Opening Address: Looking back and looking forward
I first visited the South-east region with caves in mind some 50 years ago. Two things stand out in my memory:
- My shock at seeing how far the Town Cave at Mt Gambier had departed from Tenison-Woods 1862 description, and the shock of the City Council at my suggestion that it was not a really great idea to dump all rubbish into caves and at the same time, to drink from the groundwater!
- Visiting the caves at Naracoorte, being shown the really important things like the Butcher's Shop, Ladies' Wardrobe, Toffee Shop, Wedding Cake and the Goldfish in the Pond, and being told that the caves resulted from bubbles coming up through the rock as a result of the volcanic eruption at Mt Gambier !
By the end of the 1950s a number of us involved in caving developed the feeling that better public understanding of caves was vital, and that improvement of tourist guiding was one very basic way in which this might be furthered. We started talking with cave managers, and building better relationships with managers and private landowners. But it was not until 1973 that we were able to call the first conference on cave management at Jenolan. As we all know, this was the first of a series, and in 1987, those present at the NSW marathon-conference agreed to establish what we now know as ACKMA and which has provided a basis for accelerating progress in karst management.
Today, this conference with its numerous participants from Malaysia, USA and Canada as well as Australia and New Zealand, speaks for itself. ACKMA has indeed become a very healthy organisation. We can also look around us, and see that although there are continuing problems, many of the most important karst regions are in protected areas, and the quality of management continues to improve.
At the world level, we have the formally approved IUCN Guidelines for protection of caves and karst, together with the current World Bank initiatives for developing better policies and practices for the quarry industry, at least in SE Asia.
Looking to the future, we need to maintain and strengthen our current efforts to achieve both better protection and better management, in spite of the economic irrationalism of contemporary governments. We also must recognise that there are some new emerging challenges.
Some of the re-emerging old countries, such as Slovenia, Romania, Hungary, Vietnam and Thailand are setting a new sense of direction and a new standard in cave management. We must work with those countries in a spirit of mutual learning - and stop thinking we have it right!
Then our understanding of karst processes is becoming increasingly complex. This includes a rapidly growing understanding of the role of microbiota, even in cave genesis; the recognition that many caves have not been formed simply through erosion by carbonic and humic acids but that many other processes including sulphuric acid solution and hydrothermal activity have been indeed prevalent. All of this raises new issues in the maintenance of environmental integrity and in our role as interpreters of the cave environment. We have an exciting time ahead.