KOONALDA
Prehistoric Mind and an Australian Cave
by
Kevin Sharpe
37,000 words
Copyright © 2000 by Kevin Sharpe.
WARNING
Koonalda
Cave 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
CONTENTS
Plates iii
Figures x
Preface xii
Chapter One: Across the
Nullarbor 4
Chapter Two: Exploring
Koonalda Cave 13
Chapter Three: The Mirning 29
Chapter Four: Nullarbor Fauna
and Flora 43
Chapter Five: Nullarbor
Myths
Chapter Six: Koonalda in
the Nullarbor 79
Chapter Seven: Results
of Excavations 106
Chapter Eight: The Ritual
Art of Koonalda 125
Chapter Nine: Good-Bye
to the Gurneys 150
References 160
PLATES
(A Selection Can be Made From These)
CHAPTER ONE
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.
CHAPTER TWO
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 Koonalda
Cave.”
CHAPTER THREE
14. “They…lived off scraps from White
civilization.”
CHAPTER FOUR
15. “Flowers flourish for a short time after
rain.”
16. The Koonalda sinkhole. Note the Gurneys’
water pipe.
17. “We set up our camp on the surface beside
the sinkhole.”
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
overhang.”
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
archaeological investigations.”
25. “I found the crumbling remains of [a
cockroach] in the upper chamber of Koonalda
Cave.”
26. The remains of a cave cricket in the
upper chamber.
CHAPTER FIVE
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.”
CHAPTER SIX
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
the dust.”
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
each end.”
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
centimeters.
38. “Sculptural concretions shaped
like…animals.”
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
jagged.
45. Christine Kortlang lying in the “squeeze”
entrance under the engraved wall.
CHAPTER SEVEN
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.
CHAPTER EIGHT
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
centimeters.
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
sinkhole.”
CHAPTER NINE
67. “I
spruced myself up with a plunge into the tank of Cave water that the windmill
pumped up.”
68. “The Gurneys’
Koonalda home sits in the midst of the Nullarbor.”
69. “Six
emus, four wallabies, two dozen goats, and two horses occupy the yard.”
70. “An
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 Koonalda Cave.
73. A portion of the “head” and “trunk” of
the “elephant head” boulder in the upper chamber.
FIGURES
CHAPTER ONE
1.
The Nullarbor Region, with locations mentioned
in the text.
2.
Australian non-Nullarbor locations mentioned in
the text.
3.
Koonalda
Cave, plan and section of the Northwest
Passage (after J.B.Hinwood, 1960;
see Richard Wright, ref. 294).
4.
Koonalda
Cave, Northwest Passage
(after I.D. Lewis and K.R.Mott, 1976).
A.
The Gallus Site.
B.
The Upper Chamber.
C.
The squeeze area.
CHAPTER SIX
5.
Geological and archaeological time scales.
CHAPTER SEVEN
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
procedure.
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).
CHAPTER EIGHT
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
salt crystallization.
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
approximately 1:1.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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.
Kevin
Sharpe,
Oxford.
AR02\C01.doc 2563 words 13 June 2003
Chapter One
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.
Basil Fuller, 1970.[1]
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.”[2] 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 South Australian
Museum 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 South Australian
Museum 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 Koonalda
Cave arrived at the last minute
from the South Australian Protector of Relics.
The Eyre
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
beyond, 1,800
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—Polluted
Beach” notices barricaded the park
from the sea of Murat Bay.
That night we broke the glass of a gas lamp—the first of the many problems that
hampered our ability to illuminate Koonalda
Cave. 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
worries.
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.
But hot.
The Eyre
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
car¾through
tightly closed doors and windows¾irritating noses, throats, and eyes. The limestone
powder of the Nullarbor can create the worst discomfort of travel across the
Plain.
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.[3]
We stopped at a set of Government
tanks¾large,
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 Koonalda Cave
offered me something also unexpected and unique.[4]
ENDNOTES
AR02\C02.doc 3,163
words 13 June 2003
Chapter Two
EXPLORING KOONALDA
CAVE
Natives knew the
Goonalda [sic] reservoir; but tradition
mentions only one [Aborigine] as having ventured down into the basin with the
aid of rough saplings tied together with hairstring belts.
Daisy
Bates, 1921.[5]
It took three days to drive from Adelaide
to Koonalda.
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.
Koonalda
Cave 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:
potholing.
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.”[6]
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.
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 Koonalda
Cave 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 Koonalda Cave.
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 Koonalda
Cave 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 South
Australian Museum
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
them together.
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 1959 Sydney
University expedition stumbled upon
a similar scene. The bones of a 27-year-old
Aboriginal woman lay scattered through an extension of Bildoolja
Cave. 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 South
Australian Museum.
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 Koonalda Cave
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 Koonalda
Cave up to relatively recent years,
though infrequently and with trepidation.
The same with other Nullarbor caves.
Weebubbie
Cave¾also 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
cannibalistic Weebabbj-Junnaaibil,
which they believed lay in wait in Weebubbie
Cave. W. C. Evans,
in the early part of the twentieth century, couldn’t entice his Aboriginal
friends to enter what he calls Wee-Bubbee
Caves. 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 Weebubbie
Cave. The shaman or medicine man
would perform his ritual to relieve the thirst of his watching tribe and then
ducked down into Weebubbie Cave
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 Weebubbie
Cave¾also 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,
frightened.
The naturalist Charles Barrett
visited the Plain during the 1930s,
its wonder and loneliness luring him, and tells a story about Mereguda
Cave similar to the one about Weebubbie
Cave. 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.
Koonalda
Cave’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 Koonalda
Cave 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
markings, why?
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.[8]
ENDNOTES
AR02\C03.doc 3105 words 13 June 2003
Chapter Three
THE MIRNING
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.
William
Dampier, 1688.[9]
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.
Daisy
Bates, 1921.[10]
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
civilization.
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 w