Time Tunnel

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Glenn Shaw leans back against a huge fallen eucalypt, shaking his head. "I feel no need to go in," he says, black beanie pulled down low against the chill. "I'll just sit here and listen to the scrub." Wind roars in the canopy above and the sullen Tasmanian winter sky threatens rain or worse. In layers of thermals, waterproof trousers and parkas, gloves sodden from slippery branches, Shaw and other members of the local Aboriginal community have scrambled for an hour through steep rainforest to reach this spot in the island's wild southwest. Here at the base of a rough limestone bluff, half-hidden by the immense arching fronds of tree ferns, a dark cave mouth gapes crookedly, big enough to admit a man almost upright. But Shaw, the head of the Tasmanian Aboriginal Land Council, suddenly feels uneasy - not about the bugs or the damp, but about the ancestors who gathered in the cavern's gloom, perhaps tens of thousands of years ago, and left their marks on its walls.

Cavers joke that Tasmania is almost hollow, a speleologist's paradise with as much wilderness to explore below ground as above. But while caves are plentiful, caves containing rock art are not. That's why the location of this cave is so closely guarded: since it was found in 2002 by a caver surveying the area for foresters, only a handful of people have seen inside it. So sensitive is the land council about tipping off sightseers and vandals to the cave's whereabouts that a condition of Time's visit is that not even the name of the closest town be mentioned.

In preserving its secret, the Aboriginal community's best ally is the landscape itself, a maze of outcrops, winding valleys and steep-sided natural depressions so baffling that one of Shaw's staff recently spent a night lost in it. And for what's under the ground here, in this part of what cave biologist Arthur Clarke calls "the underworld," there are no maps at all. Cavers tend to "look at their feet and not at the walls, so there could be other art work down there," Clarke says as he adjusts his hard hat before going inside. Years of studying the spiders, beetles, aquatic snails and other invertebrates that shun the sunlit world have led Clarke into many of Tasmania's darkest corners, often by very uncomfortable routes. So for a caver who thinks nothing of slithering on his belly along an underground tunnel just wide enough to fit his body, with only his head above water - "we call it roof sniffing," he says - the entrance he's plunging into is like a portico.

Inside, the cave floor slopes away in the dim light to a wide and uneven ledge before dropping abruptly into a large chamber which curves away out of sight. The only sound is of water dripping somewhere. As he crouches on the slimy ledge among the slender tips of stalactites, the torch light suddenly catches splashes of color on the chamber's far side. There are about 15 stencils, some in such a rich russet they almost glow against the pale limestone, silhouettes of adult hands both left and right, one with a forearm also stenciled, several others with curiously stunted splayed fingers, and some partly obscured by a serrated fringe of stalactites. The unmistakable outline of a child's hand sits slightly apart from and lower than the others, so vivid that it might have been finished this morning.

Hand stencils have been found in only three other caves in Tasmania's spectacularly rugged southwest, all reachable by only the keenest of bushwalkers. Dating of those discovered in 1986 in Ballawinne cave, in the Maxwell Valley, provided the first proof that rock art in Australia had survived from the last Ice Age, which ended roughly 10,000 years ago. Tasmania was then joined to the Australian mainland by a land bridge, and though the island's stencils may not be as old as Arnhem Land's tableaux of long-limbed spirits, or as elaborate as the red spectral figures of the Kimberley region's Bradshaw paintings, they still inspire wonder, for the Ice Age hunters and their families here were living further south than anyone else then on the planet. Today this cave entrance looks west over a gully choked with soaring swamp gums and mottled dogwood trees, fallen logs and bark rotting at their feet under a damp smothering of moss, red mushrooms and the thick mulch of autumn's deluge of leaves. But if this art does date to the last Ice Age, its guardians - their bodies probably rubbed with a mixture of ocher and animal fat against the cold - would have looked out on a much barer world. Until, that is, the climate warmed and dense rainforest spread like an incoming tide, forcing people from their caves and gullies into the open areas where prey roamed - even as rising seas drowned their only link to the rest of the world and began their long isolation.