years later, we can add that the Gibson
Desert lies beyond the Nullarbor.)
The western boundary of the Province
of South Australia lay, in 1841, on the 132°E line of latitude, around 50 kilometers west of Fowler’s Bay. “No Man’s Land”
refers to the territory (part of New South Wales)
between it and the Western Australian border at 129°E.It
became part of South Australia in
1861. The name, “No Man’s
Land,” derives from a bull of Pope Alexander VI in 1493that divided the world in two, one half to
the Portuguese and the other to the Spaniards, with a neutral zone between the 129°E and 132°E
The South Australian Government hoped¾probably
because of strong lobbying¾to create a profitable grazing area out of the
Nullarbor, and in 1865 sent
Alfred Delisser to survey it. He found the only spot along the cliff line
suitable for a port (near Eucla), but nothing else of significance. He
described the Plain as excellent farm country, if farmers could obtain water.
The Plain saw its first farms in 1871. The telegraph line along the coast
opened in 1877, the first
pole planted at Port Augusta on 25 August 1875.
Further explorations occurred in the 1870s.
W. H. Tietkins took up a lease for 25,000
hectares near Ooldea in 1878,
but had trouble finding water for stock. He abandoned one attempt at a well 65 kilometers north of Ooldea after drilling
down 18 meters and finding a
small supply of salt water, and another after 39
meters. He abandoned his venture after two years of deprivation when his funds
ran out. He later said in 1887
that agriculturalists reported the Nullarbor “eminently suitable in every way
for pastoraling, and probably also for the growing of cereals.”
Aboriginal legend describes the Plain
as once wonderful and beautiful, a land of perfection. Europeans fixated on the
Nullarbor as a pastoralists’ haven: crops would grow in abundance and sheep and
cattle would graze. Only a myth could empower the Whites to believe this and
try forcing it into a reality. Only a myth could empower them to believe that
sufficient quantities of suitable water wait in this wilderness to transform it into fine pasture.
company sent two men, Fairie and Woolley, to find suitable grazing. They left
Eucla on 4 November 1878
to travel NNE, and no one saw them again. Jones tracked the last signs of the expedition
a year later: their water bags leaked and they overshot their camp tracks by
over seven kilometers. They stretched a blanket through the branches of a tree
to shade themselves¾the
thermometer at Eucla registered 71°C
to 76.5°C in the sun that
day. One of their horses staggered back to Eucla and Aborigines found the
remains of another horse, perhaps their other one, on the sea cliffs. Jones
writes that they probably abandoned any systematic course and headed directly
they thought was south¾stumbling from one likely looking object to another,
continually to meet with disappointment. In their stupor, they probably fell
down a blowhole.
Jones thoroughly and enthusiastically
went about his tracking task, seemingly immune to the dangers that claimed
those he tracked. People lost in a wilderness like the Nullarbor often strip
themselves naked garment by garment, hanging one on some scrub and another on a
stunted tree as they stumble along. Inexperienced people panic quickly,
especially when they notice their predicament at dusk with the uncertainty of
night about to fall. It is easy to become bewildered in this sea of saltbush
with a horizon of hazy mirages.
The pastoralists’ dream continued in
the 1880s and 1890s with the establishment of more farms
and feasibility investigations for others.
Arthur Mason and a man named Younge
set out to investigate rabbits. During the night of 26 July 1896 near Boundary Dam, shortly
after they started their journey, their camels and some of their provisions disappeared.
They spent a night sleeping on the Plain in a black frost and found their
clothes stiff with ice when they arose. They killed their dog, skinned it,
partially cooked it, and ate it. Dew clung to grass and bushes, so they sucked
it off. That badly cut their lips. It saturated their leggings, boots, socks
and the bottom of their trousers, so they took them off, wrung them out, and
obtained four mouthfuls of water. The tan taste of the boots made them feel
sick. Younge became delirious. The pair walked 260
kilometers to Eucla. They examined the tract of land between Kurnalpi and
Eucla, and returned claiming to have discovered 400,000
hectares of some of the finest agricultural and pastoral country in the world.
Mason also mentioned the Plain’s poor water resources.
Forrest traversed the Nullarbor in 1869. He afterward entered politics. The
idea of a railway to link east and west enthused him and he pushed it, hoping
to unify Australia
and sever Western Australia’s
isolation. He inflamed imaginations with the pastoral opportunity of the
Nullarbor: the train would open up eight million hectares of the best grassy
country. Abundant water waited underground.
The Western Australian
Government sent engineer John Muir in 1901
to begin a survey along the route for the proposed railway, at least that
State’s section of it. He considered this stretch of country one of the finest
and admirable for grazing when water is found¾which would happen soon if
properly prospected for. The Western Australian Government mounted further
water-seeking explorations in preparation for the railway, most notably those
of A. Gibb Maitland in the early years of the twentieth century. The South
Australians engaged in similar searches.
Water is available on the Nullarbor
from a few sources. Rock or gnamma holes store surface supplies, especially
after rain. Muir generously estimates, from the ones he saw, that they could
hold between 1,350 to 45,500
liters. J. T. Jutson reports these in 1934
as a chief source of water for the limited pastoral use of the plateau.
L. Keith Ward describes the two other
water sources in the Nullarbor, both underground. The water accessible in the
lakes of the deeper caves is called groundwater. It lays a little above sea
level and gently slopes seaward across the Plain. The lakes average 66 meters in depth. They contain too much
salt for humans and usually for sheep; better water floats above the salt water
on many of the lakes but, at a few centimeters in depth, that also offers
A separate underground water system
exists beneath the groundwater. Ninety meters of impervious clay sit under the
limestone, and sand and gravel below it contain water under pressure. The sands
north of the Nullarbor absorb the water, it runs seawards, and the clay traps
it. The geologist Henry Y. L. Brown thought he saw this water running into the
sea at the foot of the cliffs, throwing up sand or mud from the ocean bed in
large and continual jets and puffs. Forrest also noticed a stream of fresh
water flowing into the sea and the captain of a ship reported fresh water for
over three kilometers from the shore. The salt level of this subterranean water
varies. Sheep can usually drink it, reports Maitland in 1915, but the pressure won’t raise it to
the surface. Farmers need to use pumps.
Only one of the eight bores the South
Australian Government drilled in 1880
yielded water sufficiently free from salt. Few of the bores sunk over the years
succeeded. Yet the Government continued to pressure for agriculture and money
making from the Nullarbor. In 1936,
a former Governor of South Australia lamented the neglect of cultivation in
Nowadays, the lure of oil and
minerals sends explorers into the Australian wilderness. The geologist W. G.
Woolnough states that his aerial survey eliminated the possibility of finding a
structure on the Nullarbor suitable for concentrating or conserving oil. No
hope exists for translating this “veritable abomination of desolation,” he
writes, into economic significance.
Flinders observed the sea cliffs and
noticed the absence of river outlets. He concluded that the cliffs form a
barrier between an inland sea and the open ocean. This myth of an inland sea¾perhaps
below sea level¾stood
for many years.
Eyre inflamed the belief when he
found “freshwater snails” over the region. Tate
noticed wheelbarrow-loads under the larger bushes and saw them strewn thickly
over the open country. He couldn’t walk two steps without crushing a shell.
Bates saw the slimy track of “the mysterious land snail” on early winter
W. Earle noticed “dew shell-snails” crawling
around and activated by any moisture, whether a slight rain shower or a dewy
snails grow larger and support a more acute
turret on its shell than does the common garden snail.
The snails aren’t freshwater. No
inland sea exists. Another of Tate’s observations proved wrong as well: the
land doesn’t gradually slope away from the cliffs toward the interior.
The Nullarbor remains an uncanny
place of mystery and strangeness, of silent caves and waters. Scientist Michael
Archer responded to his feeling of unease by taking an electroscope to test for
Nearly a century before, the train
arrived. It was heard a long way off¾softly as it passed over firm and level ground, loudly
as it passed over hollow ground. By day, it belched sparks and smoke. By night,
it wound its way as a “dragon of lights.” “And
anon,” writes Bates, it was here, “moving and creeping so silently that
newcomers from the distant Musgrave and Everard ranges not infrequently
snatched up their weapons and flew northward again from the magic
monster…creeping towards them.” The
whole of Central Australia knew the legend of Ganba who killed and ate anyone he
caught on his oondiri
(“the waterless,” the Nullarbor Plain). With the train, Ganba had left his haunt “to
ravage the earth,” as Ernestine Hill puts it, “with death in his breath.”
Aborigines started to take walkabouts
over the Plain years later, in 1936.
The story of Ganbaceased to restrain them a long time
after Europeans arrived on the Nullarbor.
The Nullarbor, with its treeless
Plain and black caverns, continues to offer challenges, fields of exploration
that call the investigator. Subterranean wonders repay the person who hears and
answers, writes Anthony Bolam. Human beings in the Nullarbor, he continues,
feel themselves second to something greater.
Standing before the line markings in KoonaldaCave, I feel myself second to
something greater too. I now need stories¾sustainable ones¾to
help me understand.
words13 June 2003
KOONALDA IN THE NULLARBOR
[Two hundred meters] in from the entrance
we turned and looked back, and never shall I forget the sight of the great rock
chamber with the light filtering in and changing colour as it diminished. The
huge domed roof and columns of rock could be compared with nothing else but London’s St. Paul’s
Cathedral. The beauty and majesty of it turned my chest as no [humanly]-made
cathedral could do. At the entrance the light was blue-green, this changed
through rose-pink to grey. The swift silent flight of bats and swallows added
to the atmosphere. It is undoubtedly one of the sights of Australia.
We finished our first evening meal at Koonalda. The
temperature began to fall. Our irritabilities also cooled down and we felt
ready to re-enter the Cave¾at least re-enter for some of us; half had not yet been
inside. Off we went.
To enter KoonaldaCave from the surface beside the
sinkhole means a walk over thorny, sparsely grassed ground, and a climb over a
broken-down fence beside water tanks in which grow deadly nightshade. Kittens
sometimes occupy one of the tanks; old cans fill the other. Past sheets of iron
and onto rocks is the edge of the sinkhole, 30
meters deep and 85 meters
across. A steel ladder starts its 15-meter
descent. It remains perpendicular to the rim of the sinkhole until near the
bottom where it slews off to the right. A forked branch supports
one side of it.
Aborigines descended the sinkhole
with the help of saplings tied with string. Other people climbed down with a
rope, and some, such as L. A. Wells in 1904,
with fencing wire.
The last step off the present ladder
leaves a further ten meters to the floor of the sinkhole down a zigzagging
track of loose stones, the haunt of poisonous brown snakes. A fig tree stands
on the floor to the left of the track and, on the right, a peach tree that
harbors webs of spiders with bodies eight centimeters across. Right around the
fig tree, partly around and over another pile of rocks, the inconspicuous
six-meter wide entrance of the Cave opens up a few meters below. We left our
protective helmets here. A descent over a pile of rocks and debris (which
Sandor Gallus excavated a little) leads into the entrance. The track then
climbs up a little into the darkness. A pipe here that the Gurneys once used to
carry water from the Cave often struck our helmets.
Water can percolate down from the
surface and dissolve away the limestone into solution tubes. Sometimes, the
rock breaks away vertically to expose downward solution tubes as cross-sections
and horizontal tubes as holes. Such holes and tubes mark a rock face just
before the Cave entrance. Several people consider them the inspiration for the
prehistoric line makers though, at 30
millimeters in diameter, they dwarf the engravings in the Cave.
We trimmed our lights once into the
Cave entrance. Gallus carried a kerosene Tilley lamp, and the rest of us lit
with gas lamps and candles. Battery lamps wouldn’t last
From the entrance, a walk over a rise
reaches the Gurneys’ pipe at foot level. The floor drops to the Gallus Site, 120 meters from the entrance and its ceiling
75 meters underground. The
slope rises a little further on the right until a shaft of light enters through
Sliding is the way to reach the
Gallus Site. A backwards scramble over large rocks interrupts the slide and
leads to a short steel ladder that sits at an angle on the dust. The path
mostly follows the Gurneys’ straight pipe, apart from hewn steps that lead in a
wide loop from the bottom of the ladder. A track branches off from the last
section of the slope into the lake-filled northern chamber of the Cave.
The Gallus Site part of the Cave
looks like a football stadium or cathedral¾considering the feeling
the Cave engenders, the latter creates the better image¾90 meters long by 60
meters wide by 30 meters
high. A shaft of light touches from the entrance. Otherwise, away from the base
of the slope into the Cave, a reflected moonlight-type glow bathes the dark. R.
McCullough writes in 1892
of the sun’s rays penetrating at
between the boulders at the entrance and lighting up the chamber to show off
the dome and surroundings. The shaft of light changes color as the day
proceeds: pinks and yellows, and sometimes a cold ice blue. Swallows twitter as
they fly around the entrance. It feels damp and cold. Horizontal lines of black
flint and concretions, and nodules of powdery red-brown ochre (hydrated iron
oxide) sit conspicuously in the walls.
Paths across the Gallus Site reach a
stone wall that fences the excavations. The main trench threatens to collapse
at its current ten meters depth; in the glow of the lamps it carries the eye
down and down. Corrugated cardboard signs say, “Danger Keep Out,” and, “Deep
Trenches,” with Gallus’s signature. He has marked out what he considers a
prehistoric mining trench with ceremonial picks, points down, at each end. A
stone with a human shape sits propped-up on the surface together with
sculptural concretions shaped like birds and other animals.
Behind Gallus’s collapsible card table,
to the right of another stele, the path arrives at the back of the Gallus Site.
It then climbs to the base of a 30-meter
cliff. The upper chamber begins on top. A boost from behind helps the climber
up the step to the winding trail up the cliff. The trail is also steep and
crumbly. It has fallen away at one place to leave it even narrower: eight
centimeters wide. I felt better when I ignored the hole with its darkness,
stepped over it, and slogged up to a rest point. An overhang near the top of
the ascent forced me to my knees to squeeze under, especially when I wore a
pack on my back. Stones easily dislodged under my feet. A cup-sized rock once
slipped from beneath my feet and bounced off Gallus’s hardhat.
How would the prehistoric visitors to
Koonalda manage that climb, without a formed path and with glowing sticks for
The divide between the large
rocks (the “ramparts”) at the beginning of the upper chamber appears
unexpectedly. It welcomes and offers a needed ten-minute rest on a handy flat
slab. I sat on this rock each day to eat my lunch, tinned meat and tinned beans
in vinegar, a diet I soon tired of. At least no flies annoyed me as they did
outside. I looked at the activities in the Gallus Site way down below.
Everything said and every clump of Gallus’s pick I could clearly hear.
The upper chamber smells limy, cold,
and dusty. Its overall color is white; lime dust pervades, patched occasionally
The ceiling domes with large holes
that correspond to similarly large chunks of rock below. Its height, at most
around nine meters, contrasts with the Gallus Site section of the Cave. Its
width measures 12 to 15 meters and its length around 200 meters.
I never walked on level ground; I
climbed up, or I climbed down, or I clambered over boulders, or I jumped from
stone to stone. The daily hike in and out alone exhausted me let alone the
climbing the rest of the day. The need to navigate in the darkness added to the
challenge. A large rectangular boulder stood out near the high
point of the upper chamber and a lamp caught it from
almost anywhere in this part of the Cave. I couldn’t remember the way out from
the rear of the chamber the first few times and I couldn’t see the entrance. I
needed only to head toward this friendly rock¾or “directional stele,” as
we called it¾and
the route became clear. In some places, the path also obviously wound around
rocks and this helped. Yet tiredness eventually restricted even the most agile
of us, especially toward the end of a day when our distance judgments waned. I
fell once. My lamp broke, the glass scattered, and I lay in it on my back and
wedged between rocks, shocked but unharmed. Luckily, no serious injuries
occurred on our trip.
The lines strongly called me the
first night. I showed the sights to the newcomers¾with a reminder to all of
us that lines and pockets of charcoal survive on many floor boulders and that
moving in the upper chamber can easily destroy them. Neil Chadwick started to
compare the shapes of the rocks with animals and objects, the beginning of his
involvement in the rock forms over the following three weeks. The surveyors Ian
Lewis and Kevin Mott looked around and discussed troglodyte questions.
The members of one of Thomson’s
expeditions to Koonalda¾probably that of 1935¾found
a footprint in the dust of the upper chamber. They thought it was that of an
Aborigine once employed to inspect the Cave. I found a footprint in the upper
chamber on my earlier visit and tried to locate it again this time, but without
luck. Perhaps someone had walked over it in the meantime.
The floor of the upper chamber rolls
up and down. It divides into three sections. From the ramparts at the top of
the climb from the Gallus Site, it rises to a hump at the directional stele.
Then it gradually descends until it arrives at a short precipice where the roof
hasn’t fallen away and forms a step down. This defines the second section. A
short flat area lies past the foot of this slope before the end of the chamber
at the “squeeze.”
From the ramparts to the directional
stele, the floor comprises smooth and rounded boulders. They show line
markings. The floor of the second section of the upper chamber, from the
directional stele to the slope before the squeeze, comprises rough and angular
boulders. They show no line markings. The rock that did form the ceiling up
until it steps down in front of the squeeze now forms the rubble back to the
directional stele. Rubble from the rockfalls has slipped and rolled down the
slope but, in the short distance that remains before the squeeze, the rubble
ceases and smooth and rounded boulders again comprise the surface. In other
words, the floor of the third section of the upper chamber is the same as that
of the first section, interrupted in the second by the rough and angular rubble
that fell onto it. Lines mark the original stones of the third section too.
The rockfall opens up part of the way
down the slope to the third portion of the upper chamber. Under a slab of rock
that once formed a piece of the ceiling (its underside is smooth), sits a
smooth and rounded boulder, shaped like a bird, with a stream of lines running
along its “face.” Some other lines in this vicinity look like natural scrapes.
The most famous part of KoonaldaCave is the rock face above the
squeeze. Finger markings and large engravings cover dozens of square meters of
the wall. One set of markings, looking like chevrons or arrows pointing to the
floor, especially intrigued Gallus. His excavations beneath them turned up what
he interpreted as a prehistoric mining trench.
Tourists often venture to this
terminus of the upper chamber and deface the Aboriginal markings with their
initials and dates of visit.
The roof and floor gradually merge
toward the area of the markings. This makes the upper chamber appear to end in
a four-meter wall. Through this wall, however, runs a slit called the squeeze,
or “cat-run” in Thomson’s words. The upper chamber represents an earlier and
higher level of development of KoonaldaCave than the lower level of the
Gallus Site, during a period in which the water table (and sea level) stood
higher than at present. Scallop markings in the squeeze indicate that water
once forced its way through it into the upper chamber. G.
W. Hunt reports from 1904
that, unlike the other passages in the Cave, a strong wind blew between the
ledges of rock at the end.
Thomson needed others to chip rock
away in 1947 because he was
too large to fit through the opening. I had to pull myself on my belly only one
to two of its six meters. I slid into a meter high pit in the middle and
crawled the rest on my hands and knees. Mike Smith tried on our previous visit
to crawl through an opening at the end of the upper chamber that he thought was
the squeeze. Though wiry, he had to take his belt off half way through and lie
calm for a couple of minutes before he could back out.
The squeeze leads onto a six-by-six
meter, triangular-shaped ledge, its apex at the end of the squeeze, and
perching near the ceiling of a large chamber. It consists of boulders sitting
one on top of the other. Its edge is crumbly. Some of the undergirding boulders
have fallen away to leave a drop of about 30
meters. Richard Wright and his team picked up a few hundred flint pieces on
this platform, of which prehistoric humans fashioned at least 26. It is, Wright suggests, “one of the most
fearsomely situated tool-making sites in the records of prehistory.”
The wall beside the ledge shows line
markings. Markings also lie beyond the present edge of the ledge, presumably
created when it extended further. Another opening at the same height as the
ledge appears to exist on the other side of the chamber: perhaps the ledge once
carried on right around and the upper chamber continues further. Perhaps
prehistoric Aborigines visited it.
Thomson first squeezed through to the
ledge in 1935, but his
lights couldn’t illuminate the far side of the new chamber. In January 1947, he, Roy Gurney, and two others sat on
the rock ledge and tried to solve the problem:
I had brought pilot flares to illuminate
this space and setting one alight I threw it into the crater….It fell onto a
ledge of rock and burned brilliantly for about a minute, giving us time to look
around. A second flare completed the job. I was delighted to see at the bottom
of the crater a piece of wood leaning against the side.
Thomson had noticed the wood in the
lake chamber that morning (Orville Dunnet used it to climb partway up the wall
The squeeze opens into the western
chamber of KoonaldaCave.
It plus the northern chamber contain the Cave’s lakes. The northern passage
opens off the northwestern one (the upper chamber and the Gallus Site) near the
toe of the first slope from the Cave entrance down to the Gallus Site. It
continues northward for about 500
meters where it becomes submerged. In cross-section, it measures about 15 meters high and 18 meters wide and looks like a railway tunnel cut
through the white crystalline limestone. The western passage, which runs in a
west-north-west direction, branches from the northern one about 150 meters in. We spent little time in these
most of Koonalda’s modern visitors, who focus their interest on the lakes.
A little into the lake passage rests
a disused pump and its large car engine. The Gurney brothers once relied on
this equipment to water their sheep. They carried and windlassed the machines
and the associated iron pipes into the Cave, cleaned and laid them. Their
mammoth effort now rusts away.
Clay, red earth, with some rock collapse
form the floor of the north passage between the foot of the initial slope into
the Cave and the branching of the west passage. Collapse has eaten out a dome
at the branching, beyond which, some 150
meters in, lays a lake 60
centimeters deep and 45
meters long, with a bottom of mud and broken rock. Ted Anderson measured the
water temperature on 31 December 1963 at 14.3°C.
The water smells moldy and on it floats a thick brown-and-white scum.
Those who swim in the lakes find them
bitterly cold, despite the relatively warm temperature. They must lift their
feet high while walking in the water and each foot sinks a further 60 centimeters into silt mud with hidden
sharp flint boulders that cut. The female members of my earlier expedition to
Koonalda ventured a swim and wash in lake water; the bat dung floating on the
surface discouraged us males. The mud rules out feet washing. We visited the
nearest motel on this trip for a once-only shower.
A low isthmus of clay and rockfall
about 33 meters across comes after
the lake. The second lake then follows, with less scum than the first. It
measures 145 by 27 meters, descends 1 to 1.5
meters, registers 14.6°C on
the thermometer, and contains large boulders with their tops jutting out. It
widens at a bend under another dome. Jo Jennings noted watermarks in January 1957 of up to six meters above the current
The Mountain (or SnowMountain), a 35-meter high cone of sharp edged rocks,
follows the second lake. Glauber salts glisten over it. Above rises a cupola-shaped
dome, 60 meters wide and 68 meters up, only 15 from the surface of the Plain and the highest in
Thomson’s expedition sailed across
the lakes in a frail canoe, but barefoot to save the canoe from damage by heavy
boots. They crossed the first lake to the Mountain where some of the party
stayed while the others paddled across the second lake. Returning after two
hours, they found the waiting members shivering from the cold; with bare feet,
they couldn’t move far. They all retraced their steps across the island
carrying the canoe. One of the party slipped on the slimy rocks and badly cut
the ball of his right foot on a sharp flint. The others rendered first aid and
paddled him back across the first pool. Gurney then piggybacked him up to the sinkhole.
After the island Mountain, comes the
third and final lake in the north passage. It descends six to nine meters and
measures 120 by 24 meters on its scum-free surface. Hunt
obtained a maximum depth of 4.8
meters in 1904. He thought
it might descend further in places, but he couldn’t test the depth over all of
the lake because he found the Cave too dark, the water too cold, and, probably
more to the point, because his pontoon deflated too soon. Large boulders jut
out of it and its temperature reads 16.9°C
(a large difference, notes Anderson,
from the temperatures of the other two lakes 120
meters away). One of a 1957
party, a Sydney speleo named John
Bonwick, swam the full length of the lake with only the light from his headlamp
as a guide. “He must have felt very alone when he rounded the bend at the far
end of the Cave and disappeared from our view,” writes Ted
The third lake in the northern
passage ends in a small squeeze, which a person can float through on an air
mattress. A terminal pool and steep chimney lie beyond it. A 1967 party tried to climb the chimney. They
quit after six meters because it was too tight and the decomposed and chalky
limestone broke away too easily. The cold and damp also made them shiver
The Gurney brothers forged a dingy
from a sheet of iron. It struck one of the boulders whose tops jut above the
surface of the water, and sank. Down went their lamp too. They struggled to the
shallows and to the shore, and then groped their way back through the cavern in
complete blackness with nothing to indicate which way to go. Some of the best
horses from a circus escaped around Koonalda and Gurney recaptured them after a
couple of days of tracking. In recognition, the circus sent him a dinghy to
replace the sheet of iron. But he couldn’t carry the dingy to the lakes. A
group of boys arrived to explore the Cave 18
months later and they carted it down to the waterway without any trouble¾frequent
lifting of their bus from ruts had prepared them. Numerous publications refer
to Gurney’s light boat. Not many visitors thought it light, however. One party
found it too heavy to carry over one of the islands and could only gaze out
over the water to where their pressure lamps showed another archway leading to
the final chamber.
western passage leads off on the same level as the northern one. Its floor
contains low piles of debris and two shallow lakes, the second around 18 by 21
meters and three to 4.5
meters deep at maximum. The passage ends in a dome 30 meters high. Near the top of this emerges the
far up for me to see it¾that the squeeze of the upper chamber emerges onto.
Gurney’s sheep drink water from the
lakes in the western passage, pumped by windmill out of a pipe that passes vertically
through the roof of the cave and up 90
meters directly to concrete tanks. (Gurney no longer uses the iron pipe that
the path follows into the Cave.)Humans
can’t drink this water because of its high salt content. We could drink the
less saline top few centimeters if the bat guano didn’t pollute it.
Stalactites and stalagmites grow in
some Nullarbor caves¾none
in Koonalda. Unusual crystals grow in the bat guano of some Nullarbor caves¾none
in Koonalda. In Koonalda, grow snow-white helictites. These rare gypsum
formations, sometimes curved and sometimes straight, develop sideways and
upwards from one part of the wall over the lakes. Marion Carpenter describes
them as small gypsum flowers. The Russell Grimwade Expedition carried away from
Koonalda a “curly stalactite” that the mineral collection of the NationalMuseum in Melbourne
The water in the Koonalda lakes
originates with the rain that soaks and runs through the limestone surface to
collect in underground reservoirs. Around 200-250 millimeters of rain falls annually
around Koonalda. Winter produces most of it, though rare cyclonic depressions
can sometimes carry heavy downpours in the summer. Koonalda lies in one of the
wetter portions of South Australia;
83 percent of the State registers
a rainfall of less than 250
millimeters. Koonalda’s 200-250 millimeters also compares favorably with
the 150 millimeters in the
northeast of the Plain. Its climate is thus merely semi-arid and warm. The
region’s weather pattern originates with the moist southwest wind that prevails
and sweeps across the ocean until it strikes the cliffs. There it precipitates
its vapor on the Nullarbor. Koonalda lies close to the sea.
For Don Lawler, a member of a cave
exploration group in the early 1950s,
torrential rain in the early hours of the morning broke his 30 days of silence on the Plain. It fell
without warning and drenched sleeping bags¾and sleepers¾in
seconds. After the rain, writes Ion Idriess,
a rainbow across the Nullarbor, but what a rainbow! A shaft of
sunlight came smiling through the low, black sky. Quickly the ceiling of heaven
lightened up to unguessable heights and as it did so the great rainbow drifted
down not over us but over all the vast Nullarbor. It must have been hundreds of
miles wide at base, a vast, entrancingly [colored] arch over all the Nullarbor.
Its gigantic size, its perfect form, its dazzling medley of [colors] fairly
took our breath away. All the rainbows I had ever seen if blended into one
could not have compared with this.
Heavy rain means flooding. The lack
of river channels means the surface of the Nullarbor quickly turns into a
slowly and southward moving sea. Sheets of water can remain in usually bone-dry
districts for weeks. Wildlife appreciates the water and covers the ground as a
moving mass of lizards, rabbits, and wombats. A vehicle¾if not bogged down¾can’t
drive for 20 meters without
swerving to avoid an animal. Rabbits lose interest in humans. When disturbed,
they hop a meter before they stop to plant their noses into another puddle.
The effects of the rain only stay
briefly, for two reasons. The Nullarbor’s honeycomb limestone quickly absorbs
or drains away almost every drop of what falls. It also disappears through
evaporation. At Koonalda, evaporation (2375
millimeters annually) exceeds rainfall in every month. (The rate in half the
State exceeds 2750
millimeters.) Some water can stay for a while in a hollow of hard clay or
impervious rock (the gnamma holes). Each can hold up to 270 liters.
Precipitation arrives in forms other
than rain. Heavy frosts can occur in winter near the coast and dews are common.
Dews don’t occur inland because, while the temperatures there fall below the
dew point, the air holds insufficient moisture. The early Nullarbor Station
resident, Tom Brown, writes about the heavy dews and dense sea fogs that drench
grass and trees. Dogs and kangaroos quench their thirst by licking water off
them. Eyre sponged the dew hanging in spangles on the grass and shrubs,
squeezed it into a two-liter pot, and filled it in an hour.
The mean maximum temperature at
Koonalda registers around 29°C.
The coast records an even lower mean maximum. Further inland the temperature
increases to where, for about 30
days of the year, it exceeds 38°C
(100°F). In comparison, the
average minimum temperature in July decreases from the coast inland. Freezing
nights match boiling days. Days become very hot when the wind blows from the
north. W. C. Evans describes the north winds
as like standing in front of a fiery furnace with its doors open. Eucla holds
the Australian record temperature in the shade of 51.1°C (123.9°F)
from a day in March 1905.
The daily temperature there often exceeds 45°C
in summer, even near the coast and even in the shade. An early inhabitant of
Eucla, James Lawrence, notes that the thermometer at usual registered above 32°C. The extreme heat from a northerly can herald a
southerly: a cooling sea breeze. Southerlies cause their own problems. Eyre
describes the southwester as “very cold,” chilling almost as much as the
northerly oppresses. Further, the sudden and radical temperature changes can
Climatically, Koonalda is harsh. It
receives adequate rainfall, heavy dews, and not-so-extreme average temperature.
Against this moderation act high evaporation, scorching northerly winds, cold
southerlies, and the limestone’s porosity. Only the very hardy and well adapted
The climate of the
Nullarbor influenced the formation of KoonaldaCave and the area around it. To
trace the Nullarbor’s geological history, we must remember that it consists of
different layers or accumulations of limestone and that¾as the deposition of
formed under the sea.
The upper 30 or so meters of rock comprise the gray-yellow
crystalline, and sometimes referred to as marble. George Woolf writes that it
tinkled like a bell when he walked through caves formed in it.
The next 200 or so meters of rock comprise the white Wilson
than the Nullarbor Limestone yet harder than chalk, it weathers to a powder,
and contains both black and white nodules of flint. Ralph Tate writes that its
seams of hard white flint rang like chimes under his hammer. He examined the
deposit at Wilson Bluff on the coast; hence, the rock’s name. (The surveyor
Alfred Delisser created the name Wilson Bluff in 1866. “If this point has not yet been named,” he
writes, “may I request that it be called Point Wilson, after Professor Wilson,
of Melbourne, the acclimatizer.” An
editorial footnote in his memoir comments that Sir Samuel Wilson and Mr. Edward
Wilson founded the Victorian Acclimatization Society, not Professor Wilson, a
mathematician at MelbourneUniversity.)
The lower chambers of KoonaldaCave occur in Wilson Bluff
Limestone, which perhaps explains why the prehistoric miners mined there.
The flinty nature of the Wilson Bluff
Limestone caused headaches for the Western Australians who built the “old
string” in 1876-1877, the 1300
kilometer-long telegraph line from Albany
to Eucla. They couldn’t sink postholes through the flint in many places without
continuous blasting. So they drilled shallow holes in the surface rock, sawed a
meter off the butts of the poles, placed them in the holes, and piled rubble up
over a meter around for support. George P.
Stevens (the son-in-law of S. William Graham, the first telegraph stationmaster
at Eyre’s Sand Patch in 1877,
and himself postmaster at Eucla) writes in 1933
about how well many of the poles erected this way had weathered over 50 years of storms. They stand as monuments,
he considers, to the durability of the Western Australian jarrah wood, “as
sound as the rock in which they are planted.”
The two limestones formed millions of
years ago. The various rocks now below the limestone subsided from the center
of the Nullarbor in the middle Eocene (53
to 43 million years ago). The
lower part of the Wilson Bluff Limestone accumulated in the subsidence. Then,
in the late Eocene (43 to 31.5 million years ago), the chalky upper
part of the Wilson Bluff Limestone deposited in a quiet sea about 300 meters above the sea’s present level. It
retreated from the Koonalda portion of the Nullarbor during the Oligocene to
middle Miocene (31.5 to
about 17 million years ago)
and erosion of the Eocene limestones occurred. Years later, the sea once more
covered and retreated from the central Nullarbor. Then, in the middle Miocene,
it gradually expanded across the basin again and the Nullarbor Limestone
deposited. The Nullarbor Region uplifted around 15
million years ago to become land.
The sea under which the limestone
formed penetrated far inland. How far inland? The gulf it formed included the
Nullarbor Region, a large part of the Murray
area, and parts of the Eyre Peninsula. Some geologists
believe it ventured only to the northern fringe of the Nullarbor. Others
suggest that at times it nearly reached the Gulf of Carpentaria
and just about divided the continent in two.
Natural erosion of the Nullarbor
since its uplift out of the sea removed between 60
to 100 vertical meters in
the south. The rock weathers evenly partly because of the low rainfall and
partly because of the ease with which water passes through the surface rock.
The regularity in weathering plus the absence of earth movement created a
of the most featureless large tracts on earth.
The surface of the Nullarbor isn’t
absolutely flat and smooth. It rises at a gradient of one in 5,000
to reach an altitude of 200 meters
when it meets older rocks at its northwestern extremity. Two features create a
slight local relief. Claypans, depressions of a few meters in depth and around
a kilometer in diameter, frequently interrupt the flatness throughout the
Plain. The other local features are troughs up to several kilometers apart.
Parallel, straight, and shallow, they run northwest to southeast and northeast
to southwest, with intervening low rises of several meters. Boulders and the
rare pavement of limestone stick out along the rises, while the troughs
accumulate clay. The troughs aren’t pronounced enough to call them valleys. Few
of these exist on the Nullarbor. One begins close to Koonalda. Its
six-kilometer flat floor runs continuously southward and its gently sloped sides
descend 4.5 to six meters
from the level of the Plain. Mild slopes similarly close off its ends. It
probably formed as a stream during a former period of greater rainfall, though
now no signs of a streambed show.Dolines
occasionally puncture the billiard-table landscape. The sides of a doline erode
over time and it receives fill washed in from the Plain. It then forms a donga
(a name which Charles G. Gibson introduced in 1909)¾round and flat-bottomed
depressions 18-410 meters wide, 4.5-6
meters deep, and sometimes with steep sides.
Dolines, dongas, troughs, valleys,
and claypans interrupt the flatness¾so does the cliff line. The sea cliffs and the inland
scarps pose a geological problem: how did they form, from the eating habits of
the sea or from the pushing habits of earth tectonics? Their relative
straightness suggests a fault origin. On the other hand, is this what happens
when the sea erodes rock beds as uniform as the limestones of the Nullarbor?
Experts currently prefer to think that the sea licked away the upper portion of
limestone to create both the submerged and the dry lower areas.
One of the dry lower areas is the Roe
Plain. Its fertile soil derives from a thin layer of limestone laid down under
the eroding sea during the Pleistocene (1
million to 10 thousand years
ago). Good crops of wheat grew on it in the early days of Eucla. Winds during
previous arid times carried loams from the upper Plain eastwards.
A discussion of the Nullarbor’s
geology must mention its underground features. AbrakurrieCave, 48 kilometers northwest of Eucla, boasts the largest
cavern on the Nullarbor, 365
meters long. MullamullangCave
in the Madura district features one of the most extensive underground stretches
in Australia, 4.8 kilometers long. On the other hand, the
Nullarbor registers a low rate of caves, around 130 for its 200,000 square
kilometers. The Mole Creek area in Tasmania
registers over 100 known
caves in its 200 square
kilometers. The scarcity of Nullarbor caves probably arises from its arid
climate; less rain, less dissolving of limestone, fewer caves.
Blowholes, apertures up to two meters
in diameter and 11 meters
deep and through which strong air currents gust in and out, appear more
frequently than caves: between 10,000 and 100,000
of them. A continuum of cavern size stretches between blowholes on the small
side and Koonalda near the top of the large side. Such a distinction, though
disputable, helps us understand how the Nullarbor caves formed. The two types
began and developed differently.
Groundwater that flows beneath the
surface toward the coast dissolves the limestone, especially that close to the
water table and particularly when the water table stood at about 15 meters below its present level. Collapse
into this lower level resulted in the modern caves. (Correlating lower and
higher water tables with similar sea levels may help date the cave creation,
though experts still can’t say for sure when they formed.) A further lowering
of the water table, which would weaken the water’s support
of the caverns, assisted the subsidence. Streams undercut the walls. Water
seepage played a more important role. It enlarges the joints and bedding planes
within the rock, preparing the blocks to drop down or fall inwards after their support
weakens beyond a critical point. Earth tremors can also trigger a fall. An
earthquake that shook the district from Cook to Eyre in 1950 caused cave subsidence. Rockfalls
occur continually through the life of the Cave but on average less than once in
a lifetime. Collapsing tends to stabilize when the ceiling becomes a dome,
apse, or arch. When the water table rose to its current level, it drowned the
lower parts of the caves.
The existence of other channels above
the present water table¾the upper chamber in KoonaldaCave for instance¾suggests
also a higher water table or water tables in times past.
The water sat 90 meters lower about 20,000
years ago when the Koonalda people visited the upper chamber. Perhaps they also
visited chambers now under water and inaccessible. Yet, perhaps portions of
some of these hypothetical chambers breach the water surface above the present
level. If so, diving might reach them. Lewis arrived with scuba gear and wet
suit. He ventured into the final lake of the north chamber to see if he might
materialize in another one unknown at present. Unfortunately, his rope lifeline
wasn’t long enough and his body unable to stave off the cold for enough time to
KoonaldaCave formed with the dissolution of
the limestone and the collapse of the ceilings into the dissolved channels to
create stable geometric shapes. Other mechanisms operate as well. A gently
sloping depression about 240
meters across surrounds the sinkhole and acts as its catchment. Surface water
flows down from the Plain through the Cave entrance carrying soil, rocks, and
other material into the lower parts of the Cave. Flat floors develop. Periodic
flows inundated most of the Gallus Site at one stage, a factor that helps
unravel how humans exploited this area in prehistoric times. The flows nowadays
mainly stream into the northern passages and their lakes.
This water flow can round rocks by
dissolving and abrading them. Salts saturate the lake water, however, so water
in the lakes can’t dissolve much if any of the limestone. The freshwater
“creams” on the tops of the lakes, and the shallow freshwater pools away from
the lakes, could dissolve it. We are particularly interested in how the
boulders in the upper chamber become smooth and round. If the lake isn’t
responsible, what is?
A form of cave breakdown occurs
continuously. Surface grains of limestone flake off in a process called salt
crystallization or exudation. Water percolates through the rock and evaporates
near the surface to deposit crystals of sodium chloride, calcium sulphate, and
sodium sulphate. The crystals grow in subsurface cavities smaller than
themselves and the pressure they exert pushes off surface grains. This produces
dust, prevalent in Koonalda, and smoothes, rounds, and sometimes hollows out
surfaces. It also peels off skins from walls and boulders. The humidity and
other conditions necessary to produce exudation occur in Nullarbor caves such
as Koonalda. For instance, the air must move¾strong winds blow through
a number of the caves, in excess of 6.7
kilometers per hour in Mullamullang.
The Aborigines of the
greater Nullarbor Region came to terms with the treeless Plain, its caves, and
blowholes, through their myths. They thereby knew it and could coexist with it.
Our equivalent to the Aborigines’ mythology includes the writings of geologists
Jennings and David Lowry, who built
on the sketchy labors of previous pioneers and gathered and synthesized a body
of geological knowledge of the Nullarbor and its caves. Jennings
participated in the caving society explorations and in the geological studies
Lowry, of the Western Australian Geological Survey, investigated the Nullarbor
and submitted his work as a doctoral thesis. His and Jennings’
publications provide for modern humans what the myths provided for the
AR02\C07.doc4124 words13 June 2003
RESULTS OF EXCAVATIONS
In spite of this reservation [namely Robert
Wright’s not recognizing the coincidence of Koonalda’s and certain European
stone tools], Dr. Gallus’s interpretation though somewhat imaginative at times¾not necessarily a bad thing¾is worthy
of consideration. He aims at “a first attempt in placing Koonalda into some
perspective within human evolution.” A little old-fashioned this may be, but
perhaps it is none the worse for that. Dr. Gallus, a European scholar, long
since domiciled in Australia, brings his European cultural heritage to bear on our [endeavors]
in Australian prehistory.
Sandor Gallus and bands of helpers journeyed to KoonaldaCave over many summers to excavate.
His last visit to the Cave was with me and he spent most of his time checking
his notes and diagrams. He draws cultural parallels between the remains of
mining, workshop, and settlement activities that he unearthed there and what he
saw in Europe¾impressive
enough for highly reputable international journals to publish them¾and
controversial. Gallus was, and remains, suspect in the eyes of the Australian
archaeological establishment. It ignores him if possible.
Gallus holds two doctorates: one in
law and one in archaeology. A Hungarian by birth, he was the Curator of
Prehistory at the Hungarian National Museum, Budapest, when the atrocities of the
Russians toward the Hungarians lead him to leave with his wife and two sons and
to rebuild a life in Australia. That happened in 1949. Australian officials examined his qualifications
and experience and allotted him to manual labor. He then worked as a clerk and
as a language teacher in various high schools until his retirement, but
couldn’t regain a professional appointment in archaeology. He vigorously
pursued his interest in archaeology and other subjects during his spare time,
into his retirement, and until his death in 1996.
Gallus mentored a number of young
people interested in archaeology. He encouraged them, inspired them, provided
them practical opportunities, and showed them what it’s like to have a vision.
He exemplifies quiet determination in the face of opposition.
The 1950s assumed, Gallus recounts, that the Aborigines
arrived in Australia
shortly after the last ice age. Professional and popular belief dismissed
earlier dates. This cautiousness resulted from entrenched ideas about the
emergence of human beings: the highest product of human development happens in
Western civilization and, therefore, cultural evolution originates in Europe.
Gallus believes that both his Koonalda and Keilor (near Melbourne)
sites produced evidence for the great antiquity of the human presence in Australia.
For instance, he considers that an implement workshop he unearthed in Koonalda
resembles those of the Aurignacian in Europe. The oldest
Aurignacian finds in France
date at around 34,000 years ago, but the Koonalda
finds, according to Gallus, date at least 45,000 years ago. This
not only challenges the dates for the human presence in Australia.
It also proposes that the technology underlying this phase of human development
first arose in Australia.
Rather than a backward area at the edge of the human world, the Australia of
Gallus’s theory leads progress during certain stages of human evolution.
The Australian Institute of
Aboriginal Studies mounted a multi-disciplinary expedition to Koonalda in 1967 to investigate Gallus’s claims. The
main presentations of the expedition specialists’ and Gallus’s results appeared
in the same book, The Archaeology of
the Gallus Site, KoonaldaCave.
Richard Wright of the University of Sydney
led that Expedition, edited the book, and produced the authoritative findings
The Gallus Site area of the Cave¾the
main chamber at the foot of the entrance slope¾features a deep hole near
the rear: the remains of Gallus’s three main excavations and Wright’s
extensions to Gallus’s Trench III. Three matters concerned these
·the stratigraphy: the
layer-by-layer accumulation of soil, rock, and other materials;
·the radiocarbon dates from charcoal and similar
·the artifact finds (mainly stone tools) and
Gallus, Wright, and Rudy Frank, a
soil scientist on Wright’s expedition, agree that three layers of accumulation
are present: white-pink deposits (the top white), red deposits (the
intermediate red), and further white-pink deposits (the bottom white). The top
white comprises two meters of a mixture of limestone rubble, flint, pink and
red dust, and fireplaces. It results from normal breakdown of the Cave (the
gradual collapsing and wearing away of the Cave interior) plus human debris.
Beneath this lies the intermediate red, about four meters of level red deposit
washed in from the surface, with a small amount of white limestone from
breakdown of the Cave. Frank compares the two deposits as the steady and
continual accumulation of breakdown versus the sporadic dumping of soil that
short-lived streams carry into the Cave after rain on the Plain. The lowest
level, the bottom white, similar to the top level, comprises breakdown and
large limestone boulders with some red soil between them.
Neither Wright nor Gallus (Frank
didn’t excavate) reached the bottom of the deposit, the solid rock floor of the
Cave. Gallus had only reached the top of the bottom white when Wright excavated
and wrote his report. Wright says that a massive rockfall prevented him from
investigating deeper and, therefore, he leaves open an earliest date for human
use of the Cave.
Wright bases his dates for the
prehistoric use of the Gallus Site on an analysis of nine carbon-14 datings on pieces of charcoal from a
significant part of the excavation, Trench III. The dates range from 10,000
years ago. Wright disregards the oldest date, however, because to him it seems
out of place with the other eight datings. He concludes that the traces of
human occupation date from about 15,000 to 22,000
Gallus needs a date for Floor 7 in Trench III, near the bottom of the
intermediate red unit, because there he found what he considers an important
collection of stone artifacts. It dates at around 20,000-21,000
years old according to Wright’s list of dates. Gallus questions some of
Wright’s dates, however. So he calls upon two other methods to establish an age
for Floor 7: fitting it into a
specific geological period, and comparing the tools found on it with ones of
similar style and of known age.
He arrives at an approximate age of 45,000
years for Floor 7 with the
geological method. It draws, unfortunately, on the 31,000-year
date that Wright dismisses. It also questionably divides the intermediate red
deposit into levels laid down in different climatic periods. Gallus argues this
way. When the intermediate red deposit formed, water ran into and ponded in the
Gallus Site and not only in the northern chamber of the Cave, the area that now
receives water after heavy rain. This would only happen if more water flowed
into the Cave and this would only happen if the climate were wetter than at
present. Thus, the intermediate red unit and its Floor 7 accumulated in a wetter climate. Gallus finds the
dates for such a climate and applies them to the red deposit. Frank disagrees
with Gallus’s argument. Slight shifts in the rockfalls or new collapses could
alter the course of the water from the Plain and prevent it from entering the
Gallus Site. The climate needn’t be wetter. Further, the stream would deposit
soil along its own path when insufficient flow prevented it from running all
the way. This would impede its next flow and sometimes cause it to change
The second method Gallus employs to
date Floor 7 equates the stage
of development of the stone tools with other finds at the same developmental
stage, notably from his site at Keilor. The majority of Australian
when Gallus wrote and now¾would dismiss this comparison as too subjective. They
wouldn’t agree on his classification for the types of tools he found in
alone entertain a connection between them.
The conflict over datings leads to
their analyses of artifact finds.
Wright only considers flakes and
flaked pieces of flint. A person knocks a “flake” from a stone, which then
becomes a “flaked piece.” Both must show, Wright says, particular marks that
look like the skin layers of a bulb¾called a “bulb of percussion,” either sticking out of
the stone or curving into it¾because these indicate an intentional hitting with a
hammer of some sort and hence a human origin. Anything else Wright considers
natural or waste from flaking and mining and he wants only to consider definite
human artifacts. He discusses why he employs signs of a bulb of percussion as a
criterion. Flint occurs naturally
in the Cave, he says, and could mix with mined or shaped pieces. It even occurs
above the excavation. When in the Cave, a member of his expedition climbed a
ladder and examined the flint nodules in the wall six meters above the
excavation, pulling out lumps and slivers or flint with the same silhouette as
flakes and flaked pieces. No traces of a positive or negative bulb of
percussion occur on any of the pieces from the wall. Wright cites two further
reasons for caution. First, numerous debates around the world focus on how to
identify whether a piece of stone originates naturally or from humans. Second,
some archaeologists in the early part of the twentieth century incorrectly
matched amorphous waste found in European flint mines with flaked tools from
Wright’s flake-flaked piece
criterion removes from consideration all the flints he found in the bottom
Two further criteria supplement
this restriction. Wright won’t consider finds from the red deposit because, to
his mind, the flints in it probably washed in from other places like the
surface of the Plain. He also discounts pieces of flint with dimensions less
than 1.5 centimeters because
they aren’t obvious and could pass through the sieve he used to screen what he
The criteria of Wright restrict
his analysis to the flints he found in the top white deposit. Only two of these
artifacts possess a strong enough character for him to call them implements.
Each he interprets as a pick with an end trimmed off for a comfortable
handhold. Hitting flint nodules while digging in the rubble shattered the other
end of each pick. He concludes that prehistoric people used the Cave to produce
pieces of flint that they carried elsewhere to refine for use. The waste
doesn’t say anything about the stone tools they would eventually create. Rock
shelters in the vicinity would contain the more conventional archaeological
debris from the users of Koonalda. The Cave for Wright offers only a glimpse at
one aspect of prehistoric people’s lives, their flint mining. The motivation of
people who seek their flint in such dark and hazardous passageways, he adds,
disturbs him; the flints assume significance beyond the merely practical that,
as common archaeological materials, they often receive.
Gallus, on the other hand, isolates a
predominantly flake stone-tool tradition from the artifacts he recovered from
his portion of the upper white deposit of Trench III. Wright restricts his
artifact analysis to the same deposit. The large number of used implements not
employed in making stone tools¾the majority for working wood and some for cutting
to Gallus that domestic activity or settlement occurred.
in the intermediate red zone provides for Gallus another stone-tool tradition.
He finds here refuse from stone tool workshops, splinters, rejects, and
abandoned or half-made blanks. It also contains used tools and some broken by
use. This stone-tool tradition moves in Gallus’s mind toward implement
specialization because it uses wood in a significant and new way: the stone
tools include whittling knives, chisel-like burins for incising, axes for
chopping, tools for cutting or sawing, scrapers, and implements for hollowing
out. He considers this stone-tool tradition less crude than the higher (more
recent), more firmly established, and less specialized one he unearthed in the
upper white deposit of Trench III.
Evidence from the Cave suggests to
Gallus that mining, workshop (producing stone implements), and domestic (such
as woodworking) activities occurred. He found no kitchen fires or remnants of
meals inside the Cave. The few fireplaces he unearthed are shallow and the
pieces of charcoal probably the remains of torches for illumination. What he
found on the Plain around the Cave and in the sinkhole do suggest to him the
stationary presence of groups of people and that they did other things there
than they did inside the Cave.
Evidence for flint quarrying exists
not only in the Gallus Site, but also at the “squeeze.” Wright relates this to
the marking of lines on the walls. For the age of the mining, he refers to the
carbon-14 date of 19,900
years as the most recent use of the area, assuming that the dated charcoal
originates from torches. This date coincides with the activity in the Gallus
Site. He collected around the “squeeze” 16
flakes and a flaked piece of flint with the charcoal.
Gallus’s excavations in front of the “squeeze” also
reveal evidence for mining. The quarrying happened in two phases. The more
recent stage dug flint from the walls and the older dug it from the fallen
rock. Gallus correlates the first with pieces of wood found seven to 15 centimeters down from the surface and
which date at 21,200 years old. The second stage
he correlates with a tradition more primitive than the one on Floor 7, Trench III, of the Gallus Site. He draws
other conclusions as well. Engraved lines point down to the opening of mining
pits and others follow the diggings horizontally¾thus Gallus believes the
wall markings link to the mining activity near the “squeeze.” He found an
artifact connected with the mining. Near the “squeeze” and on the surface of a
slanting rock between other rocks, which a rockfall had covered, he discovered
a large pickaxe. This pickaxe, Gallus writes, predates its development
elsewhere in the world.
This and his other finds in Koonalda
lead him to say that the products of civilization spread from Australia
in the opposite direction to what scholars usually think. We must think of Australia,
Gallus suggests, as an important center for human cultural and biological
Wright says that, apart from the wall
functioned as nothing more than a flint mine. Derek Mulvaney of the AustralianNationalUniversity
in Canberra upholds this
conclusion. Australians practiced a developed technology 25,000-30,000
years ago and therefore, he concludes, Gallus’s “primitive” finds can’t be
tools but must be waste from stone workshops. Gallus bases his conclusions on
empathy not science. Wright and Mulvaney wouldn’t consider most of Gallus’s
implements as implements, or even humanly made, because they lack a positive or
negative bulb of percussion.The
majority of Australian archaeologists either ignores Gallus’s work or
approaches it with skepticism and contrariness.
A highlight of the Gallus-Wright
disagreement centers on the supposed cultural tradition that Gallus found on
Floor 7. This floor lies in
the red zone, a deposit Wright disregards because a stream could have washed
the flints into it from the surface or from elsewhere in the Cave. Frank
concludes from his examination that the stream didn’t flow on through and that
rockfalls blocked and ponded it at about Trench III. This lake measured about 15 meters across and started a meter or two
toward the Cave entrance from Trench III. Wright would say that people don’t
sit in lakes to fashion tools.
Two other points by Frank throw light
on the Gallus-Wright disagreement, at least for Floor 7. First, the pond intermittently dried up. Gallus
could thus say that people sat on a dried up and flat red floor and fashioned
tools; we needn’t think of them sitting in a lake. Second, Frank points out,
the stream eroded some of the deposited material as it flowed back into the
pond area. Gallus might respond that perhaps the stream didn’t erode that part
of the red floor at the time of Floor 7
and so he found the artifacts he describes more or less where their prehistoric
users left them, with sediment gently covering them. Alternatively, perhaps
they washed only a short distance. Gallus doesn’t describe any water-rolling
signs on the finds on Floor 7
and he usually does if he sees any. The fact that this large number of finds
clusters around two large nuclei (blocks from which flakes were struck) may
count for their lying more-or-less where their makers left them.
Wright selectively recovered only 14 flakes from the red zone, only three of
which showed further (but uninformative) working. He doesn’t say how many
flaked pieces he found. In comparison, Gallus’s plan of Floor 7¾a small portion of the red zone¾shows 64 numbered artifacts, 40 of which he discusses as tools and nuclei.
Why this difference between Wright and Gallus? The diagrams of the two
archaeologists suggest that Gallus dug about 15
percent more of the red zone than did Wright and less than half its depth.
Gallus excavated over three times the horizontal area than Wright.
Alternatively, perhaps Gallus struck it rich in the red deposit with a workshop
or occupation area. Perhaps Wright found a mining area while Gallus unearthed a
workshop; perhaps the prehistoric people sat and whittled wood a little away
from the walls and large boulders (the wall and large boulders were close to
and hampered Wright’s lower levels). The same applies to Wright’s finding
nothing of cultural interest in the top white. Perhaps luck evaded him.
Alternatively, perhaps mining dominated in the area of his dig, and tool making
and woodworking in Gallus’s.
If the tools are as crude as Gallus
says, then maybe they are cruder than anything found and recognized in Australia
when Wright wrote. Wright maybe overlooked most of the few tools among the
mining remains because of his strict and systematic methods, and because of the
crudeness and newness of the finds for Australia.
The difference could reflect the tool recognizing abilities of the two men.
Gallus responds to the assumption of
archaeologists like Wright about what constitutes a human stone implement. He
describes the way that hammering, shattering, or breaking, and not flaking
split the rough and quadrangular blocks of flint in Koonalda. The brittle
glass-like nature of the flint makes it hard to flake. To shape it, therefore,
people would break it along its natural splitting planes in a controlled and
efficient manner. This doesn’t produce the bulb of percussion or the ripples
that Wright looked for. Gallus found neat heaps of intact material on the
floor, which people had picked through for suitable flakes and broken pieces
with sharp edges. They could use these immediately or as blanks to fashion
tools from later. He mentions three other corroborations for his position.
First, J. Peter White saw people in New Guinea
break flints in a way that left no signs of bulbs of percussion and which they
still used as implements. Second, two observers of Australian Aborigines
noticed that they used any piece of suitable stone without further treatment if
it had a suitable working edge. Third, archaeologists typify the old industries
in Australia as
working-edge oriented rather than shape-of-implement oriented. These references
indicate to Gallus that the edge of a (potential) tool should concern him and
that he may observe traces of use on formless pieces. He believes that this
approach, rather than Wright’s search for evidence of flaking, will correctly
identify human stone tools. Wright reports that a microscopic examination of a
sample of his flakes showed no signs of abrasive wear. This suggests that
people hadn’t used the pieces of flint that he found. Some of Gallus’s finds do
show microscopic evidence of wear. This suggests that people had used some of
the pieces of flint he found.
Gallus names his stone finds with
European terms, terms that summon particular stone shapes to the minds of
archaeologists. He doesn’t mean that the same people made the European and
Koonalda implements. He merely exploits, he says, the similarities in
appearance of the two collections of tools as a basis to name the Australian
finds. Wright fails to see the European shapes in the material he excavated. He
also fails to see the shapes in the finds he saw of Gallus:
This disagreement is not based on a
chauvinistic preference for Australian terminology, nor is it based on an alarm
at the diffusionist implications inherent in a European terminology applied to
Australian artifacts. In fact[,] I would intellectually welcome the excitement
of finding in Australia a site [that] contained the variety and number of types
he mentions….What I do find discordant is the lack of coincidence between the
actual material from Koonalda and the . . .industries of Western Europe.
To accept this terminology criticism
doesn’t mean, though, that Wright and others should disregard Gallus’s work.
Gallus’s collection of implements from the upper white deposit resembles the
well accepted “small tool tradition” found in Australia
from about the same time. Gallus’s finds on Floor 7 from a level lower down resembles the older and
well-accepted “core-tool and scraper tradition,” which appears in an evolved
form in the later small-tool tradition. Gallus enriches the understanding of
these traditions with his analyses of the different types and uses of the tools
Archaeological investigations suggest
nothing of distinction about the prehistoric users of KoonaldaCave.
A few excavated caves on the
Nullarbor besides Koonalda show signs of human occupation. Ljubomir H. Marun
and Peter Thompson examined MaduraCave
on the Roe Plain portion of the Nullarbor Region. Human occupation of that site
began about 8,000 years ago and lasted about 4,000
years. Marun also excavated Cave N145
with an earliest occupation date of 24,000-25,000
years ago. He concludes from these sites and from his archaeological study of
the Nullarbor in general that, over the last 25,000
years, the environment changed in the Roe Plain and, as the unearthed
implements indicate, so did the technology. The technology changes are, he
concludes, discrete, local, and fail to fit a recognizable pattern for the
Excavations reveal the remains of
things other than human activities. Alan Thorne accompanied Wright to Koonalda
and describes the animal remains that Wright’s excavation unearthed. The meager
finds occurred only in the red deposit. They include bones of lizards, a couple
of rodents, and of four types of marsupials including a Sarcophilus cranium. (The Sarcophilus or Tasmanian Devil, a
carnivore like a wolf or hyena, has disappeared from the Australian mainland¾perhaps
human beings or of the Devil’s competitor, the dingo, helped in its extinction.
The same holds for the thylacine¾the Tasmanian Tiger or Wolf¾the remains of a number of
which explorers have found in Nullarbor caves.) Five sources explain the
presence of animal remains in the Koonalda excavations. The bones could have
arrived here in owl pellets. Owls eat small animals and then regurgitate the
beaks, and so on¾as
pellets. The sides of the doline outside the Cave contain numerous owl roosts
under which lie heaps of disintegrated pellets, and inside the Cave further
back from Trench III of the Gallus Site lie similar heaps. The bones could also
have arrived here as the food remains of predators such as the Sarcophilus. A Sarcophilus broke some of the
larger bones, in Thorne’s opinion. The bones could have arrived here, as a
third source, as the remains of animals that lived in the Cave, or, fourthly,
of animals that lost their way in it and died there. Perhaps some washed in
from the doline or from the surface of the Plain.Nothing¾no signs of use on the
bones and no burning¾indicates
that the animal remains relate to the presence of people in the Cave.
The surface of Gallus’s excavation
produced a few large bones that dingoes possibly brought in, plus bird
skeletons and decaying owl pellets with their hoards of small bones. Wallaby
bones, which could represent the remains of a human meal, rested just above a
level that dates at 13,700 years. Marsupial
rat bones and the mummified remains of a honeyeater also rested at about this
level. Gallus uncovered bones of small animals, again probably from owl
pellets, down further among the bands of the red zone. Much of the faunal
remains from his excavations still await examination.
Animal remains exist not only in the
Gallus Site, but also in the upper chamber. I found a number. These include the
vestiges of owls, crows, bats, and insects¾which found their way
there by themselves¾plus
several bones from large marsupials that humans probably brought in. The
marsupial remains haven’t been identified.
investigations of Koonalda ceased with our departure and are unlikely to
re-open. This also applies to investigations of the line markings. Attempts to
understand them further must rely on research in other caves.
words13 June 2003
THE RITUAL ART OF KOONALDA
Ritual is the ordered arrangement of
symbols and symbolic actions all of which express [the human] urge to conceive
in outward forms the “shades,” the inner life and meaning, the permanent
element, in [human beings] and the world and [their] relations to it¾mundane thought these often are. Here, then, is art.
P. Elkin, R. M. Berndt, and C. H. Berndt, 1950.
The Koonalda people mined flint in the Cave. Why? Why did
they risk their lives on vertical climbs in darkness to obtain it?
John Eyre saw white flint lying abundantly on the ground at Kaldiyerra
near Eucla. A site close by on the South and Western Australian border readily
provides a black flint, like that in Koonalda, called jee ‘mari. Aborigines prized both colors and traded them widely.
Perhaps the Koonalda people could
have obtained both black and white flints without entering the Cave. The
problem remains: why did the Koonalda people venture into the Cave to mine
Environmental factors add to the
puzzle. Rudy Frank compares the red deposit from excavations in KoonaldaCave and present day soils on the
surface. He finds them much the same in texture and mineral composition, and
concludes that the Nullarbor climate has stayed more or less the same over tens
of thousands of years. David Lowry and Jo Jennings review this and other ways
for finding out about the Nullarbor climate of the past. They decide that,
though the methods draw on a variety of different factors, overall they point
in the same direction. Water availability and rainfall on the Nullarbor have
changed over the last million years, but the changes from present conditions
are always minor in either direction and for short periods.The current climate and environment of the
Nullarbor remains as it was tens of thousands of years ago.
Life on the Nullarbor that long ago
therefore differed little from that of the Mirning. Early
records indicate that Aborigines rarely ventured beyond the edges of the
coastal belt, let alone into the heart of the Plain. The only part of the
Nullarbor Region that can sustain human life is the wooded coast. The Nullarbor
inhabitants of 20,000 years ago lived in the
coastal life-supporting environment and, if
their attitudes to the Plain were like the Mirning’s, they rarely ventured inland.
Today, Koonalda lies 23 kilometers from the ocean, between the Nullarbor
proper and the wooded strip. Twenty thousand years ago, Koonalda lay 190 kilometers from the ocean. It sat in the
heart of the Nullarbor. Two facts explain this. First, the present ocean in the
Great Australian Bight descends about 46 meters close in shore. The seabed is a
submerged plain that stretches southwards at a slight slope that adds another 36 meters in depth before it drops away at
the continental shelf 160
kilometers south of the present coast. A lowering of the sea level by 82 meters or more would therefore expose the 160 kilometers of this plain. Further, the
earth periodically undergoes glacial periods called ice ages (the last one
finished around 16,000 years ago),
interspersed with warm interglacials such as the one in effect at present. An
ice age locks up much of the earth’s water in ice sheets on the northern and
southern extremities of the globe and on the higher mountain regions. This
lowers the sea level. The low point for the sea during the last glaciation was
about 90 meters below the
present level. Around 20,000 years ago,
therefore, the 160
kilometers of now-submerged coastal plain was dry land.
This would move the coastal belt
south by the same 160
kilometers. Studies on the pollen grains in various levels of a number of sites,
just above the coastal Roe Plain, confirm the movement of the belt with
alterations in the sea level. The sea changes over time parallel the changes in
the pollen ratios of coastal to inland species. (This negates the suggestion that
the coast 160 kilometers
south lay in a wetter latitude and thus created a wide coastal belt with a
richer environment for human inhabitants.)
The relocation of the oasis would
also relocate its Aboriginal inhabitants. While Koonalda sat on the back door
of the Mirning, the
earlier people traveled some 160
kilometers from their habitation to it.
The sea started to rise around 16,000
years ago and reached the base of the present cliffs between 13,000
years ago. The rise in the sea claimed land¾at a rate of one meter per
week over the millennium 14,000 to 13,000
years ago. The advance of the sea would affect the amount of coastal belt
capable of sustaining human life and, therefore, tribal territoriality. It
could have affected the people in a major way¾they may have died out.
This may explain why the Aborigines deserted the upper chamber of KoonaldaCave about this time. Did they
decease with their coastal life-support and,
after a while, a new group of people, the Mirning moved in?
Perhaps Aborigines frequented KoonaldaCave because it provided the only
or the most abundant source of flint during the lower sea level. Perhaps then
flint wasn’t available anywhere else. Sand dunes may have prevented their
access to the flint nodules in the cliffs¾thick dunes now cover some
sections of the present ones. This may explain why quarrying at Koonalda
continued to around 13,000 years ago, the
time when the sea began to abrade the coastal cliffs and perhaps remove the
sand to expose the flint. On the other hand, sand may not have covered the
cliffs during the time of the Koonalda people; it doesn’t cover the present
cliffs north of the Roe Plain and they contain flint. If this were true, we
need another reason than access to flint for their Aborigines’ entering
Perhaps they frequented KoonaldaCave because they thought of the
Cave and its flint as special and powerful. The Cave’s mid-Nullarbor
inaccessibility plus their needing to venture into a dark, mysterious, and
dangerous place to obtain the flint support
this idea. So do other factors. For one, the giant snake Ganba dwells in the Nullarbor
caves. Local Aborigines also believed that they must pass through the caves
after death on their way to the sea and the Koorannup (after-life hunting groups). The spirits of the
dead, the Kaanya, must
enter the sea from the caves. Aborigines, therefore, felt the holiness of every
hole in the Nullarbor, including KoonaldaCave. Its flint perhaps absorbed
this spiritual presence and they imbued it with qualities absent in stone they
could acquire more easily.
At the back of the upper chamber of
the Cave, covering large expanses of the soft, chalky, limestone walls scrawl
masses of marks, stroked into the receptive medium by human fingertips or
scratched with sticks or stones. The lines comprise one of the oldest examples
of Aboriginal expression in Australia.
The stroking begins from high up with outstretched fingers that draw together
as the hands descend. The effect, covering the buttress-like undulations of the
Cave walls and extending overhead out of present reach, resembles the fan
vaulting of the decorated Gothic style. Why did people create these lines in
the back of the upper chamber of KoonaldaCave, far from daylight and the
surface of the Nullarbor Plain? What did they intend by
This activity, like their flint
mining, probably connects with their ritual and religion.
Lesley Maynard and Robert Edwards
note that the shape of the upper chamber (or “art passage,” as some people
refer to it) changed since the visits of the wall markers. They could easily
access the soft limestone that they impressed with their fingers, from before
the “directional stele” to the “squeeze.” Now, 15
meters of rocks pile up and rest against the decorated surfaces. Only the wall
near the “squeeze” is available.
Edwards and Maynard think that the
markings may relate to the ritual mining in the Cave. They concede, though,
that the lines may only represent a response to the softness of the walls.
Children respond similarly to finger paint. Because the markings appear
randomly distributed and void of any preconceived visual impression, Edwards
and Maynard think they probably don’t represent an art form. (A few of the
finger lines form simple patterns, though perhaps unintentionally by the
artists. Open fingers inscribed two curved sets of parallel lines in two
movements of the hand and created a design that looks like a concentric circle,
a frequent symbol in Aboriginal art.) Edwards and Maynard suggest that Koonalda
stands for a transitional phase in artistic development from “non-art” to art.
Jenny Webb writes of the finger
markings as ritual touching or stroking of the walls. She feels that the Cave
held great spiritual presence and power, and that only important tribal members
possessed a power of their own sufficient to withstand and benefit from that of
the Cave. Its power transferred to these people when they stroked the walls. It
then passed to lesser tribal members outside the Cave. The physical contact
with the walls held more importance to the wall markers than the markings that
The anthropologist A. P. Elkin would
agree with an element of Webb’s interpretation. Aborigines impressed on him the
meaningfulness of every mark they create. The wall markings don’t result from
prehistoric impulse. The drawing of fingers over walls or the rubbing of flint
along grooves represent ends in themselves and obtain their meaning from
rituals. Elkin’s experience suggests that all Aboriginal rubbings, drawings,
and re-tracings present ritual acts.
Rituals, therefore, formed the
context in which people created the Koonalda lines. They made the lines
Ancient finger scrawls occur not only
in Koonalda or Australia,
but also in Europe. AltamiraCave in Spain
contains such marks made in wet clay. Siegfried Giedion describes the markings
as short and linear signs, close together, covering the ceiling, and rendered
by quick, unhesitating strokes of the hand. Today’s visitors can discern the
pressure of the fingertips at the start of the lines and the fingernail marks
at the end of each stroke. Henri Breuil, a father of the study of prehistoric
art, coined the name “macaroni” for these finger scrawls¾an obvious nomenclature
given their appearance. Other people call them “serpentine meanders” for a
A slight shift in direction carries
discussion from marks by bare hands to impressions of the whole hand. The hand
motif commonly occurs in Australian rock art. Aborigines apply pigment or blood
directly to the hand and press it onto the rock face. They chew pigment and
splatter it or blow it around a hand held against the rock. They draw hand
outlines and then fill them in with a brush. The effect, from a European’s
point of view, signifies a hand raised in greeting.
Interpretations of hand
stencils include: representations of betrothal contracts, calling cards,
pastimes, games, and parts of stories. W. W. Thorpe suggests that, as the hand
is peculiar to the human being and relates to work and worship, it should symbolize
humanity. R. Verbrugge stresses the importance of gleaning as much information
as possible from examining the hand stencils and how the artists created them.
For example, we may discern, he says, if a left hand stencil was made from the
right hand of the artist with palm facing outwards. Close examination of the
stencils may uncover some of their meaning, but not all of it. Perhaps the
artist provides the only way to obtain the true meaning of a hand stencil.
Elkin writes that he couldn’t find out the Aboriginal meaning of the stenciled
hands found in some of the Wondjina
galleries. Another anthropologist relates that Aborigines shook their heads in
a mysterious manner and refused to explain, or expressed their ignorance as to
the presence of the hands. Few anthropologists asked the artists. The origin
and meaning of many hand representations may date from well before the arrival
of Europeans to Australia
anyway and, therefore, are now lost. The existence of a heavy, glazed surface
film over many of them supports their
antiquity. Aborigines often say that the hand marks were created in the
Hand impressions occur in eight
caves in the Nullarbor Region, including the MurrawijinnieCaves or The Caves of the Bloody
Hands, near the Nullarbor Station. The artists may have dipped their hands in
kangaroo blood and impressed them on limestone first smeared with red ochre. If
so, a chemical reaction between the blood and the ochre would create the white
prints now visible. J. Maitland Thomson asked Jimmy Scott, an Aborigine of the
Nullarbor Station, how artists created the handprints. No one had made them,
Scott replied, within the memory of living Aborigines.
Handprints and stencils appear in
European caves especially in the Aurignacian period, a culture whose name
derives from the cave in Aurignac, southern France,
where in 1860
archaeologists first discovered its remnants. The prints represent one of the
first uses of color in art, the beginning of painting. The handprints sometimes
mass together and overlap and, according to Giedion, artists created a panel in
several sessions. The techniques appear similar to those of the Australian
Lines and handprints belong to the
early period of art in Europe. These forms also
constitute the only Aboriginal art seen on the Nullarbor.
The early Koonalda visitors created
finger lines on the walls of the upper chamber. In addition, near the entrance
to the “squeeze,” they expressed themselves in lines they incised on the walls
with a stick or a piece of flint. Incised lines stand out separately on bare
areas of wall and contrast with the masses of finger scrawls. The incisions
suggest orderliness, perhaps even symbols. Nine horizontal lines crossed by
five shorter vertical lines form a grid of near-parallel lines. An ellipse or
fish shape stands out among the grid’s lines and the grid resembles the
tectiforms or latticed signs of Paleolithic art in Europe.
Contemporary Aboriginal bark painting also employs lattice extensively as
decorative fill. Perhaps the most striking symbol near the “squeeze” is a set
of large and curved parallel lines in a rainbow shape. It arches beneath an
overhang and runs to nearly a meter in length.
The human marks on boulders that Christine
Kortlang and I discovered on our first visit to Koonalda could form a third
class of line markings in the Cave. The marks range from two simple lines that
run parallel down a rock face, to meshes of lines as tangled as the wrinkles on
an old face. Two features stand out: first, the careful, intentional quality of
the marks, and, second, the vast number of them.
Kortlang intended to draw some of the
boulder engravings in detail and, in the process, to find something out about
their structure. Alexander Marshack describes
European engravings that form “streams”¾groups of almost parallel
lines with the same cross-sections. The streams sometimes overlap and, when
they do, Marshack can differentiate between them because each set exhibits its
own cross-section. He wanted to know if this also happens in Australia.
Kortlang first selected a couple of clear-looking collections of engravings on
boulders near the nicknamed “elephant head” rock. She illuminated the area with
a gas lamp and looked at the intersections of the lines with a magnifying
glass, trying to work out the order in which the line maker(s) laid down the
lines. She then recorded the information on paper with a sequence of coloured
pencils to represent the overlays. Some of the intersections lacked clarity and
not all lines crossed over each other, making it difficult for her to
Lines incised with different
flakes or slivers of the glass-like flint so bountiful in certain sections of
different cross-sections. Lines with different cross-sections would indicate
that the engraver(s) intended something different by them, or that different
engravers created the lines, or that engraving happened at different times.
Kortlang, therefore, looked at the cross-sections of the lines. She held a
candle in front of the magnifying glass and, moving the candle from side to
side over an engraving, looked inside it to see its shape: a U, a V, a deep U,
or a flat U. This she recorded on the drawing as well as in her notes.
Each line in a stream showed the same
cross-section and the cross-sections change between streams. Marshack’s
European examples demonstrate the same structure. It implies to him that
engraving occurred in participatory ritual where different people with
different instruments marked the rock surface with specific intentions in mind.
Kortlang also found that, in general, fine engravings override coarser ones and
that the streams comprise four lines or, if not four, three. The direction of a
line often imitates a natural form like a crack in the rock.
Kortlang found it painstaking and
slow to decipher the cross-sections and overlays accurately, to write down the
information, and to draw it. She could only study a few streams. I faced
similar difficulties with my photography. I had to set up a tripod on boulders
and maneuver it and myself into a suitable position in front of the markings.
Lighting caused the most headaches. I had to position floodlights so they threw
a certain amount of shade into the lines: too much light or not enough of an
angle and the lines disappeared from view.
Ian Lewis and Kevin Mott knew how to
fill a cavern as large as Koonalda with light: a Diprotodon (a large magnesium
flare named after the largest-ever marsupial) lit the whole chamber for a few
seconds with dazzling white light, providing a chance to film its entirety.
A couple of non-photographic
questions intrigued me. Three kinds of boulders sit in the upper chamber: those
with rough surfaces, those with smooth and rounded surfaces, and those with
smooth and undulating surfaces. Why do the boulders show different degrees of
smoothness? Further, no line markings exist on the rough and jagged rocks, and
virtually none on the smooth and undulating ones. Almost all the boulder lines
occur on the smooth and rounded stones, despite engravable surfaces on the
smooth and undulating ones. Why?
I thought about this and I
investigated. Perhaps the floor of the upper chamber comprises rockfalls of
quite different ages. If so, engraved smooth and rounded boulders may sit
underneath the present rough and jagged boulders¾perhaps also under the
smooth and undulating ones. Neil Chadwick and I crawled through gaps under
these two rockfalls to find out. Maynard and Edwards had previously crawled
under 15 meters of rockfall
to find wall markings executed before the collapse of the roof to form the
rough and jagged boulders. Under both this recent rockfall and the smooth and
undulating rocks, Chadwick and I found engraved boulders. This contradicted the
idea that water flowing over the rocks smoothed and rounded them; others had
told me this and it appeared gospel. My reasoning went like this. Engravings
exist on the smooth and rounded boulders underneath the smooth and undulating
ones. Chadwick and I found it difficult to climb under the present surface
(among other things, we removed rocks to gain access), which meant that the
engravers (human or animal) probably didn’t climb under the floor to engrave.
Rather, a rock collapse buried the engravings. The surface collapse then
weathered to become smooth and undulating¾but the weathering
process, if by water flow, would erase the line markings. The existence of the
markings, therefore, means that water didn’t smooth the smooth and undulating
boulders. Other problems faced water flow as the smoothing and rounding
mechanism: for instance, water would have to flow up hill (from the squeeze to
the “ramparts”) under pressure and then through a now collapsed channel in the
dome above the Gallus Site. I can’t see where it could run from there.
Water flow didn’t smooth and round
the boulders. Another mechanism must do this. It must work continuously and
must smooth and round originally rough and jagged boulders via a smooth and
Only one mechanism that I know of,
salt weathering, fits the requirements. Water dissolves certain salts to form a
solution that moves through the porous limestone and evaporates within a few
millimeters of the surface. The salts in the solution precipitate as crystals
when the water disappears and the growth of the crystals applies pressure on
the rock surface, forcing off grains from it. Specialists already believe that
this mechanism causes small-scale breakdown in Nullarbor caves. A ten-meter
pile of dust in MullamullangCave,
called the Dune, evidences to it there. Volumes of limestone dust (also known
as “rock meal” and “rock flour”) in Koonalda suggest this process also occurs
here. Of course, investigators must still find out for sure if the conditions
necessary for salt weathering occur with the boulders in the upper chamber of KoonaldaCave. They appear to.
Salt weathering changes a rough and
jagged surface into smooth and undulating, and later smooth and rounded. This
suggests that the rough and jagged rocks fell the most recently, the
(nonengraved) smooth and undulating rocks fell at an intermediate time, and
that the (engraved) smooth and rounded rocks fell the longest time ago.
I spent some time posing and
answering the questions about rockfalls and a smoothing-rounding process. Even
to perceive the questions required that I spend an extended period in the upper
chamber. The same applies to seeing that prehistoric people performed rituals
in the Cave. A fleeting visitor notices little.
The Gallus Site shows that people
mined for flint and, at the same place, set up sculptures. The upper chamber
shows that people engraved lines and, at the same place, cleared floors of
rubble. They cleared them for specific purposes. Smooth boulders, whose inner
surfaces usually show engravings, define the edges of the ritual floors or
activity areas. Stones pile up against some human line engravings. Pieces of
wood, charcoal, and bone also occur within the activity areas. KoonaldaCave is important not only for its
art and excavational finds, but also because it was a center for ritual.
Large torch stubs still sit atop the
boulders from where they illuminated the scene, and small pieces of wood litter
extensive portions of the upper chamber, probably the remains of torches of twigs
lashed together and soaked in fat. Attempts to analyze the wood from the
remnants proved fruitless because fungus has seriously damaged them. The wood
for the larger torches probably derived from the mallee tree, both roots and
branches, whose burning and lighting properties early European explorers knew
I found the skull of a kangaroo,
without its mandible, among the bones on one activity area. It sat on a rock
not far off the floor.
Chadwick later discovered a small
flake of flint on the same activity area, perhaps an engraving tool. No flint
nodules naturally occur in this section of the Cave.
Another activity area centers on a
“cache” inside of which sit several vertebrae and plaques marked with lines.
Perhaps the Koonalda people engraved the plaques and placed them in the cache,
covered them with layers of pebbles and dust, deposited enfleshed vertebrae on
top, and finally covered the cache with a flat stone. The floor around the
cache is flat and centers on a large, engraved, smooth, and rounded boulder.
Perhaps the Koonalda people constructed the floor this way.
Perhaps important members of the
tribe climbed into the Cave, lit their mallee root torches as the entrance
light faded, and descended the slope. They walked past the mining trenches and
stele and up to the upper chamber. With them, they brought animal parts to
place ritually in a particular spot. They sat in a close group inside a stone
circle, and chanted, recited myth stories, and added their special marks to
those already on the boulders and walls. The Cave and those who had entered
before them strengthened them through the ritual.
Koonalda witnessed a modern day
ritual. My birthday fell at the end of our visit and a cake hid in the
provisions for the occasion. Mott’s and Lewis’s birthdays also fell at this
time. We invited Cyril Gurney to the party. Six people sat around a birthday
cake and a fireplace of stones, 30
meters down a hole in the Nullarbor Plain. Bats swished
past our ears and stars thickened the canopy as we sang “Happy Birthday to
Modern visitors also construct
meanings from Nullarbor rocks. Formations of limestone still fire imaginations.
A. G. Bolam relates that limestone nodules
exit all over the Nullarbor, some assuming curious shapes that resemble animals
and other things. A railway construction gang found two such nodules attached
to each other, the smaller on the larger. To them it resembled a head¾face
a torso, and they named it Billy Hughes.
The Nullarbor offers a small number
of Aboriginal standing stones and stone arrangements, some associated with
caves. Aborigines believed that spirits live inside them. They thought that
those shaped like people once were people. Some once were other living beings.
Standing stones and line markings exist in places in Australia
other than KoonaldaCave.
The OrchestraShellCave near the town of Wanneroo,
Western Australia, contains
finger lines like Koonalda’s. Sylvia Hallam distinguishes four types on the
roof of this cave: a stemmed splay of lines, wide-spaced parallel grooves of
nine lines, short and very deep individual cuts, and, what predominates,
curving criss-crossing sets of usually five narrow-spaced parallel lines.
Robert Bednarik describes several major sites on the boundary of South
Australia and Victoria.
A cave in Buchan, eastern Victoria,
exhibits the markings too. Similar lines also appear in two caves near
Katherine in the Northern Territory,
Kintore and Cutta Cutta¾though animals may have created the marks by scratching.
The incised lines in both caves occur in soft rock or in now-hardened mud.
Traced or incised lines exist in
Australian caves other than those of the Nullarbor. Do they exist in Nullarbor
caves other than Koonalda? A photograph of the handprints in the MurrawijinnieCaves show lines cut through the
ochre; they appear similar to the Koonalda engravings. Wood and charcoal some
distance into MullamullangCave
could mean that prehistoric people entered it and left line engravings or
We set aside a day for visiting WarblaCave to see if it contained
Koonalda-type markings. Warbla is near Coompana not far from Koonalda and
enters, like Koonalda, from a large sinkhole 40
meters in diameter that opens up suddenly into the Plain. The Cave’s main
passage extends for 240
meters, with a sloping mass of loose rocks as a floor, and a small lake at the
end, 90 meters below the
surface. The mounds of rockfall down the center of the near-horizontal chamber
sometimes reach to its edges.
Aborigines told the Government
geologist Keith Ward of WarblaCave
and he visited it in 1908,
the first White to do so. Thomson arrived next in 1935. He located it differently: a light plane circled
overhead while a car approached it on the ground.
The name Warbla probably derives from
the Aboriginal word wardong,
or crow, though another source suggests it derives from the warbling of birds.
Thousands of crows fly cawing over the sinkhole and weave intricate and
constantly changing black patterns against the blue of the sky. The Warbla
crows follow a special flight path. They ascend in a spiral climb, often in
three circuits before reaching the top, and descend to the narrow opening of
the cave in a series of stall turns.
While the rest of us planned our
descent into the Warbla doline, Kortlang noticed many flakes of flint lying
about. A previous report noted signs of flint workings near the Cave entrance.
Kortlang found so many flakes that obviously someone had chipped or flaked
tools there. She sat down and began to gather the pieces together. She felt a
searing pain. A large bull-ant had bitten her. It reared up waving its front
legs and snapping with its mouth. Barrett writes that the Nullarbor bull-ants
are the Queensland “bull-dogs,”
the world’s largest ants. They measure over 32
millimeters in length and possess a large and powerful sting that they can use
often in quick succession. A cut piece of bracken root rubbed on the sting
quickly relieves the pain.
Lewis abseiled down into the
sinkhole. He tied his rope to the Landcruiser, lowered himself over the lip of
the doline, and eased himself down 45
meters or so to the bottom. He looked like a spider on a thread from across the
top of the sinkhole.
The rest of us took our turn when he had
descended, but over a shorter drop and on a caver’s ladder thrown over the
edge. I went first. The ladder¾15
centimeters wide with wire sides and pencil-thin slats of aluminum¾immediately
bent me in half by bringing my feet and head to the same level. It also twisted
back on itself so that I faced the opposite direction from what I intended. I
then began to rotate slowly round and round, gradually picking up momentum. The
floor waited for me 24 meters
My feet came to rest on a slope
of white crumbling limestone containing many fossil shells. I then walked down
to the bottom of the sinkhole over thick buffalo grass. This looked like a
smooth, green field from above but grew as a thick mat over piles of boulders.
Each of my steps pierced the grass and jarred on the unseen boulders. A rabbit
The mouth of WarblaCave is larger than Koonalda’s. As
I entered, the hot sun cut out abruptly and cool shadow, icy breezes, and the
familiar limey smells replaced it. Piles of guano evidenced the presence of
bats. The walls of the main chamber near the entrance show fine lines, probably
animal scratches. I saw no other markings.
We left WarblaCave and drove toward the Eyre
Highway to return to Koonalda. We disturbed a
group of grazing kangaroos, which bounded off into the sunset. Only a few
remain from the great numbers that lived on the Plain when Whites first settled
The fine lines on the walls of WarblaCave look similar to several
examples of fine line markings in Koonalda. We still don’t know how
systematically to distinguish animal marks from humanly made lines. If animals
created the Warbla marks, what made the Koonalda lines? Cylcons (the acronym
for “cylindro-conical stones”), odd shaped Aboriginal artifacts many of which
turned up in the basin of the Darling River, also bear marks similar to the
Koonalda engravings yet we assume that humans created them. Owen Broughton
describes the cylcon lines as most frequently at right angles to the axis of
the stone, some going right round the stone. Sometimes the marks run
longitudinally, and sometimes the marks aren’t lines but emu tracks or broad
arrow motifs. We know little about the use or significance of the cylcons.
Hypotheses range widely: seed grinders, grave markers, calendar stones, sacred stones
representing yams, symbols of the death-bone pointer, and instruments for the
defloration of virgins.
Cylcons resemble message sticks.
Daisy Bates relates that Aborigines write letters to each other on many shapes
and sizes of wood: flat and round, long and short, straight and curved, and
from 25 to 450 millimeters long. The makings on the
message sticks she encountered also vary, from those with a few Koonalda-like
strokes or notches, each, she says, representing an individual, to those
covered with conventional designs. Some display what she terms cryptic symbols
with a meaning known only to the sender and the recipient, while others display
marks of a totem sent as friendly greetings between those of the same group.
If the markings on message sticks
held meanings, did the Koonalda lines too? I already suggested that they may
represent an aesthetic response to the limestone or that people created them in
ritual for the sake of creating them. Many other interpretations appear in the
literature: the lines are byproducts of tool sharpening, of gauging out calcium
carbonate for medicinal use, or of indicating places to mine flint.
We could compare the Koonalda
markings with contemporary abstract painting or sculpture. A successful work of
art transmits feelings and ideas to the viewer without the help of a
representational framework or written words. So too might we respond directly
to the Koonalda lines.
Understandings of the activities of
prehistoric people often rely on ethnography, the study of living peoples.
Archaeologists often compare a living area of prehistoric hunter-gatherers with
the area of people who live in a similar way and environment today. Ethnography
can also help the study of prehistoric art. We can’t say for sure that what a
symbol means for a contemporary society is what it meant for another society in
the past. We can learn something, however, about the working of art and symbol
in indigenous societies so that we don’t approach prehistoric art from an
overly modern or European standpoint.
Several generalizations about art in
indigenous societies and about the art of the Australian Aborigine can help.
The audience of an indigenous artist
must more easily “read” the art than we “read” the work of many modern artists.
Indigenous artists aren’t solitary persons caught up in their own ideas.
Rather, the artist remains in close touch with and shares the values of the
community so the public can readily understand the art and it convey its
message. A close reciprocal bond exists between artist and community.
Aborigines live on two interrelated
planes: one attached to the events of daily existence and centered on family,
marriage, and gathering food, and the second the life of ritual, symbolism, and
faith. Both of these planes are practical as well as symbolic. Everything that
humanity, rocks, and animals¾possesses both spirit and outside form. Art and ritual
represent this whole thing symbolically. They affirm in outward, objective,
solid, and living forms the co-existence of the spirit life with and as part of
the life of everyday.
Even designs that to the outsider
seem purely decorative possess cultural significance. Creating the design ranks
in importance with the work itself, and a design only reaches completion if its
creators sing meaning into it when they fashion it. This meaning isn’t
superficial and readily translated or read, but draws the viewer through
various related meaning systems back to the Dreamtime. Aborigines also read
natural objects, stone outcrops, hills, and waterholes in this way. The objects
may form part of a Dreamtime hero or ancestor, or mark where such a person
traveled. The Aborigine can re-enact happenings from the time of creation by
walking these paths.
An actor dressed to re-enact a legend
becomes that ancestor through body painting, and ceases to be the character
when the design goes. Ground painting and earth figures possess the same
transience. Their creation and destruction form part of and often depict the
ritual that the people chant.
Permanent ritual objects¾engraved
stones or boards hidden along sacred trails, or rock engravings or paintings¾also
reveal the dreaming. Selected individuals may only visit them on specified
Munn studied the symbolism of the Aboriginal Walbiri people. She suggests that a design such as the circle
can summarize visually the organization and principles of Walbiri mythology
and life. A symbol, whether the Walbiri express it verbally,
graphically, or in movement during a dance, sets off within a Walbiri person
a chain reaction of associations with aspects of society’s structure. This
recalling produces new meanings for the associated ideas.
None of these observations about
Aboriginal art may apply to the Koonalda people. They present places to start
in an attempt to further understand the markings found in KoonaldaCave.
Archaeologists who write on European
prehistoric art usually concentrate on the appealing animal paintings. People
such as Breuil and André Leroi-Gourhan try to explain the groupings of engraved
lines and trailing finger marks by treating them as pictorial representations.
The masses of engraved lines become huts, arrows, sorcerers; the finger scrawls
become snakes or phallic forms.
Marshack carefully examined the marks
on pieces of bone and stone and the nonrepresentational wall engravings. He
found that different tools often created the lines on the same piece or
formation. Would a mass of lines made with different tools represent a single
entity like a hut? Marshack thinks not. He also believes that different people
built up some of the line series over time. Each line represents a character or
component in a story and all the lines seen together may remind the viewer of
that particular story. This form of notation is less specific than writing and
leaves the mind free¾after
initial stimulation in the direction that the signs indicate¾to
build, imagine, and form images. We shouldn’t look for shapes in groups of
lines because each line is important, Marshack suggests.
These early marks reveal something of
the thought processes of prehistoric people.
We may speculate about the
meaning of lines, look at ethnographic parallels, and comment on what they
evoke in the contemporary viewer. We ought, though, to base this on as much
information as possible from the structure and formation of the lines. Marshack
offered me this advice for Koonalda. Bednarik and Francesco d’Errico in France
have since then reiterated it.
Looking at the Koonalda lines
closely started with the studies Kortlang carried out in the Cave. Trying to
recreate the line markings might help us learn more about their creation and
the limitations involved. A structural analysis of the markings might teach us
more about the sequence in which their creators laid them down. Perhaps there
exists a consistency among the sequences.
KoonaldaCave offers a unique opportunity to
explore the relationship between the different human activities carried out in
it. It has remained relatively undisturbed for so long. Whatever avenues of
investigation we follow, we must ensure the preservation of the markings. They
are an unequalled part of our human heritage.
AR02\C09.doc2442 words13 June 2003
TO THE GURNEYS
I remember. . .the
Gurneys of Eucla and Koonalda, fighting with gay courage and unquenchable
energy to wrest a living from the parched soil, and welcoming with matchless
courtesy all who pass along the east-west road.
The Gurneys invited us to tea, Nullarbor outback style, one evening
toward the end of our stay.
I spruced myself up with a plunge into the tank
of Cave water that the windmill pumped up. I hoped the sheep parasite in the
water wouldn’t infest me. The six of us piled into the Landcruiser and the
station wagon and took off to the homestead and real food.
The Gurneys’ Koonalda home sits in the midst of
the Nullarbor, no other buildings for hundreds of kilometers. Roy Gurney bought
the ruins of the Eucla settlement for the stone and timber he could salvage
from it before the sand swallowed everything, and used some of the materials to
enlarge his Koonalda house. It cost him less than transporting the materials
Low slung, hidden in verandas, the house bespeaks
the bits and pieces of its origin. A little fence surrounds it and flowers
bloom in its garden. Two cages of cockatoos beside it all say, “Hello.” Six
emus, four wallabies, two dozen goats, and two horses occupy the yard. Fifteen
Shetland ponies, dozens of dead cars, buses, trucks, tires, and sheds occupy
the space in front. The creaking and grinding of a half-dozen windmills
reverberates and the generator hums. Hides hang out to dry.
The yard also houses many gadgets knocked up from
scraps. Ion Idriess describes one as a cross between a centipede and a
grasshopper. Gurney compiled his own tractor here from an early vintage
Graham-Paige car, an earth scoop, and a pair of wheels from a harvester, along
with miscellaneous items. In a shed, Idriess discovered a maze of bags,
harnesses, timber, jars, saddle and bridles, old papers and books, half-filled
cases, lids, queer-looking machines, carvings, ropes, branding irons, a large
and ancient Bible picked up somewhere on the Nullarbor, and a 6.75 kilogram lump of the whale-product ambergris.
An overlander on the Eyre Highway every so often drives up the double-sided drive
to buy gas at Gurneys’ hand pumps. It costs half as much again as in Adelaide. The paved highway runs a few kilometers south
of the Gurneys’ home whereas the dirt road ran a hundred meters away. I
wondered how their business could survive.
Two dozen farmers graze sheep on the saltbush of
the Nullarbor. They face dingoes and excessive distances. They face a lack of
surface water, good saltbush, and other sheep grasses. They face plagues of
rats, mice, and rabbits that suddenly appear in droves and then vanish. They
build up a hardy flock in the good years, which withers and dies when the rains
fail and the plagues arrive.
Gurney decided in 1940 to graze the Koonalda run when he heard about
and confirmed the existence of water in the Cave. He sent samples of the water
to Adelaide to test its suitability for stock. A positive
reply returned. He and his brother Cyril leased 62,160 hectares (240 square miles) around the Cave so they could pump
water from it, but only in 1945 could they install their first pump in it. The
year 1950 saw
their first fruits: they clipped 40 bales of merino wool, excluding crutchings and
KoonaldaCave offers the only permanent water supply in the whole of this now 295,260-hectare (1,140 square mile) sheep station. Paddocks on
Mundrabilla Station ranged from 4,000 to over 12,000 hectares in 1936. Koonalda supported 1200 sheep in the good year of 1957, one sheep per square mile. (Arthur Mason, the
explorer who lost his camels and trekked back to Eucla with his delirious
companion, wrongly reckoned that the Plains would carry at least 150 sheep to the square mile.) Sheep reared on such
terrain are known as saltbush mutton and offer a unique flavor.
We entered the Koonalda farmhouse by a welcoming
cockatoo, filed down a dark hallway, and entered the large kitchen. Cyril
Gurneys’ daughter stood there, scooping fresh milk out of a basin into smaller
containers. A wooden table dominated the room. A cast-iron cauldron sat on a
We continued from the kitchen and sat down in the
dining room. Its ceiling drooped, suggesting that it might fall at any moment.
The old furniture belied the warmth of the house and its people, one large
extended family. Sandor Gallus indicated that only the photographs had changed.
They seemed to cover every family event.
Mrs. Gurney entered, her face welcoming. She was
short and plump, wore a fashionable dress, and looked young for her forties.
We sat down and waited. The Gurneys run on a
different time to South Australian or Western Australian time: they observe
Gurney time, and by that we had arrived an hour early. The sun had a way to go.
Mrs. Gurney told us that Cyril didn’t come in until from “the pastures.”
She spoke of her father who knew Daisy Bates, and
about the degeneration of the Aborigines around the train line when it first
appeared, how they scavenged for scraps. She insisted that they were all
civilized and not wild. The Gurneys also contended that Aborigines didn’t
create the marks in the Cave because they couldn’t get down there. Anyway, the
Gurneys added, the Aborigines knew nothing about the lines.
What did she think of the overlanders traveling
through? Mrs. Gurney just laughed. “Well, Mrs. Gurney,” one joked, pointing to
the sinkhole, “how long did it take you to dig that?” “Gee,” she replied, “if
Cyril started to dig years ago when he came, and he’s still digging now, he
wouldn’t have dug an eighth as deep as it is now.” “Is the Cave underneath your
shed?” another asked.
The hour of our wait passed quickly.
Gurney arrived: “Ullo, ullo, ‘ow are ya, ‘ow are ya?”
He took his hat off and offered us a beer. We eagerly accepted. He stood tall
but stooped, a gaunt man with large gnarled hands and a big bushy beard. He
wore a flat-brimmed hat, a sports coat done up, stove-pipe trousers, and
crossover boots, folded and buttoned, with pointy toes. His face shone ruddy
and his nose sat round and snubbed. His blue eyes pierced.
He looked similar to his brother, Roy, whom Basil
Fuller describes as a model for the typical Australian: strongly built with
powerful hands, the slouch of a pioneer, sun baked skin, and an easy manner.
Idriess describes Roy20 years earlier as grinning a welcome. He had keen
eyes, a quick body, short and wiry, and had started to gray. Roy managed the White Wells Station in the 1930s and retired to Eucla. Idriess recognized in him
what he calls “an old bush figure built for endurance,” with a set expression
that hints at initiative and determination.
Gurney’s arrival signaled the serving of tea. In came Mrs.
Gurney on the first of many trips, with plate upon plate of cakes, large hot
pies, and little hot pasties with ketchup, all of which stayed on the table
untouched for half-an-hour. She brought in a teapot somewhat like a saucepan
with a spout on it. Goats’ milk accompanied the tea. An earlier visitor drank
the milk avidly until one of the children said, “Pass the goats’ milk.”
Now we could eat.
Mrs. Gurney spoke of the gatherings she had held
at her place, entertaining 50 or 60 people at a time, like the Christmas before last
with all the children, all the spouses, and all the grandchildren. Gallus
remembered playing with the children when he first visited Koonalda. An old
bent-tailed Siamese cat came in and sat next to him, purring.
We started to eat about on the Gurney clock. About eleven we could eat
Gurney and his wife entertained Arnold Wright and
members of one of J. Maitland Thomson’s expeditions. The Gurneys invited them
on their first evening at the Cave to a birthday party for one of the Gurneys’
five children. Don McKinnon played his bagpipes and Gurney couldn’t keep it to
himself. He tuned in his radio to the Flying Doctor Network and spread the
entertainment across the Nullarbor. Somebody responded with a mouth-organ solo
and off swung the “Nullarbor Amateur Hour.”
“Hospitality personified”¾Crosbie Morrison’s name for the Gurneys¾hides the life of hewing a home from the Plain.
“The spirit of the Nullarbor,” Morrison better calls them, a spirit that
nothing can daunt. They need both hospitability and dauntlessness
to succeed. The larger Gurney clan, “the Gurneys of the border,” is a
celebrated Nullarbor family.
We soon had to pack up camp, bid farewell to the
Gurneys, and set off back to Adelaide and Melbourne. The last morning we spent clearing the Cave of
our belongings and entering last minute records.
A roll of exposed film rolled down between rocks
near the “ramparts” of the upper chamber and disappeared out of reach. We
removed a few stones and Neil Chadwick climbed in and behind the large floor
boulders to retrieve it. He also discovered a large face of line markings under
the present floor.
I left last. By that time, the gas for the lamps
had expired, the candles had burned away, and one box of matches remained. I
knew the route by heart and only needed a match or two at the worst places.
Christine Kortlang fell off the ladder out of the
sinkhole on her last ascent. A large brown snake, probably a king brown, slept
in the rocks just behind the ladder and frightened her. The king brown is
widely distributed, frequently inhabits the caves on the Nullarbor, attains an
adult length of two-and-a-half meters, and strikes aggressively. People die
from its bite. Kortlang was unhurt.
Roy Gurney met a snake and nearly fell off his
wire ladder while carrying a section of pipe over his shoulder, bound for the
Cave. He hung about six meters down and on a rock ledge:
This morning it was
a bit awkward, like. I could only use one hand, I had to hang on to the piping
with the other; that long pipe was jolly awkward to balance. When I reached the
ledge I took a grip of the wire with my teeth, then reached my free hand up
over the ledge and gripped the wire. I was all right then, so climbed up over
the ledge and my face butted straight into the peering face of a snake. It
hissed violently and I swayed violently out and the piping went plunging away
down below. As the wire jerked me back to the ledge, the terrified snake
plunged straight out past me into the open air and I came within an ace of
We said good-bye. Koonalda rested back in the
hands of the Gurneys, who probably little understand the importance of the
place that waters their stock.
I drove along the unopened stretch of paved road
from Koonalda to Nullarbor where I had to revert to the dirt road with its dust.
I missed the pre-arranged point for the night’s sleep, Ivy Shed Tanks. Fuller
once spent a night there. His thoughts ranged over topics that prevented his
sleeping: war and the Bomb. Due north about 80 kilometers lies Watson, the railway siding that
links with Maralinga, the Long Range Weapons Establishment of the Australian
Government. “Maralinga” derives from an Aboriginal word that means thunder.
Instead of Ivy Shed Tanks, I stopped at the first
gas station I found. I slept, as I had over the last three weeks, in the open
on the Nullarbor, exposed to the moon and the stars. My thoughts didn’t turn to
destruction. A full moon rising over the hot Nullarbor atmosphere can assume
square shapes. A halo of colors¾yellow, blue, and green¾suspends in the atmosphere when the sun sets.
Myriads of stars emerge. I felt in another world with no other human being
around. Bates looked up into a plethora of worlds and felt the earth the
tiniest atom in comparison. “On such nights,” she continues, “it is good to wander
over these great distances in company with the Aborigines and listen and hear
their wonderful legends of this and that star. . .and wander with them along
the ‘Yaggin’ (moon) that was made when the moon was human.”
We offered a surplus crate of fresh fruit to an
Aboriginal family squatting across the road from the gas station in the
morning. They probably lived at an Aboriginal Mission in Yalata near FowlersBay. It originally opened at Ooldea early in the twentieth century and moved
to its current site in 1952. About 350 people now live and work there, most of them
from the more northern Pitjanjara
Some tribes on the northern desert fringes of the
Nullarbor still live in those fringes. One of the last parties of these people
to “come out of the bush” attempted to walk south across the Plain to Neale
Junction in 1963. They
tried to extract water from the roots of the myall, as in their homeland with
eucalyptus trees, but with little success. Three of the six died of thirst.
The predecessors of these outcasts and fringe
dwellers created the markings we journeyed to the Nullarbor to look at. The
civilization of the original Koonalda people and the squatting Aborigines lived
successfully in what we find very harsh; Aboriginal civilization had learned the
spiritual values necessary for peaceful co-existence with its life-giver. The
original Australians met their needs and savored their life. We could learn
such civilized behavior. Europeans once did learn from them¾if Gallus is correct¾because Aboriginal experience helped develop the
stone tools, art, and self-expression of European culture.
The arrival of later Europeans quickly destroyed
this ancient civilization. The Mirning quickly slid from the sole
inhabitants of the Plain, to beggars at the edge of society, to ceasing to
exist. Bates’ reflection on the Nullarbor also applies to its now-gone people:
Here there is
nothing young that was not long since old. Here there is no germination potency
of nature. . . .The solemn all-embracing silence. . .is so impressive that one
feels as if the moment of breaking will usher in some catastrophe. Even the
echoes seem to be dead.
The Landcruiser completed its trek back to Adelaide and the station wagon limped into Melbourne minutes before its engine ceased up. We returned
to our lives. Koonalda, with many mysteries still unlocked, continues.
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