AR36 C02. Nature dreams

AR36 C02: 14 March 2002.

· Include plates and diagrams in the text.

· Check name introductions.

· Units of measurement?

Chapter Two

naturE dreams

[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’ [‘Tire’] and not Eyre Highway.

Basil Fuller, 1970.[1]

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. Seemingly Godforsaken and endless, the Nullarbor feels desolate with white limestone cropping up everywhere and in every direction like dried bones.

Captain E. Alfred Delisser coined ‘Nullarbor’ in 1886 from the Latin words nullus arbor, meaning ‘no tree’; the Nullarbor grows no trees. Coincidentally, 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. This deception of atmospheric refraction can bring death as it did to two explorers Fairie and Woolley who lost themselves on the Nullarbor and perished. They stumbled toward mirages that continually vanished.

The enlarged Nullarbor Region, about the size of Colorado or Great Britain, includes four main features: a currently under-water plain, a series of above-water coastal plains, a dramatic cliff line, and a plateau running inland from the top of the cliffs. At the foot of the cliffs lies the ocean or the coastal plain with a narrow wooded belt that hugs the coast.

Bat- and owl-haunted caverns dot the plain. Caves undermine it. Its climatic and geological characteristics render it mostly hollow underneath, and every now and then it collapses to form surface-openings called ‘dolines’ or ‘sinkholes.’ At the bottom of the sinkholes open entrances into the Nullarbor underworld, a geography familiar to prehistoric Australians.

Dreaming befits the Nullarbor. We can imagine it civilized or tamed, or what surprises its underground cavities hold in store, or how to survive its extremes, or what it might feed us spiritually. I imagine finding a key to unlock the minds of our prehistoric ancestors. That is why I traveled there.

A train journey across the Nullarbor takes 29 hours. I drove.

The Eyre Highway, the only east-west road that crosses the Nullarbor, travels close to the coast for 790 kilometers between Colona in South Australia and Balladonia in Western Australia. Originally, it was an Aboriginal trade route and the course of the explorer John Eyre, the first European to traverse the Plain. A more defined trail developed with the movement 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 in 1896. The transformation of the trail into a road started in 1941 on Anzac Day (25 April), the day commemorating the World War I slaughter at Gallipoli of the Australian and New Zealand armies. The impetus for the 1941 road construction came from World War II and the need to transport soldiers and supplies across Australia to help battle the Japanese. Four hundred men cleared, graded, and laid gravel.

The abrupt cessation of towns and people when entering the Nullarbor matches the abrupt rediscovery of them on the other side, as in an ocean crossing. A burning street light greeted me at noon at the Nullarbor sheep Station and its store, a couple of near derelict buildings but the only structures for hundreds of kilometers. Settlements like this perch like islands, at dusk seemingly at the edge of a flat earth. The railway line sails a similar course: maintenance depots, stations, and human habitations cluster beside the line at comparable distances. Railway workers and farmers, 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 this town so nervous are cartographers about empty space.

Given the flatness of the Nullarbor and its lack of trees, you might think you could drive fast along its dirt roads and tracks. Not so, unless only one vehicle at a time uses them. Problems arise when two or more do. Drivers overtake blind in the pall of dust that the car in front kicks up, convinced that no vehicles are coming in the opposite direction. The Eyre Highway dirt road saw a disproportionately large number of fatalities.

No longer is it a dirt road. The route gradually saw reconstruction and paving until completion in the late 1970s. Engineers had to add kinks to it to minimize driver boredom.

When I first drove the Eyre Highway in 1973, abandoned car bodies lay beside the road rotting in the sun, remnants of accidents and breakdowns. I could see beside the road around the Nullarbor Station, among the sparse saltbush and bluebush, mounds of freshly turned yellow soil that mark the presence of hairy-nosed wombats. Hundreds of these marsupials, which you ordinarily never see because they’re nocturnal, also lay dead. 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. Aborigines used to walk hundreds of kilometers to feast on them and, using two sticks, spin their fur into thread for weaving garments. The wombat bodies I saw weren’t victims of hit-and-run drivers, but of the drought the Nullarbor experienced that year.

The 1973 drought also killed the sheep of the stations. Cyril Gurney, the grazier at Koonalda, had no live sheep left on his land and worked on a road gang. Sheep carcasses lay everywhere, especially around the wells of brackish water that windmills pump from underground. , Ravaged, the land was bare and lifeless.

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. They can also devour the bark of sandalwood and other trees and dig up the roots of smaller bushes, or even climb mulga trees to nibble young shoots. I lay in my sleeping bag on the hard ground for the first few nights of my 1973 visit. I then found it more comfortable to sleep on the rabbit droppings (up to 30 centimeters deep 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. Their dreams undaunted, the graziers could only see herbage covering the countryside to create excellent pastoral land, ideal for sheep.

Both of the occasions I traveled the Nullarbor, in 1973 and 1976, I came to see Koonalda Cave especially its prehistoric art. I believe it contains a key for helping us to understand the nature and history of what makes us human.

Entering it makes it demands. 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.

My 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. They frighten me.

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. I leave my protective helmet here when I come out of the Cave. A descent over a pile of rocks and debris (which the archaeologist of the Cave, Sandor Gallus, excavated a little) leads into the entrance. The track then climbs up a little into the darkness. My helmet often strikes a pipe here that the Gurneys once used to carry water from the Cave.

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 Cave’s prehistoric line makers though, at 30 millimeters in diameter, the solution tubes dwarf the line markings in the Cave. Plus, the line markings never tunnel into the rock.

I trim my light once into the Cave entrance. Gallus carries a kerosene Tilley lamp, and the rest of us light with gas lamps and candles. Battery lamps don’t last long enough.

From the entrance, I walk over a rise to reach 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 a hole.

I slide most of the way to the Gallus Site. A backwards scramble over large rocks interrupts my slide and leads to a short steel ladder that sits at an angle on the dust. The path I take mostly follows the Gurneys’ straight pipe, apart from hewn steps that lead in a wide loop from the bottom of the ladder. If I want to follow it, a track branches off from the last section of the slope into the lake-filled northern chamber of the Cave.

Koonalda Cave, in fact, 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 90 by 60-meter chamber, 30 meters high, 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.

The Gallus Site part of the Cave is the size a football stadium. 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. The shaft of light changes color as the day proceeds: pinks and yellows, and sometimes a cold ice blue. Writes a 1956 visitor, Arnold Wright:

[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 color 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.[2]

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 he has dug 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.

Gallus set up a collapsible card table here to work on his notes. Behind it, 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 to where the Upper Chamber. A boost from behind helps me up the step to the winding trail up the cliff. Steep and crumbly, it has fallen away at one place to leave only eight centimeters. I feel better when I ignore the hole with its darkness, step over it, and slog up to a rest point. An overhang near the top of the ascent forces me to my knees to squeeze under, especially when I’m wearing a pack on my back. Stones easily dislodge under my feet. A cup-sized rock once slipped from beneath my feet and bounced off Gallus’s hardhat.

How would prehistoric visitors to Koonalda manage that climb, without a formed path and with glowing sticks for light?

The divide between the large rocks (the ‘Ramparts’) at the beginning of the Upper Chamber appears unexpectedly. It welcomes and offers me a needed ten-minute rest on a handy flat slab. I sit on this rock each day to eat my lunch, the archaeologists’ special: tinned meat and tinned beans in vinegar − a diet I soon tire of. At least no flies annoy me as they do outside. Everywhere I see white lime dust, patched occasionally with red, and I smell lime, dust, and the cold. I look at the activities in the Gallus Site way down below and clearly hear everything said and every clump of Gallus’s pick.

I never walk on level ground; I climb up, I climb down, I clamber over boulders, and I jump from stone to stone. The daily hike in and out alone exhausts me let alone the scrambling for the rest of the day. Navigating in the darkness with the fear of being lost also tires me out. A large rectangular boulder stands out near the high point of the Upper Chamber and a lamp catches it from almost anywhere in this part of the Cave. The first few times, I can’t remember the way out from the rear of the chamber and I can’t see the entrance, but I need only head toward this friendly rock − or ‘Directional Stele,’ as we call it − and the route becomes clear. Tiredness eventually restricts me and hampers my distance judgments. I fall. My lamp brakes, the glass scatters, and I lie in it on my back wedged between rocks, shocked but unharmed. Amazingly, no serious injuries occur on either of my trips.

The ceiling of the Upper Chamber reaches to nine meters and domes with large holes that correspond to similarly large chunks of rock below − frightening if thought about too much. It’s about 12 to 15 meters wide. The floor rolls up and down and divides into three. The first section runs from the Ramparts at the top of the climb from the Gallus Site to the hump at the Directional Stele. From here, it gradually descends until a short precipice where the roof forms a step down because it hasn’t fallen away. The third section, a short flat area, lies past the foot of this slope before the end of the chamber at the Squeeze, 200 meters from the Ramparts.

Initially, I head toward the Squeeze, the rock face above which is the most famous part of the Cave. 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 intrigue Gallus. His excavations beneath them turned up what he interprets 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.

To get there, though, I have to cross different rock falls whose significance I am still trying to work out. From the Ramparts to the Directional Stele, the floor mostly comprises smooth and rounded boulders. They show line markings, often looking like animal scratches. Were at least some of them, though, human made? 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, the remains of what was the ceiling. The surface rocks show no line markings. In the short distance that remains before the Squeeze, the rockfall debris ceases and smooth and rounded boulders again appear. In other words, the floor of the third section 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. Perhaps, like the finger markings and engravings on the walls above, they were also human made.

The rockfall opens up part of the way down the slope to the third portion. Under a slab of rock that once formed a piece of the ceiling (its underside is smooth), sits a smooth and rounded boulder that to me looks like a bird, with a stream of lines running along its ‘face.’

The roof and floor gradually merge toward the area of the markings, making the Upper Chamber appear to end in a vertical four-meter wall. Through this wall runs the slit called the Squeeze, or ‘cat-run.’ The Upper Chamber represents an earlier and higher level of development of Koonalda Cave than the lower level of the Gallus Site, during a period in which the water table (and sea level) stood higher than at present. I notice scallop markings in the Squeeze showing that water once forced its way through it into the Upper Chamber. A strong wind blows past me and between the ledges of rock.

I pull myself on my belly only one to two of the Squeeze’s six meters. I slide into a meter high pit in the middle and crawl the rest on my hands and knees. Mike Smith tried on my 1973 visit to crawl through an opening at the end of the Upper Chamber that he thought was the Squeeze − it wasn’t. 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. Captain Thomson, who led a team there in 1947, needed others to chip rock away because he was too large to fit through the opening.

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. My stomach ties itself in knots just thinking of it. With a crumbly edge, the ledge consists of boulders sitting one on top of the other, some of which have fallen away to leave holes and a drop of about 30 meters. Richard Wright and his team in the late 1960s 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.’[3]

Adjusting and looking around, I feel excitement beginning to surge. 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 penetrate 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. Someday, could I?

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.[4]

Thomson had noticed the wood in the lake chamber that morning (Orville Dunnet used it to climb partway up the wall in 1935).

##The Squeeze opens into the western chamber of Koonalda Cave. To explain this and the other chambers of the Cave, I need to return to the northwestern one, the one containing the Upper Chamber and the Gallus Site. The northern passage leads from it off near the toe of the first slope from the Cave entrance down to the Gallus Site. It contains several lakes and 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 and also contains lakes, branches from the northern one about 150 meters in. I spent little time in these chambers, unlike most of Koonalda’s modern visitors who focus their interest on the lakes.

A little into the northern passage rests a disused pump and its large car engine. The Gurney brothers carried and windlassed the machines and the associated iron pipes into the Cave, cleaned and laid them, and relied on them to water their sheep. 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. It 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 women members of my 1973 expedition to Koonalda ventured a swim and wash in lake water; the bat dung floating on the surface discouraged us men. 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. Measuring 145 by 27 meters, it 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 level.

Following the second lake, towers the Mountain (or Snow Mountain), a 35-meter high cone of sharp edged rocks glistening with glauber salts. A cupola-shaped dome, 60 meters wide and 68 meters up, rises above it only 15 from the surface of the Plain and the highest in the chamber.

Thomson’s expedition sailed across the lakes in a frail canoe, but barefoot to save the canoe from damage by heavy boots. The party crossed the first lake to the Mountain where some of them 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, but one of them 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 piggybacked him up to the sinkhole.

//The members of one of Thomson’s expeditions to Koonalda − probably that of 1935 − found 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, without luck. Perhaps someone had walked over it in the meantime.//

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 Lane.[5]

The third lake in the northern passage ends in a small squeeze that 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 but 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 excessively.

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. The story continues. 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. He had to wait until a group of boys arrived to explore the Cave 18 months later and they carted it down to the waterway without any trouble; frequent lifting of their bus from ruts had prepared them. Numerous publications refer to Gurney’s light boat, but not many visitors thought it light. 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.

The 108-meter-long 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 platform − too far up for me to see it − that the Squeeze of the Upper Chamber emerges onto.

When I was there in 1976, sheep drank 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 used 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 put us off it.

Stalactites and stalagmites grow in some Nullarbor caves − none in Koonalda. Unusual crystals grow in the bat guano of some Nullarbor caves − none 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 a ‘curly stalactite’ away from Koonalda and that the mineral collection of the National Museum in Melbourne now exhibits.[6]

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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 rainfall also compares favorably with the 150 millimeters in the northeast of the Plain. Its climate is thus merely semi-arid and warm and it resembles more a wilderness than a desert. Koonalda lies close to the sea and its 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.

The Nullarbor holds no active surface watercourses, however, even any that might flow on the odd occasion. This contrasts with other portions of Australia where numerous sandy and wide watercourses, which run swiftly in the rare torrential rainstorm, interlace even the driest regions. Aerial photographs do chart relic river courses across the Nullarbor. 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; it lacks water because of its limestone composition. Riddled with holes, it rapidly drains rain from its surface.

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; a possum floated 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.

Rain does occasionally fall, and occasionally it really does fall. 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 bags − and sleepers − in 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.[7]

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 vehicle − if not bogged down − can’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 (called ‘gnamma holes’), each of which 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 but not 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 a lower mean maximum but, further inland, the temperature increases to where it exceeds 38°C (100°F) for about 30 days of the year. In comparison, the average minimum temperature in July decreases from the coast inland. Freezing nights match boiling days. They become very hot when the wind blows from the north. W. C. Evans describes these 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 six a.m. usual registered above 32°C. The extreme heat from a northerly can herald a southerly − a cooling sea breeze − which can bring on an illness by suddenly and radically changing the temperature.[8] Eyre describes the southwester as ‘very cold,’ chilling almost as much as the northerly oppresses.

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 survive.

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Closely related to the Nullarbor’s climate is its geology. To trace this, we must remember that the Nullarbor consists of different layers or accumulations of limestone and that − as the deposition of marine organisms − they formed under the sea.

The upper 30 or so meters of rock comprise the gray-yellow Nullarbor Limestone − hard, crystalline, and sometimes referred to as marble. George Woolf writes that it tinkles like a bell when he walks through caves formed in it.

The next 200 or so meters of rock comprise the white Wilson Bluff Limestone − softer than the Nullarbor Limestone yet harder than chalk, it weathers to a powder and contains both black and white nodules of flint. The lower chambers of Koonalda Cave occur in this limestone, which perhaps explains why prehistoric miners mined there. Ralph Tate writes that its seams of hard white flint ring 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.’[9] 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 Melbourne University.)

The flinty nature of the Wilson Bluff Limestone caused headaches for the Western Australians who, from 1876 to 1877, built the ‘old string’, 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.’[10]

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) and 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 only gradually to expand across the basin again in the middle Miocene, when 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 uniform landscape − one of the most featureless large tracts on earth.

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The surface of the Nullarbor isn’t absolutely flat and smooth, however. 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 and, as mentioned above, no watercourses exist on the Nullarbor. One trough 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) − round and flat-bottomed depressions 18-410 meters wide, 4.5-6 meters deep, and sometimes with steep sides.

Dolines, dongas, troughs, and claypans interrupt the flatness − so 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.

Dolines, dongas, troughs, claypans, and cliffs interrupt the flatness. So do blowholes and dolines. 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 hole − a blowhole − and 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. Caves lead off some of them.

Abrakurrie Cave, 48 kilometers northwest of Eucla, boasts the largest cavern on the Nullarbor, 365 meters long. Mullamullang Cave 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.

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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. The existence of other channels above the present water table − the Upper Chamber in Koonalda Cave for instance − suggests also a higher water table or water tables in times past. 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 enlarged the joints and bedding planes within the rock, preparing the blocks to drop down or fall inwards after their support weakened 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 Koonalda 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 water sat 90 meters lower about 20,000 and more years ago when the people visited the Upper Chamber to mine and draw. Perhaps they also visited chambers now under water and inaccessible. If portions of some of these hypothetical chambers breach the water surface above the present level, diving might reach them. Ian Lewis on my 1976 visit to Koonalda 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 reach one − if one exists.

Koonalda Cave 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. I am 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 move − strong winds blow through a number of the caves, in excess of 6.7 kilometers per hour in Mullamullang.

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Outside the caves, winds and breezes blow as well. Sea breezes mean that a belt of vegetation for 16 kilometers from the coast enjoys lower temperatures in the summer than further onto the Plain. An ‘oasis’ according to Ralph Tate in 1878, it also enjoys evening dews and a higher rainfall. A small increase in the rainfall would probably widen it. Small eucalyptus trees dominate it, but 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 shrubs − bluebush, saltbush, and samphire − dominate. 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.[11] Edgar Warburton and his companions found this frustrating:

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.[12]

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.

The Plain around the Koonalda sinkhole was very dry and dusty on my 1973 visit. The saltbush and bluebush seemed ready to die. I saw no live sheep and an extended drought pervaded. In 1976, I saw a little greenery. The drought had broken. Sheep made their way to and from the water trough. The rabbit plague had ended and the amount of rabbit droppings around the sinkhole had decreased markedly. Yet, the area around Koonalda Cave remained arid despite the comparison between drought and plenty, despite water in its lakes, and despite lying only 23 kilometers from the coast.

Flowers bloomed and insects danced around and in the Koonalda sinkhole after a rainstorm when I was there the second time. 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.’[13] 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 had planted fruit trees to produce their own Garden of Eden. A large fig tree offered ripe figs and an apricot tree too many apricots. The sinkhole 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 resources − a cool and damp breeze blows into it from the Cave. 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.

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A wider variety of animals, including birds, live in the sinkhole than up on top. It provides one of the few sheltered sites in the vicinity for birds. Welcome Swallows emerge in the evenings and flit about and 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 hawk − and 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 dry − even 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 species − noted from either cave deposits or earlier accounts − now 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 Bates.[14] Yet, 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 ecology.

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 cats − plus other European and native animals such as caterpillars, grasshoppers, and parrots − appear 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 period.

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, as does the disease myxomatosis, a distorting and deadly virus peculiar to rabbits and introduced into Australia to help control them.

Rawlinna residents reported rabbit 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 had to collect the bodies and pile them up 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.[15]

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 Koonalda Cave on 31 December 1963. The hunt began for other specimens: ‘Wanted − A Cockroach,’ advertised Elery Hamilton-Smith in a speleological journal.[16] 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 Koonalda Cave.

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. No one knows 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 impossible.[17]

Notes

[1] 93.

[2] 290.

[3] 295.

[4] 251.

[5] 148.

[6] 213.

[7] 126.

[8] 86.

[9] 67.

[10] 244.

[11] 271.

[12] 265.

[13] 19.

[14] 231.

[15] 21.

[16] 118.

[17] Sources used in this chapter include: 1, 4, 6, 11, 12, 18-21, 26, 40, 41, 44, 45, 49, 54, 56, 64, 66, 72, 73, 75, 83, 93-95, 105, 109, 113, 114, 118, 121, 126, 129, 142-145, 148, 175, 182, 183, 185, 200, 201, 206, 207, 212-214, 218, 222, 228, 229, 231, 238, 239, 242, 247-249, 251, 253, 263, 265, 271, 272, 277, 281-284, 286, 289, 291.