The Bat Cave

2007-04-03T18:05:00.000-07:00

The Bat Cave:

I grew up in the 1950’s and 1960’s at Wilsons Creek, up in the mountains out from Mullumbimby in Northern New South Wales. I was raised on a banana plantation amidst the steep slopes of rainforest and wet sclerophyll (gum) forest and occasional cliff outcrops. The creek we swam in was a very clear, clean freshwater rainforest creek with big deep pools. People now in the City, would give their `eye’ teeth for it as my late father used to say.

Wilson’s Creek is about twenty minutes (about ten kilometres) up in one of the many valleys west of Mullumbimby, in the Northern Rivers area. With this time, came for me a strong spiritual love of Creation, Nature, Country Living and the Environment.

In the early 1960’s I was going to High School at Mullumbimby. As I was often exploring the mountains around our home, I decided to explore the cliffs in the above photograph. I began by walking up throughBrown’s bananas and across through Cox’s bananas and came to the cliff. I found the following very interesting things:

The cliffs faced in an easterly aspect (which is the photograph above) then suddenly turned in a northern aspect on the righthand side. At the juncture of this cliffs was the beginnings of a small deep gully about 20 metres deep, dropped downwards to a small creek which eventually flowed down the slopes into the main Wilsons Creek .... see the creek in floodtimes in the photograph above.
The deep gully went right back into the cliff on the far southern side of the cliff Mr. Cox and Mr. Brown had built a small dam about 75 metres back with about 1.75 metre high rock wall. It backed up a small body of water up to 20 metres in length which went back into the hillside. Water could then be siphoned down to water their bananas in dry times.
The gully itself was a whole world in and of itself which I spent time exploring then and on future occasions. The gully began as a narrow defile at the dam …. about 20 metres deep by about 5.00 metres at the base. It continued for about 75 metres out towards the cliff face. The gully came to be progressively unevenly widened out in front ….. to be deeply undercut on the lefthand side ….. to be a wide overarching irregular triangular space of cliff overhangs which came nearly together at the top. The irregular triangular space was about 50.00 metres at the base and 20 metres at the top. The wide rocky creek bed widened on the left hand side into a flat 2-3 metre ledge which then fell down on the right-hand side as the creek bed. · This then fell out to the front of the cliff and over the edge. In wet times, this would have become a small waterfall. You reached a point whereby you could look out at mid-cliff height on the lower adjacent cliffs on the righthand side …150 – 200 metres in height.
The cliffs to the right hand side as the mountain suddenly turned to a northerly aspect. There was dry eucalypt bush above the cliffs. As I walked along exploring the wide rock shelf, I came upon an interesting discovery. In the rock wall which arched over the shelf, there were various pits cut out originally as the periodic creek cut down through the soft volcanic rock and eroded the walls. In one of the pits, was a 500 mm long * 300 mm wide length of white petrified tree trunk. It had been exposed by the eroding water. I deduce it was a product of burial as volcanic ash had covered whole former forests in a layer of fine ash. The wood under pressure had quickly turned to stone. There is much evidence today to show this can happen with our life time and doesn’t need millions of years. I still have a sample of this stone at our house at Chambers Flat in 2006 ….. forty years on.
At the base of the volcanic tuff cliffs above the bananas, I found a large cave 50 metres * 100 metres * 2-3 metres high as a water-cut cave. Volcanic tuff is a soft rock consisting of rocky fragments cemented together by a fine grained cream coloured matrix which easily erodes. The cave had been cut by the periodic stream descending from the gully above.
The cave was of uneven height initially with a dry shallow 300 mm deep x 1-1.5 metres wide creek bed swirling through in the foreground. In the foreground the cave could easily be explored by the light coming through a two and half metre high opening under the cliff base. In the back it was a bit dim with some roof recesses as smaller cave vaults that were carved out unevenly. I needed a box of matches to explore more fully at a later time.
On the roof of the cave I found something very interesting. There was a fine-furred alive carpet of small black bats hanging upside down in thousands of bats. They covered the whole cave ceiling. I reached up and cupped my hands around many bats. With the disturbance, bats began flying in the cave space. Before long bats were flitting everywhere and were beginning to stream out the entry of the cave.
One other day I came back with a box of matches to explore the back of the cave more fully. The flying bats were so thick that they knocked out the lighted match each time. It was fruitless to explore with matches.
In 1995, my parents were packing up the house to move out as they had sold the property to new owners after forty five years. I took the opportunity with my two children to walk up where the old banana plantation had been till the late 1980’s. We walked through the dry eucalypt forest, along the northern facing cliffs tops to the eastern facing cliff tops above the bat cave. I scrambled down to the gully with the dam and down to re-explore the bat cave. I have some memorabilia from that time at our house: an old bicycle wheel from one the flying foxes we sent bunches of bananas down the slope, one of the carriers which had two wheels on the top side for running on single wire in the flying fox and a length of rusted water pipe from the cliff dam.

See the Blog Site 'Banana Growing in the 1950's - 1970's'.

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