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Today we head home.
But first up is a visit to the Naracoorte Caves National Park. Issy remains convinced that caves have been designed specifically to lull her into a false sense of security before thousands of tonnes of rock collapse in on top of her, so it seems I’m on my own.
We read that there are 28 known caves in the park. Only four are open to the public, with the locations of the rest being kept secret from the general populace so they can be used for scientific research. I join a tour through the largest publically accessible cavern, the Victoria Cave. It might be called a Caves National Park, but it seems the big ticket item here is fossils. We’re told that the Park is one of the ten most important fossil sites on the entire planet, and it’s one of only two Australian World Heritage Listed fossil sites, the other being in outback Queensland. The Victoria Cave leapt onto the world stage, well the fossil world stage, back in 1969 when two amateur explorers crawled through a small gap in the rocks and discovered a chamber containing the fossilised remains of thousands of animals.
The cave’s fossils have apparently greatly enhanced science’s understanding of the megafauna that used to live in these parts. There was the tree eating kangaroo, which is believed to have coexisted with its much smaller modern day relative for several millenia. Then there was the marsupial lion. It wasn’t all that quick on its feet; it was however believed to be a good climber, so its hunting modus operandi consisted of pouncing on its prey from out of trees. … and there was the six metre long python of First People’s Rainbow Serpent fame. No one’s quite sure what caused the extinction of the megafauna. Much of our country was apparently wet and covered in jungle in prehistoric times, and one popular theory blames a change in the climate. This caused the trees to disappear to be replaced by grasslands and desert, which presumably wouldn’t have left a lot for the a tree eating ’roo to munch on, or for a lion to leap from onto whatever it thought was that was about to become dinner.
There are all the usual cavely offerings of stalactites and stalacmites down here, but the real attraction is the fossil pit. It’s
a wall to wall bone collection … and to add a dose of realism the custodians have set up some replicas of the skeletons of the megafauna versions of the kangaroo and lion in the chamber in front of the pit.
From the caves it’s a long five hour drive home, culminating in a dark slow gloomy crawl back to reality through our hometown’s beloved peak hour traffic. Hmmm. That was a bit of a downer.
We seem to have clocked up a few kilometres in the three weeks - a whole 7,117 of them, but who’s counting. We’ve counted a few other things too, eg the number of live kangaroos we’ve seen. That would be zero, zilch, nada. We’ve sometimes seen kangaroos on the side of the road on the twenty minute drive out to Melbourne Airport … and Issy told me they once found a large ‘roo leaping around in her suburban Melbourne backyard when she was a youngster … I think she was too young to be smoking funny cigarettes at the time. But in seven thousand plus kilometres across our outback, not a single one. Mind you there were lots of dead ones, and
signs every couple of kilometres warning us to keep an eye out for them suddenly hopping out on the bitumen and splattering themselves all over the windscreen, so maybe we should count ourselves lucky. We also kept count of the number of raindrops that fell onto that same windscreen. That would also be zero. So that’s a real upside, as was the visit to the town that’s got my vote as the world’s quirkiest - Coober Pedy. The highlight of the trip was however of course the stunning natural scenery - Uluṟu, Kata Tjuṯa, Kings Canyon, Ormiston Gorge, Standley Chasm, Trephina Gorge, the list goes on. So that’s about it for our expedition into our country’s spectacular Red Centre.
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