OPENING ADDRESS
Mr Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen,
Thank you for extending an invitation to me to officially open your conference.
I would like to extend a special welcome to interstate delegates, and our two guests from the United States. I hope your participation in the conference proves fruitful, and I hope you are able to find time to inspect some of the caves in this area of Victoria.
Buchan Caves are the most extensive cave system known in Victoria with 75 known caves.
These include: Fairy Cave, Royal Cave, Dukes Cave and Federal Cave.
This cave system contains between 4 and 5 kilometres of stream passage cut at several levels including areas where it is widened into caverns by block collapse. Some of the best cave decoration known in Victoria is found in these caves.
The cave system includes all those features which amaze and delight speleologists and tourists alike - the well developed stalactite and stalagmite forms, pillars, shawls, speleothems, rim pools and helictites together with cave sediments and a permanent flowing stream.
The Buchan area was first settled in 1840 but it was 1899 before the first detailed survey of the caves was carried out.
The State Government at that time reserved all the land around Buchan because vandals were reported to be causing damage to many of the accessible caves.
Later surveys were carried out in 1900 by A.E. Kitson (later Sir), a geologist and F. Moon, a local prospector who was employed by the Government to carry out a detailed exploration of the area in the early 1900s.
In March 1907 while exploring the Buchan Reserve, Mr F. Moon found a small but deep hole which he enlarged. He lowered himself by rope 15m into what is now known as the Fairy Cave. He was so impressed with what he saw in the cave that he reported "I feel convinced now that I have Jenolan's rival". A loose rockfall blocked the passage about 400m from the entrance and prevented further exploration at that time. The Fairy Cave was opened to the public in December 1907.
Royal Cave was discovered in 1910 when F.J. Wilson (the supervisor of the Reserve), Constable Brown (the local policeman) and Mr Moon, dug through the loose rockfall in the Fairy Cave and followed a stream passage for about 400m. It was impossible to enlarge the stream passage between the two caves, so an entrance tunnel was constructed in 1913 when the cave was opened for public inspection.
Over the years, the area has been developed for tourists, and has proved to be successful in attracting visitors to the caves, and to many other delightful features of the East Gippsland area. The camp park within the Buchan Caves Reserve has facilities for day visitors and overnight campers. There are 62 powered sites and 60 unpowered sites, hot showers, toilets, laundry, kitchen and kiosk.
In addition to recreational use by tourists, this area provides the most important venue in Victoria for the sport of caving. Indeed, speleologists rate it as among the best in Australia.
Cavers must be amongst the last of the old-fashioned explorers.
Over the centuries, men have delighted in discovering, exploring and mapping the physical features of this planet.
I myself have participated in five Antarctic expeditions, accepting the challenges of the last unknown surface features of the globe.
Apart from costly expeditions to the poles, or to the bottom of the sea, caving must be perhaps the only activity left for people who want to experience the feeling that Governor Phillip felt on sailing into Sydney Harbour, or Edmund Hilary must have felt on top of Everest.
The Land Conservation Council, in their final report on the Gippsland Lakes Hinterland Area, noted that the limestone caves of the Buchan-Murrindal area are important for a variety of purposes ranging from tourism to scientific study. While considerable exploratory work has been done in some of the area's cave systems and many of their individual values are well recorded, there has as yet been no attempt at general assessment and classification of all the caves. Such a classification should aim at designating the most appropriate uses for each cave; for example, those that could be open for guided tours by large numbers of people, those more suitable for experienced cavers, those that should not be open to the public because of their scientific and/or nature conservation values. and those that should be closed to all because of their dangerous nature.
This leads to the matter of management plans. I am pleased to note that the speleological society has been of considerable assistance to the Government's Land Management Agencies in providing advice on cave management.
The LCC recommend that a full assessment should be made of the Buchan-Murrindal cave system with a view to developing management prescriptions for each cave locality as well as a broad coordinated plan of management for the region's limestone features. While many of the areas most significant caves have entrances located on public land, in a number of instances they extend under adjoining private property. Most surface land uses will have no effect on them; however. any large scale excavation or any development that will cause ground vibration or interfere with air or water flows through caverns may damage or destroy caves.
I am simultaneously a conservationist committed and protecting the environment, and a Minister in a Government committed to expanding the economy and providing jobs.
You may think that these two roles are incompatible, but I think they are in fact complementary.
In my forests portfolio, I have spent 12 months in the arduous business of attempting to get the timber workers, the sawmillers, the environmentalists together to come to some sort of understanding of each others point of view. It would take someone with the patience of Job and the skill of Bob Hawke to actually reach a consensus between the two groups, but I believe that I have at least been able to turn an acrimonious battle into a civilised disagreement.
However, the polarisation between conservationists and developers is right now reaching a disastrous confrontation in another area - South West Tasmania.
The Franklin River dam will flood an area which for a number of reasons is far more significant than the Buchan area which I have been talking about.
Australia has three areas included on the World Heritage List: Kakadu in the Northern Territory, the Willanda Lakes in outback NSW, and the Franklin River Wilderness.
One of the features of the wilderness which will be destroyed if the dam is allowed to proceed is an extensive system of limestone caves - important not only as geomorphological features but as an archaeological site of inestimable value.
Archaeological surveys prove difficult in this terrain but systematic searching of only part of the endangered zone already has identified several small shelters and two very large caves which contain evidence of human occupation.
They lie concealed beneath a dense green mantle of damp and ancient vegetation; many more places may remain hidden.
The most celebrated cave was named Fraser Cave by its discoverers, but is now to be renamed Kutikina.
But the second cave, nearer the Gordon junction, is even larger. The uneroded floors of both caves offer living space more generous than large suburban homes. Beneath the floor of the caves, there are deposits up to two metres in depth in which, to judge from preliminary investigations, are chronicled some 5,000 years of human occupation, beginning around 20,000 years ago.
The significance of the site must be seen in the context of the prehistoric colonisation of the western rim of the Pacific. In western Europe modern humans replaced Neanderthal humans about 30 - 35,000 years ago. In the east, we see the colonisation of Australia and New Guinea across the water barriers of Asia some time before 40,000 years ago. About 23,000 years ago, the floor of Bass Strait was exposed as a dry plain. Humans immediately took this opportunity to expand their range and crossed into Tasmania.
The inhabitants of such sites as Kutikina cave were the most southerly human beings on earth. The Antarctic ice sheet was then only a thousand kilometres to the South.
The famous cave paintings of Lascaux in France were still 6 or 8,000 years in the future. It would take another 10,000 years for equivalent areas of South America to be occupied by humans. It is within this context that Kutikina Cave assumes international importance in our global view of the geographical importance of our global view of the geographical expansion of modern humans.
The archaeological deposit contains irreplaceable evidence of the culture of the earliest Australians. It contains a record of the animals which they hunted. It contains spores and pollens through which the history of Tasmanian vegetation can be reconstructed.
Only a few generations ago, our grandfathers wiped out the last Tasmanian aboriginals.
In Tasmania, since 1975, it has been illegal to knowingly destroy a prehistoric Aboriginal site. It would indeed be sad and desperately ironic it the state itself were to destroy probably the greatest monument to the first Tasmanians.
That irony is more bitter when we realise that the 200 megawatts of power which the dam will generate will most probably create fewer jobs than the wilderness could have supported in tourism and conservation.
In Victoria, we are trying to establish this new balance between conservation and economic growth, and I believe we are well on the way to succeeding.
It is with the assistance of groups of concerned experts such as yourselves that this goal will be made a little more achievable.
I have much pleasure in officially declaring this conference open.