In late 1996, during my first journey to Australia, I visited the famous Naracoorte Caves.  If you have not yet read the section of this site which discusses the great significance of these caves to our understanding of Australia's Pleistocene vertebrates, then please do so to become better familiarized with this background information.  The following is a condensed account of my trip to the caves.

Arrival in New South Wales:

    While my native continent of North America contains countless natural wonders of its own, it seems it has always been the natural history of Australia that has most fascinated me.  A journey to Australia was something that I had been looking forward to since my youth, and in October of 1996, this finally became a reality.

    It was early spring in Australia, and though the sun was bright, the weather in New South Wales was still rather cool, especially at night.  After arriving in Sydney, the first item on my itinerary was a visit to the Australian Museum.  Several days later, I went west by train into rural NSW, to meet a fellow naturalist who prepares palaeontological exhibits for museums and various other natural history venues.  I had arrived rather late in the day, and the next morning, I had a look around the local area - a landscape of hills interspersed with pastoral land and orchards.  Though obviously altered long ago by the removal of much of the original vegetation, there remained an abundance of old Eucalyptus trees.  Around the the hilltops were scattered many ancient, lichen-covered boulders, some of which were the size of a small house.  Swamp wallabies (Wallabia bicolor) could often be seen moving amongst them.

    After a several-day tour of some of the fossil exhibits he had organized at various locations in NSW, my colleague suggested that we make a road trip west via the Great Ocean Road, and possibly even go far enough to see one of Australia's most important Pleistocene fossil sites, The Naracoorte Caves.  I was still feeling a bit overwhelmed by all that I had seen in Australia in just my first week in the country, and when the possibility of a trip to Naracoorte presented, it added a whole new dimension to my journey.  Having a keen interest in Pleistocene mammals, especially those of Australia, the Victoria Fossil Cave of Naracoorte had long been on my mind as a place I knew I must visit someday.  I had been aware of the existence of this cave since 1979, when I saw British naturalist David Attenborough in the cave's fossil chamber in his landmark television series "Life on Earth".  At that time, the cave had not yet been widened for palaeontological excavation, and it took an hour and a half of crawling through a narrow passage to reach the chamber.