Cave Care

On Capes Conversations this week, host Kellie Tannock takes us back in time to look at what’s widely regarded as WA’s first tourism attraction. 

It’s one of Margaret River’s show caves, which suffered damage in its early years of tourism, when a visit was an eight-hour adventure, not the one-hour experience of today. We’ll find out just how much our behaviour has changed with better understanding about how fragile these cave systems are. 

We’ll also hear about how the caves are being protected for future generations to enjoy. 

This episode features Ngilgi Cave Manager, Tod Kearns and Alysha Johnson, Conservation Manager for the Capes Foundation, which operates Ngilgi Cave in Yallingup, as well as Lake, Jewel and Mammoth Caves in the region’s south.

Thanks for listening and if you've enjoyed this podcast, please share with your family and friends.

For more inspiration on visiting the Margaret River Region follow @margaretriver on Instagram or explore www.margaretriver.com.

This show was recorded at RMR 101.9FM, Margaret River Region.

Transcript

Kellie Tannock 0:01

Welcome to Cape's Conversations, sharing the stories that make the Margaret River region a truly special place to live and visit. Hello, I'm Kelly Tannock, and this week we're going back in time to look at what's widely regarded as WA's first tourism attraction. It's one of Margaret River's show caves, and we'll find out just how much our behaviour has changed with better understanding about how fragile these systems are. We'll also hear about how we're protecting our caves for future generations to enjoy. Joining me today is Todd Kearns, the manager of Nilgi Cave in Yelling Up, and Alicia Johnson, Conservation Manager for the Caves Foundation, which operates Nilgi Cave, as well as Lake Jewel and Mammoth Caves in the region south. Welcome to you both. Hello. Todd, these caves are up to two million years old, potentially. They've got huge cultural significance for Wadandi people. But for today, let's just step back just over a century and to when uh Nilgi was first opened to tourists. What did that look like back then?

SPEAKER_00 0:59

Very different to today. So when it was first opened, it was uh some horsemen that discovered the entrance to the cave, and the cave was completely untouched. So they're a curious uh group of young fellas who, after about a week of studying the cave and exploring it, decided that that's a great uh idea to open it to the public. So it had no infrastructure at all in the very early days.

Kellie Tannock 1:20

So Todd, how did these visitors access the cave?

SPEAKER_00 1:24

Uh well the very first time Edward Dawson found it, the story goes that he hung himself off the reins of his horse down through the front entrance just to see what was down there and threw a pebble down just to hear the noise. So uh after that he decided to to build a rope ladder, uh so a little rope ladder tied to a tree at the top to get in. And then over time they started with those concrete pathways, which then moved on to wooden boardwalks, and then they learnt with the cave atmosphere being so humid that those boardwalks would rot away and fill with uh water. And they tried steel after the wooden variety, and then that rusted and corroded. And then in around the 1990s, we installed a composite uh recycled rubber and plastic style boardwalk, and that goes really well in the weather, and it's quite easy to build around a cave system uh with hose pipe for handrails that's sturdy, strong, and survives the humidity in the cave's harsh environment.

Kellie Tannock 2:16

So we're talking pre-World War One here, when there were still no cars and very few roads here in the southwest. How are all these visitors getting here?

SPEAKER_00 2:24

Uh well Edward Dawson was a remarkable man, uh one of many talents and a great visionary. So he thought uh that he should get honeymooners to come down from Perth to check out these spectacular caves. And he even uh brought his cousin into the family who purchased the first Ford Motor car in Western Australia to get people from the train from Perth to Bostleton and then on their Ford Motor car from 1904 down to Nilgy Cave. And it became so popular that they built Caves House Hotel shortly after Nilgy Cave opened to house the huge amounts of people coming down.

Kellie Tannock 2:57

So initially I guess they were camping in the bush and um there was accommodation needed. But I'd imagine it was a pretty rugged visitor experience back then when women especially were sort of held to a pretty different dress code. How did they manage?

SPEAKER_00 3:09

Yeah, well there were great difficulty. So in in those days they had to conform to the social norms. So the ladies were wearing uh like uh big dresses, uh corsets, petticoats, and big hoop dresses which were uncomfortable and in a really wet cave environment, quite cumbersome to use to get through the cave. And without our current day infrastructure, their journey took around eight to ten hours just to get through the cave, which we do now in about one hour these days.

Kellie Tannock 3:34

Incredible. And of course, these people visiting back then didn't know any better, but I'm assuming that early style of tourism uh didn't did some damage to the caves.

SPEAKER_00 3:42

Yeah, it certainly did. Finding a way out of a cave is a big problem without any natural light. So Edward started by burning uh his candle onto the roof of the cave and leaving these little black soot marks to find his way out. And then they dug into the natural crystal with shovels and picks to build a a stairwell and eventually started um installing sort of concrete paths and walking over natural crystal and taking home souvenirs. They didn't have any comprehension that caves might be take a really long time for crystals to grow. Um did a lot of damage in those early days.

Kellie Tannock 4:12

What they just snapped them off.

SPEAKER_00 4:13

They snapped them off. They thought, here's a pretty crystal, let's take it home as a souvenir, and thought they'll just grow back probably in ten years or so.

Kellie Tannock 4:19

Oh dear, okay. And uh graffiti, was that an issue down there?

SPEAKER_00 4:22

Yeah, it certainly was. They love to leave their name behind. Um, and there's even some some interesting inscribings on the wall from before when young fellas were getting sent to the war, and they used to leave their name behind and write the year that they were getting sent off to war in case they never came back, they wanted to leave a legacy. Um, so there's lots of graffiti around the cave, which we don't have any lights on. We don't want to encourage anyone else to do the same. So we kind of keep it hidden now.

Kellie Tannock 4:44

Sure. Okay. It sounds like there wasn't a lot of OHS going on either back then. Any incidents of note?

SPEAKER_00 4:51

Or nothing major. We think a few dresses may have caught fire because they were holding naked flames to get through the cave and going through really tight squeezes and gaps, but no major catastrophes that have been recorded.

Kellie Tannock 5:02

And there was there a story about a woman who was left in the cave?

SPEAKER_00 5:06

Uh there's a lady who set a world record in the cave. Uh so Dorothy Williams set a world record in 1963 and stayed in the cave for 87 days, and she kept a diary, so we know a fair bit of what she used to get up to. And then a fellow went in after her named Wyndham Randell, actually before her, and uh I met him in his 90s and he told me he used to drink a lot down there. I said, What did you do, Wyndham? He's like, I used to bring down bottles of sherry and I dug a few, uh dug a few in the ground down there.

Kellie Tannock 5:31

So Todd, I understand that back in the early days of Nilgi there was a little bit of uh tourism infrastructure that um was quite appealing to some of the visitors who'd come on that long journey.

SPEAKER_00 5:42

Yeah, well, because uh Edward Dawson's tours in those early 1900s took so long, like eight hours or more to get through the cave, in the deepest spot in the cave called Cupid's Corner, they uh had a little tea and sandwich station down the bottom, and uh people would stop and eat, and again, without educational knowledge, I didn't realise that food scraps in a cave bring in all the animals from outside that don't really belong in there. So we get um huge amounts of native bush rats would come in, or possums and animals that weren't adapted to live in darkness, and then they'll perish underground. Um so these days we one of our big educational messages for people is not to bring in food scraps into the cave because they then bring in all the native bush rats and the undesirables that don't belong down there.

Kellie Tannock 6:25

That makes a lot of sense, but I do have to ask why was it called Cupid's Corner?

SPEAKER_00 6:29

Well, um Edward targeted the cave tours to the younger crowds in Perth. I guess in the early days you couldn't jump on a plane and fly overseas, right? So a big journey for a couple of days on a train down to Nilgy Cave and camping in a swag in the bush or at the hotel, and then going on a massive underground adventure was considered like an extreme sport, I guess. Um so because they were youngsters and a lot of them on their honeymoon, if they wanted a bit of a what uh alone romantic time away from the main group, there's a little nook off to the side in the deepest spot of the cave, and that's called Cupid's Corner, and that's where they used to sneak off to.

Kellie Tannock 7:07

Okay, I think we'll leave the story there.

SPEAKER_00 7:09

Yeah, that's a good idea.

Kellie Tannock 7:11

Wow, I we could talk all day about some of those stories. Todd Kern's manager of Neilgy Cave is chatting with me today on Cape's Conversations, which is sponsored by Margaret River Bustleton Tourism Association. Alicia, I have lots to ask you about how we can protect our caves today, but first let's have a music break with local band Boom Pat Pow and keeping you happy. That was Keeping You Happy by Boom Pat Powell, who are regulars on the Gig Guide in the Margaret River region. I'm Kelly Tannock, and this is CAPES Conversations. Neil Gave Manager told Kearns, just before we go to Alicia, could you tell us when did people start to understand how fragile these cave systems are?

SPEAKER_00 10:53

Well, because everyone was taking souvenirs in the early days and the cave management was done by the Hotels Association, not by a conservation or even a government department. So all the tourists coming down started to realise by about the 1940s and 1950s that these caves weren't regenerating and growing back. And that coincides with then geologists and speleologists started to understand caves and that crystals grew about a centimetre every 100 years. And then that really led to some change and transformation and um some great policies.

Kellie Tannock 11:22

Todd Kearns, thanks for filling us in on how Nilgi Cave has been impacted by early visitation. I guess all show caves have had a similar story. Alicia Johnson is uh the conservation manager for the Caves Foundation. What's your role in relation to the caves?

SPEAKER_01 11:35

So I oversee all the environmental works across Capes Foundation sites. So we can think of tree planting, weed control, walk trail maintenance, uh coordinating volunteer groups, and one of the most interesting parts of my jobs is cave conservation.

Kellie Tannock 11:52

Sounds like a fun job, Alicia. We spoke to one of your team, Diane James, on the show a few weeks ago about land management. But she referenced vacuuming caves.

SPEAKER_01 12:00

What's that all about? It's as literal as it sounds. So every three months we vacuum the boardwalks of the cave. We start super early before the cave's open to the public. We'll put on our backpack battery-powered vacuums, our head torches, and we go down and we remove all the dust and debris that the visitation brings into the caves.

Kellie Tannock 12:19

Really?

SPEAKER_01 12:20

So how is this coming off clothing? What's how's this happening? Yeah, just people naturally shed fibres, hair, skin cells, all those delightful things. And if you can think, these cave systems, they don't have any natural well in the main chambers, they don't have any natural aeration. So if you can imagine not vacuuming your house for 120 years.

Kellie Tannock 12:43

Alicia, is it just the interior of the caves that you need to look after, or is there a whole ecosystem that you need to be aware of when you're managing these areas?

SPEAKER_01 12:51

It's entire ecosystem. So above and below ground. What happens above ground affects below ground. A good example is arum lilies. I'm sure everyone who lives in the region knows the arum lilies. We had some of these growing in the dolene of Lake Cave, and we got the local caving group with their absailing skills to absail down and spray these arum lilies.

SPEAKER_00 13:11

It wasn't just arum lilies that can be a problem. We identified at Nilgi Cave a bunch of introduced species that over the years have been planted at Nilgi. And with them not being natives, they impact how much water from our rainfall percolates through the ground and then into the cave. And our cave systems being porous with the right native plants above ground is critical to their health and their environment. And that's that's a huge part of how we conserve the caves as well. Not just what happens underground, but the vegetation above ground as well.

Kellie Tannock 13:40

Alicia, Todd touched on cave science, which is helping us to better understand how fragile our caves are. But is there still a lot that we don't know about our cave systems?

SPEAKER_01 13:50

Definitely. No two cave systems are alike, they're individual ecosystems, but there is still so much to learn about caves in general. We have four different showcaves that we manage. So some of the projects we do are hydrological monitoring at Lake Cave, which is a fancy word for water monitoring and how water moves through the landscapes and its properties. And at all of our show caves, we do dust monitoring. And to go back to my favourite topic, cave vacuuming, this is an important area of cave and ecotourism to document and research. So rather than just removing the dust, we want to weigh the dust, we want to see where the dust is going, how far it's moving off the boardwalk.

Kellie Tannock 14:33

Look, there are six caves open to visitors in the region, as you mentioned. Four in the care of the Capes Foundation and two with the Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions. But there are hundreds of caves in our region, and that's why the Caves Road has the name that it has. Why are not more of them open?

SPEAKER_01 14:51

We could almost look at the caves that we manage and that DBCA manage as ambassadors for caves to the region. Todd spoke earlier about the unintentional damage that visitation has done to the caves in the early days. So we like to look at our caves as ambassadors so people can come in and see these ecosystems.

SPEAKER_00 15:10

And they can also be dangerous places too. So if they're not regulated and um buried off, we can have uh kids going on big adventures, getting lost, and having huge accidents in a dangerous environment with no lighting or wayfinding, and things can go wrong really quickly in the cave system.

Kellie Tannock 15:25

Yeah, sure. I I don't think any of us want to be lost in a in a cave system that's uh not well understood or known. How do you explain all of this to visitors?

SPEAKER_00 15:34

That's one of the challenges. Um at Newgi Cave, we've got a guide station in the bottom of the cave to really help uh explain cave formation and cave conservation to people. And that's one of the goals of having those ambassador caves. Although there's some damage done by tourists coming to our caves and we'll never prevent it, but by having only a handful of caves open and and around 90 completely untouched, we really limit that damage to try and educate as much as we can through those conversations and education that we do as people um visit our sites.

Kellie Tannock 16:04

This is Cape's conversations. I'm speaking with Todd Kearns and Alicia Johnson, who each play an important role in caring for some of our region's caves. After this next song, I want to check in with both of you on what people can can expect when they visit Milby Cave in particular. But first, I've chosen Empire of the Suns Walking on a Dream. It's a collaboration between Nick Littlemore and Percy Luke Steele, but this song was re-released in 2022 for tourism WA to use in its international marketing campaign, so it's a pretty good fit for today.

SPEAKER_06 19:16

Oh we got it opened by the first time.

Kellie Tannock 19:37

That was Walking on a Dream by Empire of the Sun. I'm Kelly Tannock, this is Capes Conversations, and my two guests today are from the Capes Foundation, which operates Nilgi, Mammoth Lake, and Jewel Caves. So I guess a lot of us think of caves as being a fairly static sort of rear rock formation, but they're actually there's a lot of life going on and in and around the area in that space.

SPEAKER_00 19:58

Yeah, there certainly is. And then we even talk about the lungs of the cave. So we pay a lot of attention to baromic pressure, which is a strange thing, but we notice that as baromic pressure changes and our first low pressure systems of the winter come through, they help to cleanse the cave air as such and allow the cave to breathe. So that change in bromic pressure sucks the old uh air out of the cave, the carbon dioxide heavy air, and allow it to exchange and then um so the cave goes through z seasons as well. And we also know that our trees above the cave, like our peppermint trees, get all the way down into the very bottom of the cave where the granite shelf is. And we've got tree roots down there and little microscopic creatures that live down there and rely on those tree roots. And so the healthy uh the cave the healthier the cave is above ground, the healthier all the uh life forms are underground as well.

Kellie Tannock 20:46

I mean you're getting a huge amount of visitation to the caves. What's what is people's fascination with caves?

SPEAKER_00 20:52

Oh that's a good one. I think that goes back through times. Like we can look at all different cultures and we look at how um Egyptians would look at uh underground systems too uh for spiritual purposes. We've got the catacombs through Italy and Europe, and I think humans have always been fascinated with environments that we don't go to very often. And I don't think there's a culture in the world that hasn't had some sort of significant theological story that's not linked to caves, like in some in some way. So a natural fascination for all humans.

Kellie Tannock 21:22

Todd, as manager of Nilgi Cave, do you see cave visitors showing more respect to the site than they did in those early days?

SPEAKER_00 21:28

Yeah, most definitely we do. And one of the delightful things that we find is that people um also have a social policing system. So if uh we explain the conservation um ground rules for people to follow to best care for the cave. And uh we can have uh a really busy cave at any point in time, we can have fifty or more people in there at once. And if someone's doing the wrong thing, we find it's the public that'll come up and point it out or say, Hey, make sure you don't touch those crystals and and really look after those caves as a community, which is really pleasing.

SPEAKER_03 22:59

All leaves are turning red as I look out to the trees. I rub my sleeping eyes. I'm just tryna work out what is real Poor and over memories up the way things were back then Sit and think to myself now here I go again Country music save my life Country music is better than a wire Country music when I'm in stride Country music will save your life Now the great clouds roll in and I'm happier by myself I try to think what comes next Oh Lord who knows what else And if you take me for her I know that I'll see you in hell Cause now I know what's good for me And I can hear that sound and bell Now I know live a more Well I was looking for the key to unlock the door And now I'm back for more Cause Country music will save my life Country music is better than a while Country music when I'm in stride Country music will save your life Country music will save my life Country music is better than a while country music when I'm in strive Country music will save your life country music will save my life country music is better than a life country music when I'm in strife country music will save your life will save your life Save my life and it'll save your life