Holy Megafauna, Batman!

ONE of the things you take with you from the Naracoorte Caves National Park is a new and disquieting sense of the earth’s surface as being less reliable than you thought. Mostly we walk about taking for granted the flatness and solidity of the earth beneath our feet. But in this limestone landscape you’re made aware that under the ground on which you walk, there might be caves, and under those caves there might be more caves. It’s a bit like taking in, for the first time, the implications of three-dimensional chess; you’re obliged to re-think all your previous assumptions from scratch.

In its chalky, pearly colours and honeycombed structures, it’s also a place that reminds you how short the distance can be between experience and poetry; anyone who has ever read W. H. Auden’s In Praise of Limestone will find it coming back to haunt them.

If it form the one landscape that we the inconstant ones
Are consistently homesick for, this is chiefly
Because it dissolves in water. Mark these rounded slopes
With their surface fragrance of thyme and, beneath,
A secret system of caves and conduits ...
... examine this region
Of short distances and definite places.

The “short distances and definite places” come as a surprise: if you’ve driven the 340km from Adelaide, it’s startling to see how quickly the landscape changes. As you head south-east from Naracoorte, the flat, open farmlands change quite abruptly into an uncleared and semi-forested region that isn’t so much hilly as tumbled; the closer you get to the caves, the more closed-in and mysterious the landscape becomes.

Once you arrive, it’s again surprising to realise how close together the caves are, and how each has been mapped and identified according to its own different characteristics. That each cave is its own “definite place” is clear even just from their names, which are like little poems themselves: Cathedral Cave, Fox Cave, Blackberry Cave, the inevitable Bat Cave, the Stick-Tomato Cave, the Starburst Chamber, all with their own particular features and formations.

Relatively few of the 26 caves identified in the area are accessible to the public, and only one, Wet Cave, can be negotiated without a guide. There are daily guided tours of three others – focusing respectively on fossils, limestone formations, and bats – plus weekly tours of the spectacularly formed and naturally-lit Cathedral Cave. Speleothems – stalactites and stalagmites – are the main features of the very pretty Alexandra Cave, where it’s possible to watch the slow accretion of these delicate and spooky formations taking place before your eyes.

Much thought has gone into the way the caves are managed and made available for public access. Some tours are widely accessible: in the Alexandra Cave, the steps and slopes are easy, the tour is short, and the commentary is suitable for kids. The Bat Tour includes the wheelchair-accessible Bat Observation Centre, at which visitors can sit comfortably watching, courtesy of infra-red cameras, the daily activities in the colony of Southern Bentwing Bats.

The park has also developed a range of specialty tours, available by prior arrangement, which includes the World Heritage Tour for those with an advanced interest in fossils: this is a three-hour tour of the research site in Victoria Fossil Cave, led by a palaeontologist, available only to small groups of adults, and including a tour of the Fossil Laboratory. “Adventure Tours”, involving full-on caving activities such as getting filthy and wriggling through tiny tunnels without having an anxiety attack, can also be arranged.

A major part of the fascination of this World Heritage site is the relationship between the cave formations and the fossils. Those familiar with cave country know how easy it is simply to fall through a hole in the ground; the Naracoorte caves have acted as pitfall traps for more than 500,000 years. Unwary creatures who fell in either died of starvation or were eaten by the predators who used the caves as dens; their remains, and those of the cave-dwelling creatures, have been preserved in the layers of sediment and protected by the caves. The result is a rich fossil record of Australia’s extinct megafauna. As critters go, marsupials in their current incarnations are quite weird enough to be going on with, but their ancestors, these giant marsupials, are even more so: there’s something sinister about the very idea of a giant koala or a marsupial lion. In the Wonambi Fossil Centre there’s a surprisingly effective re-creation of a landscape full of these creatures, at life size. They are audibly mechanical and mostly for the amusement and instruction of children, but when that buffalo-sized Diprotodon turns its head towards you, it’s very hard not to be startled and spooked; this display is like a cupboard full of giant toys coming alive at midnight, and is eerie in the same kind of way.

If you’re planning a trip to the park, it’s the kind of experience that can be richly enhanced in advance by a bit of preparatory homework at their superbly detailed and informative website.

Between March 26 and April 4, the park, in conjunction with the South Australian Museum, will be hosting Palaeontology Week, a nine-day week of displays, workshops, schools activities and guest speakers at both sites. Highlights include the “Out of the Glass Case” road show in Naracoorte, and the unveiling at the Museum of an Allosaurus skeleton for permanent display.