After 25 years, the memories of my adventures in the Australian outback have begun to resurface in a big way. Perhaps the passing of my 46th birthday triggered an internal "nostalgia clock". I recently reconnected with the fading past by winding my way through the electronic web we all know (don't we?) as the Internet. From my home in California, I am whisked to the far reaches of the outback of Western Australia in a matter of moments.

During my service in the U.S. Navy, I had the fantastic luck of being stationed in the remote Australian outback. I lived there for 27 months. I almost didn't make it to Australia. I worked as part of a special team in the Navy operating and repairing satellite communications equipment. We move from ship to ship and from shore station to shore station, testing the new equipment.

It was time to change duty stations. When the rest of the team got orders to either Australia or Hawaii, I became very excited, though the fact that I was the only one on the team whose orders had not arrived was a little unsettling. When my orders finally did arrive they listed my next duty station as a swift boat patrolling a river in Viet Nam! Something was terribly wrong. I had the personnel department on my ship look into it. They found that my job classification code number was scrambled in the file. This caused my electronics technician qualifications to disappear and it transformed me into a boatswain's mate. After much whining and complaining I was told that although a mistake had been made, it was too late to change the orders. I stepped up my whining campaign. In the nick of time, my orders were changed and I found myself on the way to Australia with my teammates.

That time of my life, I am finally realizing, was probably the most peaceful and joyous period of my youth. By sharing memories via electronic mail, the images and feelings are being rejuvenated in my mind. But the most exciting memories sparked by my recent searching, started in a dark, mysterious cave, 25 years ago. More on this later.

The U.S. Navy built and operated a communications station in the region known as the North West Cape of Western Australia. "The Cape" is a small peninsula jutting into the Indian ocean, at the "9 o'clock" position on the map of Australia. The Cape had a spine of low hills and canyons running down the middle called the Cape Range. The dirt was fine, dry and red with rust. The terrain was mostly flat with low scrub bushes (mostly of a variety known as spinifex) and termite mounds the size of refrigerators. The flies were thick and you were told upon arrival that you would swallow at least one during your stay. I never did. Another reason to go back I guess.

The air was clean, the sky was blue. There were no airplanes passing overhead. There was no din of traffic. There were no lights at night. The evening sky always arrived with a glorious sunset, and turned very black with very bright stars. I remember the Milky Way being very bright on any 1950's winter night on my grandmother's farm on Long Island, but the Southern sky left that in the dust. In fact, the sky was so clear, you could easily spot satellites in there journey from horizon to horizon. I was even inspired enough to spend two years building an eight inch telescope, including the grueling and monotonous job of grinding my own telescope mirror. But then again, there wasn't all that much to do anyway. At the time, to a 21 year old, this seemed like a hardship, but in my heart even then, I knew that this kind of simplicity and peace should be savored and cherished. I have not seen it since. I think that this basic, profound realization is what drives me to write this essay.

There was no television on The Cape and the radio left a lot to be desired. Once again, I must say that these things were only missed out of habit, or by those incapable of enjoying what The Cape (or any part of the natural Earth for that matter) has to offer. I quickly learned that one of the favorite pastimes of the inhabitants (both Australian civilians and U.S. Navy personnel and their families) was shell collecting. I'm not talking about the sun-bleached and broken half clamshells found by every child on any beach. The shells collected at The Cape were collected alive, with colors vibrant and forms diverse. The collectors had an unwritten code that dictated the etiquette of "shelling" such as replacing rocks as they were found and not taking too many specimens. If I had it to do over, I would not now collect shells. I am adverse to hunting for sport or trophies of any kind. At the time, it seemed like the thing to do. But then again, I'm also the guy who got his arms tattooed the minute they let him out of bootcamp!

Life on the cape was what you made it. It could be miserable, wonderful, or somewhere in-between. For the most part, twenty-something American males are not likely to realize that they can control this perception, myself included. I fell in the "somewhere in-between" group. Again, if I had it to do over as a mature adult, I would savor every moment.

Entertainment on The Cape was limited. Once in a blue moon, a professional band would venture up from Perth to perform for us in the Enlisted Men's Club, or at the only other place within a few hundred miles where a band COULD play; the Potshot Inn, in town. I think this happened once while I was there. A few of us were musicians (more or less) so we started our own band. We played at the two venues quite a few times. We did Cream, Beatles (Abbey Road) and some R&B. We were very bad. We changed our name every time we played just for a laugh. "Harvey Keck and the Chicken's Neck", "Grandma's Cookies", and "The Rubber Band" to name a few.

The Navy only had a few hundred people at the base it seemed. The tiny town where the married sailors and the Australian civilians lived was (and still is) called Exmouth. Exmouth had three or four stopsigns, one grocery store, a post office, a bank, a power plant and a few other necessities. Thank God for the drive-in-movie theater. Many a sweltering night folks would sit in their Land Cruisers, Land Rovers, Holdens, and Morris Minors, watching movies that were 15 or 20 years out of date, but welcome none-the-less.

One hot dry afternoon, a few friends and I decided to go exploring in the hills known as The Cape Range. This was a common pastime. Trying to spot kangaroos was fun. They stayed hidden during the day to avoid the heat. Any shrub tall enough to shelter a "Roo", probably was. Emu's were easier to spot. They would sometimes run along next to our jeep as we skimmed the dusty road on the ocean side of the cape. Wild Angora sheep, horses, and lizards made up the rest of the typical wildlife seen on the cape. 

We stumbled upon a few caves. Actually, a couple of the other guys I was with had discovered them a week before, but decided to include a couple more of us in the actual exploration. As far as we knew, these caves were unknown to mankind. We were pioneers in the great unknown. I recently learned that these caves were actually discovered by one David Cook in 1962, but they were not widely known at the time. We found little evidence of previous explorations.

One cave was a cavern perhaps 75 feet in diameter with a ceiling about 60 feet up. The ceiling peaked like an inverted funnel, with an apex a few feet wide, open to the sky. The shaft of light streaming down into the cave was absolutely majestic. Outside, the ground formed a hollow with the cave's ceiling opening at it's base. The whole thing was like an hour glass. The top half, shallow and open to the sky; the bottom half much larger and under ground. We lowered ice chests and picnic supplies down through the hole. But this was not the way to enter the cave. On the backside of the hill, was an opening in the rocks that was just wide enough to squeeze through.

We had some of our wives with us and the concept of crawling on their bellies into the unknown was not part of their makeup. It was the kind of opening that you could not turn around in, once you started and you hoped you could back out of if you had to! I remember crawling on my belly for several feet and then the cavern opened up before me just before I was about to panic. I scurried in with relief. The cave was dry, quiet and cool. There were no insects or animals of any kind.

The next cave we explored was a large crack in the ground which, when entered, also turned out to be cavernous once you reached the bottom. And the method we used to reach the bottom was the best part. A large tree (one of the few to be seen in the area) grew on the lip of the crevice, it's roots hanging 20 feet to the bottom. We climbed down the roots as if they were jungle vines. The cave itself wasn't that spectacular as I remember it. It was the thrill of discovery and the camaraderie we all experienced that I remember.

There was one more cave that needed exploring, but for amateurs, this was no walk in the park. The women folk forbade us from going down this hole, so we did not explore it. Not until the following week that is, when we had more time and a good alibi. We set off (as far as they knew) to photograph kangaroos in the bush. We fitted some hard hats with parts from flashlights. Electrical tape held them together. We brought candles, water and rope. This hole in the ground was only a couple of feet in diameter but as you lowered yourself into it, you found yourself in a small cavern about the size of the inside of a family car. In one corner at the floor of this little room, there was another hole. This one even smaller and more forbidding. Blocking part of the hole was a miniature natural bridge, about the diameter of my thigh. We tied a rope to the kangaroo guard on my Toyota Landcruiser. A "roo guard" is a kind of reinforced bumper/cowcatcher we all had on our vehicles at The Cape. Kangaroos have a nasty habit of jumping in front of your car and can cause a lot of damage. The rope was dropped down the little hole and would be used as a climbing aid. Free climbing, as it is known today, was not well known, at least to us, but our common body-sense told us that the climbing should be done with hands and feet on rock. The rope would be for emergencies only.

Denny Brown was the smallest (and most daring I think) so he was the first to venture forth. We tied a second rope around his waist and off he went. He started down the hole, feet first, using the many fine handholds and footholds to be found in the walls of the shaft. The rock was hard and would actually "bong" when struck. It was red from what I believe was a heavy iron content, and full of holes like Swiss cheese. As Denny descended into the blackness, we kept talking back and forth about the climb. His voice became more and more distant and the little light on his helmet grew tiny and sometimes disappeared altogether. With our makeshift lighting, all you could see was a small patch of rock directly in front of your face. Everywhere else was engulfed in blackness. Somehow, this was starting to seem like one of those bad ideas that others would read about and comment on how foolish we were for being there. But the excitement won out.

Denny came to a spot that undercut his footing. He was groping with his foot for a toehold, but encountered only air below him in the blackness. He decided that he would let go of the rock face and dangle on the rope as we lowered him to (hopefully) the next spot in this vertical tunnel where he could get a footing. So off into free space he went as we lowered him down. In a short time he was once again in climbing position. He decided to climb back up at this point, just to plot a course to overcoming the outcrop he just finished negotiating on the way down. All I remember was the tension in the air as he commented on the difficulty he was having coming around that bulge. All we could do was stare down into the darkness, keep the slack out of the rope, and wait. Once he cleared the outcrop, he climbed back down to what he decided was a good resting place.

My turn came soon enough. Each man after Denny had the rope around his waist and was held safe by those remaining at the top. The last man down (I don't remember who it was) had the rope tied around his waist but no one up top to hold him. Instead, he looped the rope over the natural bridge at the entrance to the shaft and fed it down to us at the bottom. As he climbed down, we fed the rope up, over the "pulley" and thus provided for his safety as well.

We stood against the walls of a slightly larger part of the shaft, which opened like a stomach after winding our way down the esophagus above. As we stood in this circle resting, I remember breathing what seemed to be thin air. We looked across at one another in the darkness with only the light of glimmering candles and flashlight bulbs growing yellower by the minute. We had spent over an hour getting this far. As we looked towards our feet, there in the center of the floor was yet another hole darker than the darkness around us. The rope tied to my Toyota up above, hung down before us and continued into the void below. This last piece of the journey was to become the spot where my heart let itself be heard.

Down we went, one by one. There was no way down but hand-over-hand down the rope. This was an hour-glass shaped section, but with no way in but straight down from the top, dangling for the final 20 feet. Once at the bottom, we whooped and hollered at our bravado. It was absolutely primal. Five guys from places as different as New York City and Waterloo Iowa, sharing an adventure that over time, would mature into a wonderful memory.

At the bottom, we found a very old, tattered glove. We were not the first to explore this cave, but we were certainly some of the very few. Could this glove have been left by old David Cook? We did not know, but we were prepared to leave our mark in history. Before leaving on our expedition, we prepared an aluminum panel of the type used on electronic equipment racks. On this sheet of aluminum, we each engraved our names and the date, which was some time in 1970. When we reached the bottom, we mounted the panel on the wall in a crevice. I can no longer remember exactly what we put on that plaque other than our names, but we hoped it would be there for eternity.

The bottom turned out not to be the bottom at all! There, in a dark little corner of the floor was yet another, even smaller, hole. The hole went in horizontally. We had to know! Denny began squirming in on his stomach, barely fitting his shoulders through. He went in what seemed like a mile, but was probably only a few yards. This was far enough. We collectively felt we had pushed the envelope of luck far enough. Denny wormed his way out, feet first. We were satisfied. It was time to ascend.

It had taken, as I can remember, less than two hours to climb down. Little did we know it would take the rest of the day to climb out. The first twenty feet or so on the way up you may recall, required brute force, hand-over-hand, rope climbing on the way down. Going up a rope is in this manner is another thing entirely! If only we had thought to tie regularly spaced knots in the rope! We were tired, our muscles fatigued and the air was thin. I must admit, it was a struggle and for a moment, just a brief moment, true fear flooded my body and soul. What if none of us could climb out? Tom had already made it out of the last pitch and up into the "stomach". The next thing I knew, I was being pulled magically up, dangling in mid air like a marionette. I was saved. Tom pulled me up and out of the abyss. Tom was a big boy. The rest of the climb was difficult, but it did not induce panic. Not except for the dreaded outcrop that had to be conquered. It was like climbing a nice, straight, cooperative wall, when all of a sudden, the wall juts out above you. I don't remember how I did it, but I made it around that bump, somehow climbing upside down, hanging on like a fly.

As I write this, I can't for the life of me remember the names of all my fellow adventurers. I remember Denny Brown, John Akers and Tom (something), but I am sure there were one or two more of us. I have searched the Internet for John and Denny, but they are needles in a very large haystack. A lot has happened since that day in the hills of Australia. I have lived in many towns in three different states. How can we ever find each other? Once we left Australia, I never heard from any of them again. There is a lesson to be learned here about looking up friends, writing letters, keeping in touch.

So here I am, 25 years later, reaching out through the Internet, trying to reconnect with the past. I started with one of the search facilities available on the net, and had the system scan the world for references to "Western Australia". I actually started searching for references more specific, like "Exmouth" and "North West Cape", but to no avail. Eventually, I landed on the "home page" ( the Internet equivalent of the Visitor's Center) for the city of Fremantle on the west coast of Australia. Fremantle is about 700 miles south of The Cape. There was information about cultural attractions, restaurants, etc., but no mention of Exmouth or The Northwest Cape.

This homepage had, as do many others, a method of leaving a message for the caretakers. I told them of my quest and hoped for the best. A day or two later, I received e-mail messages from a man named Mal East and from his sister, Janine Doornbusch. The live in Perth, Western Australia, which is near Fremantle. It turns out that the people at the Fremantle homepage forwarded my message requesting information about Exmouth, to several other newsgroups in Australia. Mal happened to stumble on my letter and responded. His family lived in Exmouth for many years and he was glad to share information about the town. He told me in passing that he was an avid spelunker (cave explorer). I wrote back and told him of my adventures back in 1970. What happened next was, to me, simply amazing! Mal told me that some members of his caving club had journeyed down that very same shaft, 17 years after we left our aluminum memorial at the bottom. Low and behold, the plaque was still there! They were amazed at their find. The panel was immediately deemed historic and sacred. The team agreed to leave it in place. They copied the inscription and left. As far as he knows, Mal thinks the plaque is still there to this day, 25 years later. Since that message from Mal, I have had a burning desire to find my cave mates and share the news with them. I would also like to return to Exmouth for a long visit. although returning to the caves may be limited to the less difficult ones. Perhaps some now have an automated walkway to take you through on a guided tour. Maybe there are motorized carts ala Jurasic Park for us tourists over 40. I hope not. I hope everything is the same as it was 25 years ago. I am told that The Cape has become a bit of a tourist spot. It seems that the Ningaloo Reef (as it is now called) makes for some nice vacationing. The Japanese are starting to take advantage of this fact. The U.S. Navy turned the base over to the Australian Navy in the 1980's and thus most of the Americans are long gone. 

Late Note: Since I wrote this essay two years ago, I have learned that the caver who found our plaque removed it and its whereabouts is now unknown. It was removed because the general feeling is that the caves should be left natural and intact, free of foreign objects and graffiti. At first I was saddened by the fact that our adventure was "violated", but I have decided that removing the plaque was the correct thing to do. I suppose if everyone left a plaque in every cave, what a mess we would have! But then again, how many people will be going down C-3 of the Cape Range, at Exmouth, Western Australia? We are talking, "Isolated"! Our plaque was in no way disrespectful of the environment. But, my adventure may soon be published in the W.A. Speleological Group annual journal, "The Western Caver".

John Berthoty November 28, 1996
 
 

Go see Mal Easts' photos of Cape Range caves!