Qualla: Koonalda Cave

Koonalda Cave: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

More than twenty thousand years ago, in total darkness, people walked half a kilometre into the heart of the Nullarbor and reached up to touch the wall. They dragged their fingers through the soft, chalky limestone, leaving long curving grooves in the rock, and they chipped flint from the seams to carry back into the light. They did this by firelight, far from any entrance, in a place that has no daylight and never will. The grooves are still there. Koonalda Cave holds one of the world's greatest displays of these markings, called finger flutings, and it is among the oldest and most precious records of human life on the Australian continent. To the Mirning people and the Far West Coast peoples who are its traditional owners, it is not a site. It is sacred.

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Koonalda Cave: Into the Dark

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Koonalda is not an easy place to enter, and was never meant to be. The cave opens through a vast doline, a steep-sided sinkhole some 80 metres across, its floor falling away around 80 metres below the plain on a slope of tumbled boulders. Beyond the daylight zone, the cave runs o...

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Koonalda Cave: A Record in Stone

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Western archaeologists came to Koonalda only in 1956; the cave had been excavated through the 1960s by Sandor Gallus, whose trenches revealed worked flint, charcoal, bone tools and the bones of animals layered deep in the cave floor. Dating the deposits has yielded ages stretchin...

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Koonalda Cave: The Living Owners

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

It would be a mistake to speak of Koonalda only in the past tense. The cave is sacred to the Mirning people and the Far West Coast peoples, whose connection to this country was never broken and continues today. Australia has recognised the site's significance in law for decades. ...

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Koonalda Cave: Grief in the Dark

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In June 2022, someone forced their way in. Vandals breached the barriers protecting Koonalda, made their way deep into the passages, and scrawled graffiti across walls that hold markings more than twenty thousand years old, including the words "don't look now, but this is a death...

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