Tasmania's caves are the country's deepest. While the massive limestone karst system stretching across hundreds of kilometres of the Nullabor Plain is renowned for spanning two states, at 90 metres deep they are relatively shallow. "There has been hunger for wild cave tours." "In modern times what happened in tourist caves was a much more scientific approach the ecology of a cave - how things formed and the process of it. "In the 70s and onwards there was complete change," Dr Haygarth said. Rolan Eberhard drops into a waterfall pitch in the section of Junee Cave known as Khazad-Dum in Mount Field National Park. "They put in acetylene lighting system, they applied fantastical names to cave features they made it family friendly and child friendly." When the cave opened in 1907 it was the first of its kind - a private cave tourism venture. Scotts Cave, run by the Scott family at Mole Creeks tapped into the underground fantasy idea. They were also fond of entertaining the cave visitor, inviting them to scrawl signatures on walls and to play stalactites like a xylophone. The Victorian era was dominated by the "aesthetics of the sublime" and the thrill of danger, Dr Haygarth said, but there was also an attraction to fantasy worlds, which some pioneers tapped into. "You had to have a sense of adventure, but the magnificence of the stalactites, the features, the ornamentation of the cave always fascinates, there's also this romance attached with going underground." "Knee-deep or waist deep in water, that's the caving experience in the 19th century." Cavers are dwarfed by the stalagmite dubbed the Khan which stands 18 metres tall.
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