It is more than five years now since the "big bang" but the memory refuses to fade. My feelings of shock and disbelief are still strong enough to wake me at night, and as my wife will attest, the smallest trigger will stir me up on the subject so strongly that it must get really boring for those that have heard it all before.
This particular "big bang" was not the start of the universe, but rather an attempt to destroy what was already one of the best caves in South Australia even before it had been fully explored and documented. That cave was Sellicks Hill Quarry Cave.
About thirty years ago I walked the limestone in that area and made plans to dig out a couple of promising dolines. The land then changed hands and the new owners began quarrying, so the dolines got dug more violently than I had intended, but in 1991, after about twenty years of quarrying, the Cave Exploration Group (SA) was approached to investigate a hole which had been intersected in the floor of the quarry. The brief exploration of this hole ceased when the quarry operators buried the only entrance under several metres of rock. By that time we had surveyed 1 km of passage, including some very large chambers. The exploration was far from complete, with seven good leads still to be investigated. Of these, one was walking passage that had not been visited even briefly, one was a partly formation choked crevasse apparently leading to a lower level, one was a three dimensional maze area, and two were squeezes that appeared to open up beyond.
We also spent some time on one of the visits recording some of the cave with a video camera. The results were only preliminary in nature, and never intended as a complete record of the cave. We never dreamed at the time that we would not have the opportunity to take the video camera underground again, and that the video footage we did have would be an important part of the lead stories on the evening television news on all channels in South Australia for the best part of a week.
It was a big story. One minute the citizens of South Australia didn't even know they had a beautiful cave less than an hour's drive from the centre of Adelaide, the next minute they knew it existed but it had been blown up. Quarry Company Destroys Secret Cave has all the elements of a good headline except sex, and even then the Freudian undertones abound. Does the cave represent the womb and do the quarrymen have latent hostility towards women? What about the double meaning of the word "bang"? What about the phallic significance of gelignite, and do quarrymen feel adequate without it? The list is limited only by the imagination. You can always find a funny side if you try hard, but in this case the humour is little consolation when the loss is so profound and the sadness so acute.
The truth quickly became obscured in the maelstrom of disinformation and even today only a handful of people know the real story. One of the things that really hurt in this episode was that not only did we lose part or perhaps all of a very significant cave, but those trying to protect it were accused by some, including a Government Minister who should have been better informed, of treating the cave as our own private playground and thus contributing to its demise. This certainly was not the case, and had the Minister or his advisers bothered to check their facts they would have known this. Before the entrance was blocked we had just seven short trips into the cave over a period of two months, and then spent the next two years attempting to negotiate with Southern Quarries for renewed access, getting the run-around from the State Department of Mines and Energy, as it was then known, more than from the quarry management.
To find a huge chamber, visit it briefly on three occasions only, tell the owners about it, and then despite their repeated assurances that they would protect it, actually be telephoned by their manager after the event to be told that they had blown it up, was devastating, shattering. Three tonnes of explosives! I literally went into shock. What a betrayal! What a pointless waste of a wonderful asset! What two-faced bloody luddites! I'd put so much effort into that cave and had such high hopes for it, it was like a member of the family, and I was not the only one who felt that way. Words still fail me and reliving that moment still upsets me. I have to take a few deep breaths and pause until the intensity of the feelings subsides, and I can continue to tell the story.
There were many examples of misinformation or just plain poor information in this saga. One classic example deserves mention. The then Premier told us that there are lots of caves on the Fleurieu Peninsula. So far nobody who has uttered such a statement has been able to demonstrate that they know what they are talking about. One of the so-called expert witnesses, a geologist engaged by Southern Quarries to vindicate their position in this matter, used as an argument that the cave was unimportant, information that CEGSA had listed over twenty karst features in the Adelaide region, and that Sellicks Hill Quarry Cave (5A20) was only one of these. What he failed to indicate and possibly didn't even understand, was that most of the other features are quite minor, and that 5A20 on its own accounted for more than 85% of the total volume of caves in the region. Not just more than six times bigger than the next biggest cave, but more than six times bigger than all the rest added together. It was a bit like arguing that South Australia doesn't need the Murray River because it has the Sturt Creek. Disappointingly, the Premier's advisers at the time had him repeating this rubbish, rather than bothering to check out the facts first.
The river analogy is particularly apt, and worth extending. The caves we are considering are formed by the action of water. They are current or former watercourses. Some may have been formed at times in the past when the currently dry state of South Australia was much wetter, but in any event, they occupy only a small percentage of the land area, just as surface watercourses do. The idea that they are commonplace is as wrong as believing that large parts of South Australia are underwater. We can all see that we are not underwater, so we would never pretend otherwise, whereas talking mumbo jumbo about caves seems to be acceptable.
Having made that point, it must be stressed that in our negotiations with Southern Quarries, we never once even contemplated or suggested that the quarrying would have to cease to protect the cave. The limestone reserves in the area are substantial, and more than adequate for many years of quarrying without further damage to the cave system. We saw one of our roles as defining the boundaries of the cave system and a modest buffer zone around it, so that the quarrying could continue without destroying the cave. In perhaps twenty years time, when the quarrying progressed further away from the immediate area of the cave, the owners would have a wonderful resource that could be developed for their own financial benefit as well as for the benefit of the people of South Australia in perpetuity.
By any conservative analysis, the cave in its raw state had a current value as the kernel of a tourist business of several million dollars. Properly developed, with all the multipliers in place, it could have been a significant contributor to the wealth of the region. Apart from the irreversible loss to science and therefore the people, it is almost incomprehensible that anyone would destroy an equivalent above-ground asset with as little prior assessment and evaluation. Because it is a cave, apparently special rules apply. Out of sight and out of mind is the order of the day. Do what you like. The government cares about native vegetation that can be regrown, and heritage buildings that can be restored, but when it comes to truly ancient, truly rare, truly irreplaceable cave systems, the government might make a few token noises, but message it is clearly sending out is that it does not really care.
It would not be fair to say that any actions that we took at the time "signed the caves demise", although it is possible that a different strategy could have achieved a different outcome.. We were doing our utmost to try to protect it, and we all felt betrayed and shattered by what happened. But, I'm getting ahead of myself again. Perhaps I'd better go back a bit.
A representative of Southern Quarries initially invited us to check out the hole and advise them what to do about it. After our preliminary investigation of a relatively insignificant cavity led us to the conclusion that it would be worth chipping out an otherwise impassable squeeze to try to find more cave, we were required by the quarry company to sign confidentiality agreements in order to have any further access to the cave system.
The secrecy was not of our choosing. It was imposed upon us. At that stage, what we had found was not newsworthy, and our choice was to forget about it then, in which case any additional cave would undoubtedly be destroyed by quarrying, or accept the conditions required by the company, and try to find out what was there. We chose the latter strategy. In some ways the quarry management showed an enlightened attitude. They gave undertakings to us in regard to the protection of sections of the cave which they later disregarded. Were we being conned from the outset? I don't think so, but I could be wrong. Did they just see the world differently? Perhaps. The outcome for the cave may yet end up the same as whether we'd never found it in the first place, but we've certainly managed to give the issue some prominence, and our politicians still wince at its mention.
Why didn't we simply tear up the confidentiality agreement and go public once we knew the cave was significant? The answer is simple. None of us like bankruptcy. It might not matter if you have no assets nor intend to accumulate any, but some members of the family might regard a threat to continued ownership of the family home as higher in priority than some action that may or may not be effective in saving a cave. If as a result of our actions, quarrying was held up for any significant amount of time, or the company's reputation was damaged, there is absolutely no doubt that we would have been sued for large sums of money by the company.
The saga and the negotiations were more complex than we have time for here, but it is true to say that the "big bang" blew up our obligations under the confidentiality agreement and we immediately initiated a large amount of publicity. For a while it was very effective, if a bit tense. After one TV interview the company's lawyers wrote to me threatening me with a defamation action. I told them that I would stick by what I had said, and they backed off. The TV stations and the newspapers are old hands at that game, and the company would have to take them on as well, so I guess that took a bit of the heat off me. All the same, I'd rather be crawling down a hole somewhere than biting my fingernails in a courtroom.
In summary, even in hindsight, we considered our responsibilities seriously, and probably made the only sensible decisions we could have made. It was in many respects an unenviable situation to be in, and not one that I would wish on anyone.
The Australian Speleological Federation did end up in a courtroom at one stage when it sought a judicial review by the Supreme Court of South Australia of the power of the SA Minister for Environment to overturn a decision of the State Heritage Authority to place the cave on the Interim State Heritage Register. It was a serious attempt to put things right, and it gained the Federation considerable respect in the corridors of power, but in summary the ruling was that the Minister can do what he likes in the public interest because he has been democratically elected. The then Minister for Mines and Energy told me during the course of these proceedings that we were wasting our time because even if our arguments had been upheld, the Government would simply get its way by enacting new legislation. So much for the judicial process. I'm only sorry he didn't make the same remarks to Justice Bollen. Bully boy tactics are revolting at the best of times, and the only consolation is that the curse of the cave which seems to have cleaned out many of the bad guys in this business so far may have brushed him too. He lost his seat at the following election.
Eventually there was an extensive inquiry conducted by the Environment Resources and Development Committee of the Parliament of South Australia which published a wonderful report vindicating the cavers' actions, recommending changes to legislation to improve the protection of caves and to prevent a recurrence of this type of event, and recommending that access to the cave be made possible for a proper inspection of its current condition. Amongst the most telling findings of that inquiry were the following:
"The Committee finds that the cavers performed a valuable and unique public service in exploring the cave in difficult circumstances. Theirs is the only record of that part of the cave system now destroyed. It is a record carefully and conscientiously obtained in physically and mentally demanding circumstances."
"The Committee is disturbed however at the lengths to which the department has been prepared to go in an effort to rewrite the history of its involvement in this controversy."
"The Committee finds that the department's officers were active participants in the decision to implode, rather than simply advisers who supported the company's decision."
"The Committee finds that the department's failure to involve other agencies with greater expertise in a wider range of disciplines in the decision-making process led to the impression that it was suppressing information about the caves in order to support their destruction."
We would like to think that everyone has learned from the mistakes of the past, and that these findings could not be levelled at the department today, but I regret that I have no confidence that this is the case. The proposition has been put, after the event, that "going public" soon after discovery would have saved the cave, and that in the subsequent glare of publicity the owners would not have dared to do other than protect the cave. An analysis of the facts of the matter does not support this.
After the event we forced a State Government convened "Review of Facts" into the event, which established that there was a good probability that about 90% or more of the known cave should have survived the blast in a structurally sound condition.
Given the fact that the information is now about as public as it can ever hope to be, is it giving the 90% of the cave remaining any protection? No way! The South Australian Government is choosing to ignore the major Environment Resources and Development Committee recommendations. If the government really cared we would have had a proper inspection of the remaining cave by now, and there would have been some real consultation. Instead they say somewhat sanctimoniously that they have instituted so-called "Tenement Incident Procedures" which are to be followed in future between Primary Industries and Resources S.A. (which includes the Mining Operations Branch) and Department of Environment, Heritage and Aboriginal Affairs (responsible for conservation and heritage matters) and any quarry company intersecting a cave. There has been no advice since these procedures have been put in place that they have been invoked for the evaluation of a cave system, so one would assume that no caves have been intersected by quarrying in the past few years and that caves are therefore rarer than the quarrying interests were trying to make out when justifying the attempted destruction of 5A20. On the other hand, either the remainder of 5A20 is still substantially intact, or the Tenement Incident Procedures are not being invoked (as recommended by the Environment Resources and Development Committee) when the quarrying intersects new areas of this cave (as it must), or else the quarrying is being carried out in such a way as to ensure that any blasting buries any cave which might be intersected under rubble before it can be identified and assessed. You can take your pick which explanation is the correct one, but when some people in the earthmoving industry quietly indicate that they have a policy of immediate destruction of any aboriginal remains or artefacts that they might inadvertently uncover from time to time (Oops! My bulldozer slipped! or Is that what it was? I had no idea!), to get rid of the evidence which might cause a halt to their proceedings, then you would have to be an idiot optimist to think that the Tenement Incident Procedures would be an effective antidote to a similar culture which appears to be entrenched in the quarrying industry in this country.
It's really sad, but what do you expect? It's a bit much to ask for imagination and lateral thinking by guys who don't have to be rocket scientists to make money, who have a perfectly successful formula of blowing up rocks so that they can drive around in flash cars to nice restaurants, go on a lovely trip overseas once in a while, and perhaps even visit a show cave in a country that has a better understanding of the proper values of its tourist assets.
Caves are two a penny. If you don't believe it, just ask the Premier. He's been advised by experts. But a heap of gravel, now there is something to go out of your way to see. The tourists will come flocking. "South Australia - the Gravel State!" Looking good! Two tickets please. The mind boggles.
We've done some things extremely well in South Australia, usually through the efforts of one or two people with tenacity and vision, including the developments at Naracoorte. The Sellicks Hill Quarry Cave debacle was not one of them, and unless some fundamental changes are made, it will happen again, ... and again. It is so sad. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em! Pass the gelignite.