When the explorers of 1935 lit their lamps inside Abrakurrie Cave, the light could not reach the far walls. They were standing in a chamber said to be the largest in the southern hemisphere, hundreds of metres long and tall enough to lose the ceiling in shadow, carved out of the rock beneath a plain so flat it looks like the floor of a vanished sea, which is exactly what it once was. To photograph the place, they posed members of the party as specks against the stone, and even then the pictures could barely contain it.
Abrakurrie lies about 48 kilometres northwest of Eucla, reached through country with no roads and no water. Its reputation rests on sheer volume. The 1935 expedition led by Captain Thompson described a cave roughly 366 metres long, 49 metres wide and 46 metres deep, then pushed further still, finding the passage forked, one branch running another 450 metres or so to a huge cavern. The result is a single underground space on a scale that defies the featureless plain above it, and it is this great chamber that earns Abrakurrie its claim as the largest cave chamber south of the equator.
Long before any surveyor arrived, people came here in the dark and left their mark on the walls. Abrakurrie holds Aboriginal hand stencils that represent the deepest penetration of Aboriginal art of any cave system in Australia, made farther from daylight than in any other Australian cave. These are the Nullarbor lands of the Mirning people, whose connection to this Country reaches back across thousands of generations, and whose name itself carries the sense of listening, learning, and understanding. To stand where these stencils were made, far underground in total darkness, is to grasp how deliberately and how long ago this place was known and honoured.
European visitors found their way down as early as the 1880s, and by the time Thompson's party arrived in 1935 the cave was already part of Nullarbor lore. Their photographs, with tiny human figures dwarfed by the stone, ran in Australian newspapers that year and helped fix Abrakurrie in the public imagination as one of the wonders hidden beneath the plain. By the 1960s it was a well-documented cave, mapped and described, though no description on paper quite prepares a visitor for the moment the walls fall away into that enormous dark.
The Nullarbor is the world's largest single block of limestone, laid down when this whole region lay beneath a shallow ocean. The animals and shells of that sea hardened into rock, and over millions of years water dissolved the rock from within, hollowing out chambers like Abrakurrie. So the cave is, in a real sense, the inside of an ancient seabed, opened up and made walkable. Above, the plain runs treeless to the horizon under a vast sky. Below, in a silence broken only by your own footsteps, the great chamber holds the cool, unmoving air of a world that has not seen the sun in all its existence.
Abrakurrie Cave lies at roughly 31.66 degrees south, 128.49 degrees east, on the Nullarbor Plain in Western Australia, about 48 kilometres northwest of Eucla and inland from the Great Australian Bight. The cave is entirely underground, with no surface structure visible from the air; the surrounding terrain is unbroken pale limestone with no roads or vegetation. The nearest airfield is Eucla Airport (YECL) to the southeast, a remote strip used chiefly by the Royal Flying Doctor Service, with Forrest Airport (YFRT) farther to the west-northwest. Visibility over the plain is normally excellent, but the absence of landmarks makes navigation here a matter of instruments rather than sight.