‘All that variety that can please the eye’

By the time British colonizers became aware of Binoomea in the late 1830s, following the explorations of a local farmer and landowner,¹³ there was already a well-established and fashionable tourism practice surrounding caves in Britain, with those in the Peak District (such as Poole’s Hole and Peak Cavern) sustaining a robust tourist trade.¹⁴ Early visitors’ accounts of Jenolan thus tended to be framed in terms of imported discourses of tourism, travel, and exploration. For instance, Julia Horne notes that Australian nature tourism — including visits to Jenolan — often adopted the aesthetic discourses of ‘the sublime’ and ‘the picturesque’.¹⁵ But in addition to these conventions, accounts and mediations of the caves also drew on visual technologies and entertainments that were popular in Victorian Britain at the time.

For instance, George Rawson’s written account of his 1882 trip to Binoomea makes sense of the limestone formations, not through prior experience of caves or the natural world, but rather by reference to a magic lantern show.¹⁶ Visiting Jenolan before the permanent installation of electric light, Rawson mentions Cracknell’s electric experiment, pointing out its potential to ‘turn [the caverns] into palaces the most dazzling’ (p. 54). He seems to have been particularly interested in the way light played upon the formations, apparent in his description of a chamber he calls ‘The Shawl Cave’:

[Our leader] turned the light upon the wall to our right, & we saw what appeared to be a shawl loosely pinned to the wall, falling in loose folds at first sight it appeared like a sheet for a magic lantern performance of which the Magnesian instrument with its reflector served well for a lantern, revealing afterwards the greater richness and the beautiful blending of the colors. (pp. 41–42)

In Rawson’s magic lantern comparison, the thin, flat speleothems called shawls become the screen, while the guide’s magnesium burner serves as the lantern.¹⁷ His analogy effectively turns the impulse of this projection device back upon itself, with the natural formations figured as a rough simulacrum of the technological apparatus. While Rawson here draws on the long history of the magic lantern — invented in the seventeenth century and remaining a popular form of entertainment throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth — the Binoomea caves are increasingly interpreted via a suite of visual technologies and attractions that are even more distinctly Victorian.¹⁸

Rawson’s next description, for instance, draws on the nineteenth-century visual spectacle of the world fair. Taking his lead from the name of the large chamber called ‘The Exhibition’, Rawson notes that

scattered around were rocks standing in the gloom like statues. […] By the aid of the extra light […] we could see more clearly these curiously shaped statues one having the appearance of a great man sitting in an easy posture, it was large and seemed roughly carved. (p. 42)

His description evokes the sculpture-lined arcades of the Crystal Palace of the Great Exhibition or, looking closer to home, Melbourne’s International Exhibition of 1880, held just two years before Rawson’s trip to Binoomea. With a tidy symmetry that speaks to the prevalence of these cultural forms, the Melbourne exhibition was also where the electrically lit photographs of the caves were first displayed, and their photographer — Ludovico Hart — went on to take images of the event later that same year. If we compare the photographs Hart took of the cave to those of the Melbourne exhibition, it becomes clear that he, too, was struck by the equivalence between the stalagmites and classical sculptural forms (Fig. 4). Just as the exhibition provided figurative imagery for depicting the caves, the caves in turn provided images for display at the exhibition. Records and mediations of Jenolan were thus both shaped by and fed back into popular forms of visual culture in nineteenth-century Australia.¹⁹

Fig. 4

Ludovico Hart and Ferdinand Roux, Madonna in the Helena Cave, Fish River Caves, New South Wales, (c. 1880). National Library of Australia (left); Ludovico Hart, ‘Italian Court Melbourne International Exhibition’ (1880). State Library of Victoria (right).

Electric lighting became another key visual attraction for Binoomea in the nineteenth century. The electric telegraph had arrived in Australia in 1854, but electric light technology was still in its infancy.²⁰ As guides like to tell visitors today (with only a slight sense of hyperbole) people would visit Jenolan, not to see the caves, but to see the light bulbs. Electricity was, indeed, synonymous with the new and the marvellous, or, to use the technology’s own lexicon, with excitement, charge, and attraction.²¹ As Kate Flint observes, this was most evident when manifested in the visual phenomenon of light:

Electricity became one of the most notable elements in [the] late nineteenth-century category of wonder, alongside bridges, skyscrapers, railroad engineering, and factories. It was used to enhance natural features, as with the Niagara Falls illuminations that helped dissolve any clear distinction between natural and artificial sites; its lighting was ‘a visual representation of the new force’ that powered factories, communication systems, and urban living, and it featured prominently in the great expositions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, where again lines between nature and technology were deliberately blurred.²²

Pointing to electricity’s association with the affective ‘category of wonder’, Flint’s reference to its function at Niagara Falls — ‘enhanc[ing] natural features’ and ‘dissolv[ing] any clear distinction between natural and artificial sites’ — is equally applicable to Binoomea.²³ There is a clear reciprocity at work in such pairings, where the spectacle of the caves lends itself to the spectacle of electric light and vice versa, and, in the process, both elements are shown to advantage. Flint’s description also notes the association between electricity and world fairs, one that is exemplified, again, by the display of the electrically lit cave images at the Melbourne exhibition.

Given electricity’s power to connote industrial and technological development — Flint aligns it with skyscrapers, railroads, and factories — it also becomes a kind of visible marker used for fashioning aspirational narratives of Australian modernity. For instance, when electric streetlights were installed in the western New South Wales rural town of Tamworth in 1888 the Sydney Morning Herald reported that the town had ‘outstripped all competition in the race for colonial progress’.²⁴ Cracknell’s electrical experiment in the caves mobilized a similar narrative logic. Binoomea is around two hundred kilometres from Sydney, and visiting in 1880 involved a five-hour train journey across the Blue Mountains, an eight-hour overland trip from the last station, and a vertiginous final descent into the valley itself.²⁵ The experiment also required eighteen 40-kilogram batteries to be hauled up and down the steep and winding passages of the caves and loaded with battery acid in situ, which reportedly produced so much noxious gas that, at one point, emergency evacuation became necessary.²⁶ These enormous practical impediments suggest that the underlying motivations for the experiment were perhaps more figurative than they were functional.

While electric light in this remote setting seems to disrupt some of the spatial relationships between centre and periphery that often govern technological development — fulfilling in unexpected ways Marshall McLuhan’s assertion that ‘electricity does not centralise, but decentralises’ — the lighting of Binoomea more explicitly obeys other spatial logics of colonization.²⁷ Cracknell’s experiment is, after all, a very audacious and literal attempt to illuminate one of the dark places at the edge of Empire. In this respect, it conforms to a paradigmatic historical narrative that, as Chris Otter puts it, ‘depicts “Western modernity” in terms of the relentless expansion of illumination’.²⁸ This conformation is only exacerbated if we think of the conventional association of colonized territory with the female body and of caves with female genitalia.²⁹ With these connotations in view, the illumination of Jenolan starts to exemplify the colonizer’s false dream of penetrating and enlightening deep, ‘virgin passages’.³⁰

A similar impulse is evident in the way photography is deployed in rendering the caves visible. Underground spaces were a significant experimental frontier for nineteenth-century photographers. As Flint notes in Flash!, ‘the questions of how to take photographs in complete darkness — say, in a cave or coal mine — […] raised a very different set of technical challenges’ (p. 9). The photographs Hart produced in the Binoomea experiment were a notable improvement in quality on the handful of cave images taken at other sites around the world, because the electric lighting meant he did not have to worry about the obscuring haze of magnesium oxide that had marred earlier efforts (see Figs 2, 3).³¹ Thus again, there is a reciprocity at work in bringing the camera into these caves. While the pictures promote the aesthetic qualities of Binoomea, the dark caves provided a site for the demonstration of technological prowess, showing how this light-based medium could even operate in places where there is no natural light.³² Yet there seems to be more at stake than technical development in the capturing of these images. Reflecting on photography’s imbrication with tourism, Peter Osborne outlines the medium’s role in ‘making things available (disponible), putting them at the disposal of the viewer’. He describes how this ‘phenomenon made possible Victorian photography’s primary imperial role of naturalising “the quality of disponibilité” by giving it “objective” visual form’.³³ Applying Osborne’s logic to Hart’s photographs, in rendering the caves visible, they also render them ‘available’. The taking of the pictures could thus be said to repeat the taking of the land in which the caves lie. With this in mind, as contemporary visitors, we could perhaps start to relinquish some of our imperialist impulses to see and to know, by momentarily sitting with the caves’ darkness, or at least giving over some of our insistence on illumination and photographic capture.

Feeding into this history of invasion at Binoomea was the way early written accounts often perpetuated the idea that Indigenous peoples of New South Wales were ‘frightened by, and avoided’ caves with significant dark zones.³⁴ In reality, as Andy Spate observes, the archaeological record suggests that karst landscapes were put to a range of different uses, with evidence of mortuary sites, art sites, and occasionally, occupation sites.³⁵ At Binoomea, Gundungurra peoples are reported to have visited the caves to access their subterranean water. The Gundungurra man Billy Lynch stated in an 1896 interview for the Sydney Mail that the water was thought to have curative properties, and sick people were brought there for bathing.³⁶ Binoomea is also a key site in the Gundungurra peoples’ gun-yunggalung, which describes the formation of the Wollondilly and Cox’s River region of the Blue Mountains.³⁷ It tells of a prolonged chase and contest that took place between Gurrangatch (part fish, part reptile) and Mirragan (a quoll or tiger cat), and which shaped some of the prominent features of the landscape. The caves are where Gurrangatch hid from Mirragan, taking a much needed rest in the course of this grand pursuit.³⁸

The early intimations that Indigenous peoples avoided karst caves because they were ‘afraid of the dark’ carries a clear sense of infantilization and, as Juanita Feros Ruys notes, it served to perpetuate the foundational colonial myth of Australia as terra nullius, or ‘land owned by no one’.³⁹ Exploring the racial and cultural connotations of dark and light as they pertain to the caves, Ruys posits that their darkness was often employed to signify those othered by British culture, a group in which she includes ‘Indigenous people[s], bushrangers, convicts, even the Devil’ (p. 183). Building on Ruys’s list, we might also point to the nineteenth-century association of caves and grottoes with fairies and the occult, especially given the possible intimations of the coloured lights set up at Jenolan in 1893. This association can speak further to unresolved concerns around dispossession for, noting a connection between fairy tales and landscape in Australian literature, Lisa Fiander posits that ‘writers are most likely to draw upon’ the genre when dealing with ‘a subject that generates anxiety in their culture’, and with ‘those things that they are afraid of — or are afraid of losing’.⁴⁰

Where eyes ‘have no function’

With this imperialist history of electric light and photography at Binoomea in mind, it may be useful to explore possible avenues through which visitor engagement with the caves might be extended beyond visuality and sightseeing. Alice Barnaby’s Light Touches is useful when thinking in this direction. Observing that light ‘carries on its waves emotional as well as photonic pulses’, Barnaby suggests that we should avoid simply ‘equat[ing] light with sight’, and instead also stay alert to how ‘practices of lighting (and thus visuality) [generate] experiences of sensual and tactile engagement with, rather than separation from, the world’.⁴¹ Her suggestion seems especially pertinent to any discussion of light at Binoomea. For while its recent history of illumination is, in large part, a history of visual spectacle and technology, its electric lighting has long been doing other things as well.

The contemporary lighting demonstration in Chifley Cave — that takes the visitor from darkness, to carbon-filament bulb, to coloured lights, to modern LED — builds a loose historical narrative that moves from the nineteenth century to the present day, framing the current ethos and emphasis on ‘naturalism’. The chronology of the display also carries an implied teleology, one that suggests we have now arrived at the optimal lighting strategy.⁴² With respect to environmental impact and energy efficiency, this is largely true, for artificial light can have many detrimental effects on sensitive cave environments. Before the introduction of electricity, candles shed wax and smoke, and magnesium burners gave off abundant fumes.⁴³ While incandescent electric bulbs produced less conspicuous pollutants, they still create heat and light, giving rise to ‘lampenoflora’, photosynthetic organisms that could not otherwise grow in a dark cave.⁴⁴ Modern LED counterparts are less productive of heat, but their brightness still disturbs an ecosystem finely tuned to darkness. The teleology thus envisages today’s visitor to Jenolan as an environmentally responsible subject who will appreciate a lighting scheme that better respects the natural qualities of the caves. Regarding the cultural and aesthetic history of the site, the narrative is more open to debate, and we should remain aware of the potential erasures that a lighting ethos of ‘naturalism’ involves.

Indeed, an important subtext of the Chifley lighting display is the illustration of the highly constructed nature of the experience of light and vision at the caves. Interestingly, it is probably the use of darkness and coloured lights that speaks most loudly of this constructedness. The potential of darkness is noted by Penny Davidson in her novel qualitative study of cave guiding and interpretation in Australia, which offers useful insight into the contemporary visitor experience at Binoomea. Davidson suggests that ‘the absence of vision is a powerful component of the cave experience’ (p. 38), and that guides can employ it as a means of redirecting visitor perception:

The guide makes a conscious effort to move beyond a focus on visual engagement in order to stimulate other senses for the visitor. For example, the cave guide can ask the group to be silent and listen, they can control the light and take away vision, and by limiting other sensory stimuli they can introduce the visitor to the haptic (sense of touch) experience of constant temperature and enclosed spaces. (pp. 35–36)

Darkness is here deployed as a means of returning visitors to their other senses, of making them aware of their embodiment and the unique space they occupy. Davidson goes on to suggest that this practice in cave interpretation is part of a broader ‘shift from a cognitive and visual emphasis to valuing the multi-sensual and emotional nature of the visitor experience’, a move towards a wider recognition of the importance of ‘the body in tourism’ (pp. 39, 38).

Entering a cave has, indeed, always been an embodied, and not just a visual, act. While direct tactile engagement at Binoomea is now necessarily governed by prohibitions against touching the fragile speleothems (which used to be routinely snapped off and souvenired by tourists), there remains a notably haptic and kinetic dimension to the experience. Visitors do not stand and look at the caves from a distance, they stand inside them and move through them. In the process of this moving through, they must accommodate their body to the cave, crouching below formations, climbing or descending where required. Notwithstanding the Victorians’ clear preoccupation with the visual, they seem to have understood something of this physical dimension, as suggested by the fact that the very first photograph taken in a natural cave was done in stereoscope. As one of the ‘desired effects’ of stereoscopy noted by Jonathan Crary was ‘immediate, apparent tangibility’ (pp. 122, 124, emphasis in original), this first stereo photo serves to acknowledge the fact that caves have depth. Today, this attempt at simulating depth is recalled in the delightfully kitsch holographic postcards of speleothems still on sale at the Jenolan Caves visitor centre.⁴⁵

As well as Binoomea’s powerful darkness, its coloured lights have the potential to usefully unsettle visitor perception in the way Davidson describes. With a design that tints different formations in different colours, they are reminiscent of popular contemporary light festivals, such as Sydney’s annual VIVID event. In Tim Edensor’s examination of such festivals, he refutes the common criticism of their being substanceless, neoliberal spectacles, instead exploring their capacity for ‘re-enchantment’.⁴⁶ Edensor outlines their ability to ‘stimulate critical awareness about the specificity of perception, promote interrogation of the normative uses and meanings of place, bring to mind forgotten histories and neglected spaces, and generate conviviality and playfulness in otherwise lackluster places’ (p. 137). While I would not describe Binoomea as ‘lackluster’, it has had to contend with the side effects of long-term, mass tourism, and Horne acknowledges that it ‘may have lost the freshness of novelty’ for Australians.⁴⁷ The past two decades have seen a decline in international and overnight visitor numbers at Jenolan, a reduction that has only been exacerbated by multiple and prolonged shutdown periods due to floods, bushfires, and the global pandemic.⁴⁸ With these significant challenges in mind, lighting that promotes the kind of ‘re-enchantment’ and ‘playfulness’ Edensor describes could be of value. Among the list of effects he attributes to light festivals, I would single out the capacity to ‘promote interrogation of the normative uses and meanings of place, [and to] bring to mind forgotten histories’, as being particularly relevant in the colonial context of Binoomea. Perhaps the play of darkness, light, and colour could help to shift visitors out of our perceptual complacency, encouraging us to reflect on what it has meant, and continues to mean, to stand in these caves.

When tourists descended on Binoomea in the nineteenth century, the site became enmeshed in a broader Victorian visual culture. This involved a complex interplay of nature and visual technologies, as devices like the electric light bulb and the camera mediated a widespread engagement with the caves. At the same time, these manifestations of visual culture clearly perpetuated processes of dispossession. Even though relinquishing visual authority would not alter the ongoing implications of colonization at the caves, by disrupting or challenging visitor perception, it might help to stimulate greater awareness of the intertwined histories of lighting and imperialism. While light and vision have historically dominated perceptions of the caves, it might now be the rarer experience of darkness and visual occlusion that proves most illuminating.

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.