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Kitava is the most easterly island of the Trobriand group. It is an uplifted coral atoll, oval in plan, with a maximum diameter of 4 1/2 miles. The centre of the island is swampy and surrounded by a rim that reaches a height of 142 m. Caves occur in various parts of the rim and several have been described in a previous article (Ollier and Holdsworth, 1970). One of the caves, Inakebu, is especially important as it contains the first recorded cave drawings from the Trobriand Islands. Inakebu is situated on the inner edge of the island rim at the north-eastern end of the island. Map 1 shows the location of the cave on Kitava Island. Map 2 is a plan of the cave, surveyed by C.D. Ollier and G. Heers. The location of the cave drawings is shown on the plan. Inakebu is a "bwala", that is a place where the original ancestor of a sub-clan or dala is thought to have emerged from the ground. The bwala tradition is common throughout the Trobriands and neighbouring islands. It has been described by many writers on the anthropology of the area, and was summarised in Ollier and Holdsworth (1969). The people believe that if they enter such places they will become sick and die. Until November, 1968, no member of the present native population had been in the cave, though there is a rumour that a European had entered it about 20 years before, but turned back owing to lack of kerosene. It must be admitted that this tale sounds rather like the stories one hears in Australia that Aborigines were afraid of the dark caves and therefore did not go into them. In fact, the many discoveries in the Nullarbor Plain caves show that they did, and the cave drawings in Inakebu show that someone has been in this cave. The point is that it does not seem to be the present generations who entered the caves but earlier ones; people from "time before" as they say in New Guinea. The first known European to enter the cave was Gilbert Heers, a trader in copra and shell who lived on the nearby island of Vakuta. He went into the cave on 8 November 1968 accompanied by Meiwada, head of the sub-clan associated with Inakebu, who had never been inside before. Heers and Meiwada investigated the two outer chambers but then turned back because they had only poor lights. They returned with better light on 15 November. Since they had not become sick or died, they then found seven other men willing to accompany them. They found the narrow opening leading to the final chamber, and discovered the drawings. None of the men, many of whom were quite old, had ever seen the drawings or heard any mention of them before. The drawings are the only indication that people had previously been in this deep chamber. There are no ashes or soot marks, no footprints, and no pottery, bones or shells such as are commonly found in other Trobriand caves, though bones and shells occur in the chamber near the entrance. With one exception, the drawings are all on the same sort of surface, a clean bedrock surface on cream coloured, fairly dense and uniform limestone, with a suitably rough texture. Generally the surface has a slight overhang, and so is protected from flows or dripping water. On surfaces with dripstone shawls or stalactites, the drawings were always placed between the trickles, on the dry rock. We have found no examples that have been covered by a film of flow stone. The one drawing on a flow stone column is also still on the surface and not covered by later deposition. A film of later deposit would be good to show the age of the drawings, but since the drawings appear to have been deliberately located on dry sites the lack of cover does not indicate that they are necessarily young. There are stencil outlines of three hands, a few small patches of ochre which do not seem to have any form, numerous drawings in black line, and one small engraving.
Wellington Caves, New South Wales (figure 1), have attracted scientific attention for more than a century, largely through discoveries in the cave sediments of bones from extinct animals. These bone discoveries provided impetus for a number of early speculations about the geomorphology of the caves area and its relationship to the caves. Notable among these was the conjecture of Mitchell (1839) that the valley floor sediments of the Bell River and the cave fills had been deposited during a marine transgression about one million years ago. The first systematic geomorphological work was carried out by Colditz (1943), who argued for two distinct relict erosion levels in the Bell Valley; the older level was assigned to the Lower Pliocene and the younger to the Upper Pliocene. Colditz considered that these levels provided evidence for two phases of uplift in late Tertiary times. More recently Frank (1971) made detailed studies of the cave sediments, and devoted some attention to landscape evolution. He believed that the Bell River had been captured by Catombal Creek, during the late Pliocene or early Pleistocene.
The fossils from Wellington Caves, some of them 'giant', are well known to Australian speleologists, finds of importance for the study of Australian fauna from early discovered caves. What I think we did not appreciate was that the Wellington 'bones' have a place in the world history of science of significance also, the theme of this paper. Many of you will have watched the BBC-TV series on 'The Voyage of the Beagle'; much was made of the importance to Darwin in developing his theory of evolution of the fossils he found in southern South America. There fossils of giant relatives of sloths, llamas and armadillos helped to make clear to him the notion of the geological succession of life, a basic part of his theory along with the idea of natural selection to which the finches and the tortoises of the Galapagos Islands proved crucial. However it seems that Darwin was previously aware of the similar significance of the Wellington Caves bones for the law of succession from Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology which quotes William Clift's identifications of dasyures, wombats and kangaroos amongst them. The fact that these recently extinct animals were closely related to the distinctive modern marsupial fauna of Australia counted much against earlier conceptions such as Cuvier's catastrophic theory or Buckland's ideas of successive divine creations within a short time span. Watchers of the TV series will remember the devious role played by the palaeontologist, Sir Richard Owen, in organising public opposition to Darwin at the famous Oxford meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. This article relates the series of rearguard actions of Owen to maintain that there was a fossil elephant component in the ancient Australian fauna, damaging to Darwinism. But the growing evidence from Australia, not all of it from caves, of course, finally extinguished this red herring, started by that doctrinaire N.S.W. colonial, the Reverend John Dunmore Lang.
Whilst there appears to be a popular belief that Australian Aborigines viewed caves with some trepidation there is much anecdotal and physical evidence that karst caves were used for occupation, art and funery practices. This paper reviews the past and modern literature on Aboriginal use of karst caves on the Tablelands and immediate surrounds. About ten occupation and a lesser number of disposition sites are known as are hand stencils and abstract engraved art. More representational art has been reported in the past and skeletal material of accidental or unknown origin reported widely. Dated sites are few ranging from about 1500 years BP to as old as 23000 years BP.
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