11 Ancient Structures Hidden Beneath the Nullarbor

[00:00:00]Beneath the flat, featureless surface of one of the most desolate places on Earth, something extraordinary is hiding. The Nullore plane, 400,000 km of ancient limestone [music] stretching from South Australia to Western Australia in a silence so complete that early explorers believed nothing of significance could survive here. No rivers, no mountains, almost no rain. But beneath that cracked and bleached surface, beneath the ancient khiche and the fossilized seabeds and the bones of creatures that no longer walk this earth, there are rooms, chambers, networks of underground passages so vast and so dark that entire research teams have spent days inside without reaching the [music] end. And on the walls of those chambers, on stone surfaces no sunlight has touched in tens of thousands of years, are the fingerprints of the oldest continuous culture in human history. The nullore is not empty. It [music] never was. If you value research that goes beyond the tourist pamphlets, subscribe to Loving Walabe now and hit the bell. A like supports independent Australian documentary work. Today at Loving Walabe, we are going beneath the surface. We are going to examine 11 ancient structures hidden beneath the Nullore plane. be honest about what they tell us, what remains deeply unsolved, and why several of these sites have received far less public attention than they deserve. Now, let us go underground. Structure one, Kunalda [music] Cave, and the oldest art on the continent. When Australian archaeologists entered [music] Kunala Cave seriously in the 1950s and 1960s, they were not prepared for what they found. [music] Located roughly 60 km north of Ucla in South Australia, Kunula is not a cave you stumble into. The entrance is a vertical shaft dropping approximately 60 m through solid limestone into a cathedral-sized chamber below. The silence inside is not the comfortable silence of a quiet room. It is the total geological silence of a place sealed from the surface world for [music] longer than human memory. Then you see the walls across the soft limestone surfaces. [music] Aboriginal Australians left a record of their presence stretching back approximately 20,000 years. These are not paintings.

[00:02:14]They are finger flutings, markings pressed and dragged through damp limestone by human hands, forming spirals, parallel lines, and grids that researchers have spent decades attempting to interpret. The people who made them descended 60 m underground in total [music] darkness with fire as their only light source. They were not sheltering there. They went down specifically to mark the walls. The flint deposits at Kunlddera provided a second revelation. The cave was a mining site. Aboriginal Australians [music] extracted flint from its walls over thousands of years. Creating trade networks that distributed Kunalda flint across enormous distances of the continent. Kunel decave is now world heritage listed and access requires permits from the Ming people, the traditional custodians. 20,000 years of human expression compressed into a chamber 60 m below the most arid plane [music] on the continent. Structure two, Cockbitty cave and the world record that changed everything. If Kunula is an art gallery underground, Cockalitty cave is something altogether more dangerous and altogether more extraordinary. Located on the edge of the Nullore in Western Australia, [music] roughly 300 km east of Norseman, Cockalitty holds a distinction few Australians are aware of. For a significant period, it contained the longest cave dive in the world. The cave begins as a modest entrance shaft, but within that entrance begins a subterranean lake extending horizontally into the earth for an almost incomprehensible distance. In 1983, a French diving team called [music] the group Spelologic Deassen entered Cockalbiddy's flooded passages and set a world record with a penetration of approximately 6 km underground. The divers described passages [music] that shifted between vast cathedral rooms, ceilings rising high above the water line, and sections so tight that equipment scraped both walls simultaneously. Throughout the entire 6 km [music] dive, there was no surface air, no way to stop and breathe, nothing between the diver and the return journey, but the finite supply in [music] their tanks and the guideline behind them. The world record held for years. The cave was never fully explored. Deeper sections remain beyond the reach of current diving technology because the distance becomes too great to cover safely on a single breathing supply. The water filling those passages is [music] ancient, preserving environmental evidence dating to the plea scene epoch. A geological time capsule beneath the plane. Structure three, Wee Bubby Cave and the underground lake that shouldn't exist.

[00:04:49]About 40 km west of Cockalbiddy sits Wee Bubby Cave [music] and its defining feature stops every firsttime visitor cold. After descending through a narrow entrance shaft, explorers emerge into a chamber containing a lake. Not a small pool, a vast, still underground body of water stretching 90 m in width, descending to depths that have never been fully measured. The water is so clear and so still that in the light of a headlamp, its surface looks like polished glass. You have to look carefully [music] to confirm water is actually there. The Nullore plane was once a shallow sea. Approximately 15 to 20 million years ago, a warm inland ocean covered this entire region, depositing the thick limestone layers that now form the plane and everything beneath it. When that sea retreated, it left behind pockets of water deep within the rock. We Bubby Cave is accessing that ancient hydraological system. The water inside is connected to an underground reservoir, preserving conditions reaching back millions of years. What matters here beyond the geology is what the Ming people have always known. Their relationship with these sites is cultural and spiritual [music] and their knowledge of this underground world predates every survey conducted by any research institution by tens of thousands of years. Structure four Muriji caves and the ceremonial corridors. If Kunal decave represents the artistic dimension of the nullore's underground world, the Muroini cave system near Fowlers Bay in South Australia represents its ceremonial one.

[00:06:22]Murijini is not a single cave. It is a network of interconnected limestone chambers and passages. Some accessible from the surface and some requiring traversal of flooded sections. Within this network, researchers and community representatives have documented evidence of long-term Aboriginal [music] use extending across multiple generations and potentially thousands of [music] years. What distinguishes Muroini from other Nulabar caves is the nature of the material found inside. The caves have yielded artifacts including ground ochre, remnants of ancient fires, and animal bones suggesting deliberate food processing [music] underground. These are not casual remnants of people sheltering from the elements. They are traces of organized repeated activity at a specific location over a long period of time. The cave environment has preserved these traces in remarkable condition. The low humidity, stable temperature, and isolation from surface disturbance function almost like an archaeological refrigerator. Objects placed in these chambers have been protected from weathering forces that destroy surface sites [music] within decades. The full extent of the Muroini network has not been mapped. The catalog of material inside it has not been compiled. The people who used these corridors knew the nullore in a way that modern Australians driving the air highway [music] at 110 kmh could barely begin to imagine. Structure 5, Abrai cave and the bone archive. Approximately 40 km northeast [music] of Ucla, Abrai cave offers a different kind of revelation where Kunalda [music] is about human art and Murowini is about human ceremony. Abracuri is primarily about the creatures that inhabited this region before modern times and what happened when those worlds eventually overlapped. Abracuri is a fossil cave.

[00:08:10]Its chambers have yielded the bones of pleaene megapora, the extraordinary menagerie of giant animals that inhabited Australia before their extinction approximately 46,000 years ago. Inside a braerie, researchers have recovered remains of deprodon, the largest marsupial ever to have lived. a creature roughly the size of a hippopotamus. They have found the bones of Procopadon, the giant short-faced kangaroo that stood nearly 3 meters tall, and they have found remains of thylole carnifx, the marsupial lion, whose bite force relative to body size exceeded that of any living cat. The deeper implication is something the scientific community has engaged with carefully and sometimes uncomfortably.

[00:08:54]The megapora extinction in Australia coincides broadly with the arrival of human beings on the continent. Whether humans caused that extinction through hunting, [music] through landscape altering fire management, or whether climate change was the dominant factor remains one of the most debated questions in Australian prehistory.

[00:09:12][music] Abrai cave is one of the places where that debate is grounded in physical evidence. The bones inside those chambers do not lie. Structure six, the nullore's hidden fossil reef.

[00:09:23]Beneath the surface of the nullore at depths varying from a few meters to several hundred meters lies something that the landscape above gives no indication of whatsoever. A fossil reef.

[00:09:34]The limestone of the nullore plane [music] is not simply rock. It is the compressed and lithified remnant of an ancient marine reef system built by corals, mollisks, and other marine organisms [music] across millions of years during the Mayene epoch. What you are walking on when you cross the nullore is the skeleton of an ocean. In certain cave sections, the original reef structure remains visible. The chambers of some nullore caves preserve in their walls the detailed shapes of coral formations, molllesk shells and marine organisms that lived here when this plane was a warm tropical sea.

[00:10:09]Scientists studying ancient ocean temperatures, ancient sea levels, and ancient marine biodiversity have used data extracted from these cave walls to build models of climate conditions [music] predating human existence by millions of years. This buried reef is also why the nullore caves exist at all.

[00:10:28]The same properties that made the limestone easy for ancient organisms to build with. Its pocity and its solubility in slightly acidic water made it vulnerable to the slow dissolution that carved these cave systems over geological time. The nullore plane is a fossilized, uplifted, and partially dissolved reef still legible underground to anyone willing to read it. Structure seven. Mulamang cave and the passages without end. Mula Mulan cave is one of the longest cave systems in Australia and by the standards of global cave exploration. One of the least publicized significant cave systems on earth.

[00:11:04]Located within the Nullore National Park in Western Australia, Mulla Mulang opens through a surface entrance that gives no indication of the scale of what lies below. Once inside, the cave expands into a network of passages partially surveyed at over 6 km in total length.

[00:11:22]The emphasis rests on the word partially. Active exploration of Mula Mulan has repeatedly revealed new sections every time researchers return.

[00:11:31][music] The cave contains a sequence of distinct environments. The entrance zone is dry with sediment floors that have preserved animal [music] bones and ancient plant material in extraordinary condition. Further in, passages become decorated with stallctites and stallites formed where water historically moved through the rock. Deeper still, passages become flooded, transitioning into the subterranean lake environment seen [music] at Wee Bubby and Cocobitty. The sediment record in the dry sections is what makes Muller Mulang archaeologically significant. These sediments contain a stratified archive of the cave's history with layers corresponding to different periods and different environmental conditions.

[00:12:09]Researchers have recovered material spanning thousands of years from trapped megapora to Aboriginal use that predates European arrival by millennia. A cave system of this length in a region this remote has not received the sustained research attention that equivalent caves in Europe or North America would attract. That is a gap in our national priorities. Structure 8, the ancient water channels of the nullore cast.

[00:12:34]Beneath the nullore, there exists a plumbing system of extraordinary age and scale that has never been comprehensively mapped. The geological term for the environment created by the dissolution of limestone is cast. The Nullore represents one of the largest cast landscapes on Earth. Beneath the flat, apparently featureless surface, the rock is riddled with passages, [music] cavities, sink holes, and water channels created by millions of years of slow dissolution. These ancient water channels are not active rivers. The Nullore [music] today receives less than 250 mm of rainfall per year. The surface is essentially dry. But the passages carved through limestone hundreds of thousands of years ago remain [music] now mostly dry, preserved in the rock as a record of a time when this landscape was fundamentally wetter. These ancient channels reveal the hydraological history of one of the driest regions on Earth, showing how dramatically the [music] Australian climate has changed over geological time. They create the interconnected network of cave systems that researchers are only now beginning to catalog and they preserve within their sediment floors a physical record of the environments that preceded [music] current arid conditions. Some channels still carry water deep underground. The water table beneath the nullore supports an underground system that provides drinking water for communities along the air highway. The nullore is a dry place that quietly sits on top of a much wetter one. [music] Structure 9, the ochre deposits and the trading networks. One of the least discussed aspects of the Nullore's underground world is the evidence it provides for long-distance trade and cultural exchange between Aboriginal communities across the continent.

[00:14:18]Several Nullore cave systems contain deposits of ochre, the iron oxide mineral used across Aboriginal Australia for ceremonial body decoration, rock art, and burial [music] practices. Some of these deposits are extraordinary in their scale and in the evidence they show of organized extraction. Ochre was not simply collected from wherever it was found. Specific sites were known, valued, and managed. The ochre from some Nullore cave deposits has been chemically traced to sites hundreds of kilometers away from the plane, demonstrating that material extracted from the underground of this region was traveling across the continent [music] through organized exchange networks.

[00:14:57]What the ochre evidence reveals is a picture of connected communities engaging in organized long-distance exchange over tens of thousands of years, fundamentally revising the narrative of isolated Aboriginal communities. The Kuna flint deposits tell the same story. [music] Material from Kunalda has been found at sites far from the Nullore, distributed through networks functioning across enormous distances. What we are looking at in these caves is the physical evidence of a sophisticated continent spanning cultural and economic system. The underground of the nullore was one of its productive nodes. Structure 10. The styo fauna and what isolation preserved.

[00:15:39]This entry on our list is different from the others because the ancient structure we are discussing is not made by human hands. It is made by evolution.

[00:15:48]>> [music] >> The cave systems beneath the nullore host a community of living organisms that have adapted over millions of years of isolation to existence in total darkness. These animals constitute what biologists call styopounder aquatic organisms living [music] permanently in underground water systems and troger animals living permanently in dry cave sections without ever returning to the surface. Within the flooded caves of the nullore, researchers have found species of crustaceians, worms, and other invertebrates isolated from the surface world since the plane became arid millions of years ago. These animals have lost their eyes. They have lost their pigmentation. They have adapted metabolisms tuned to environments where food is extremely scarce, and they represent in many cases the last surviving members of lineages that were once widespread on the surface before the nullore dried out. Finding them requires specialized cave diving and sediment sampling techniques. These organisms are direct biological links to an earlier wetter version of this landscape. Living specimens of ancient Australia surviving in the one environment where the conditions of millions of years ago have been partially preserved. The cold, [music] wet, lightless passages at the base of the limestone. The Nullore caves are records not just of human history but of biological history. and their inhabitants are as ancient and irreplaceable as the art on the walls of Kunalda. Structure 11. The knowledge that outlasted everything. The 11th structure on our list is not a cave. It is a question. And the evidence beneath the nullore makes it impossible [music] to avoid. When European explorers first crossed the Nullore in the 19th century, they approached it as a void, a barrier, a hostile, empty expanse to be traversed as quickly as possible. Edward Johnair completed the first European crossing of its southern edge in 1841, surviving conditions that killed his [music] companion and his horses. His account emphasized the ordeal of crossing a landscape that offered nothing, but the landscape did offer something, not to someone moving through it quickly, to someone who knew it from below. The Aboriginal people of the Nullore region, the Ming and their neighbors, navigated this plane for tens of thousands of years. They knew where the caves were, which caves held water, which walls held flint, and which surface depressions concealed shafts leading to resources below. The Nullore was not empty to the people who understood it. It was a mapped, managed, productive landscape whose most important features were invisible to anyone looking only at the surface. The structures we have examined today are the persistent traces of a living relationship between people and a landscape far more complex [music] than it appeared to any outside observer. The deepest structure beneath the nullore is not limestone. It is knowledge. [music] 60,000 years of accumulated, tested, lived knowledge about a landscape that most Australians have driven across at speed and dismissed as empty. That is the structure most worth protecting.

[00:18:53]What does this mean for Australia? Let us be honest about what the 11 sites we have examined today reveal. Taken [music] together, Australia has beneath one of its most overlooked landscapes a concentration of archaeological, geological, and biological significance that rivals [music] anything found on this continent or in some respects anywhere on Earth. Kunala Cave [music] alone with its 20,000-year-old finger markings and documented use as a flint mine would be a site of global prominence if it were discovered in Europe or North America. Cockalbiddy's world record dive would be celebrated globally if it had happened somewhere more visible. The honest criticism that must be made is about visibility and resourcing. The Nullore cave systems have received sustained attention from a dedicated community of scientists, archaeologists, and cave explorers. But that community is small. [music] Its funding is intermittent. and the public profile of what they are finding remains far below what the significance of the discoveries should warrant. Weibby mulamulang abrauri and the unnamed passages connecting them have not been fully mapped. There are discoveries waiting inside these systems that would change our understanding of Australian prehistory. The structures beneath the nullore are ancient, fragile, and finite. They deserve considerably more attention than they currently receive.

[00:20:17]Your view? What does the nullore hide?

[00:20:19]Now, we want to hear from you. Do you believe the caves beneath the nullore represent the most significantly underressearched landscape in Australia?

[00:20:27]Should the government invest more in researching and protecting these systems? And what does it mean for our national identity that the oldest structures on this continent are largely unknown to most Australians? Write your thoughts in the comments. This community values honest, considered discussion, and on a topic this significant, every perspective matters. If this analysis gave you something to think about, [music] hit like to support independent Australian documentary content.

[00:20:55]Subscribe to Loving Wabe so you do not miss our next investigation into the places and stories that Australian history too often overlooks. Thank you for watching. Stay curious. We will see you next time at loving walabe.