Description

Wonderstruck: Treasuring Tasmania’s caves and karst

After World War II, Sam Carey’s Tasmanian Caverneering Club, the first Australian caving club, began a quest to discover, record and protect Tasmanian caves which continues today.  Wonderstruck: treasuring Tasmania’s caves and karst is the story of these journeys of subterranean discovery, the myths and the legends, the explorers and the ecological battlegrounds, the ‘master’ caves and the megafauna dens, the entrepreneurs and the raconteurs.

Caves are places of wonder and mystery.  By 1840 a Gothic regime of candles and bark torches heightened the thrill of the ‘Sublime’ within Wet Cave on Mole Creek, in northern Tasmania.  More than a dozen Tasmanian tourist caves, from Gunns Plains to Ida Bay, have glistened in guiding light.  Farmers turned to home-baked hospitality when the Industrial Revolution mobilised urban excursionists, opening private ‘show’ caves by the glow of acetylene gas.