Mount Gambier (Wk 17)

On 04/03/2020 we left Victoria (although we will return at the latter end of our trip) crossing into South Australia to visit the Limestone Coast. Wow love Mount Gambier. It has everything a geologist would want but in lay-mans terms: volcanos, water-filled caves, sinkholes and blue lakes to name but a few. And it has beautiful parks and gardens, stately homes and heritage buildings.

As soon as we arrived at the Mount Gambier showgrounds we visited the Umpherston Sinkhole. I was expecting to see a large hole but what we found was a sunken garden created by James Umpherston. The sinkhole was on a farm which he purchased in 1864 and then he began work on creating the gardens. There was a lake at the bottom of the hole but as the farming sector grew the water table subsided and the lake dried up. Hard to see in the pictures that the sinkhole is 20m deep and 50m across.

In the town centre there is another sinkhole, Cave Garden, which was the original water source for the town and is surrounded by a beautiful rose garden. Would love to see the waterfall into the sinkhole which runs after the winter rain. The Cave Garden complex also featured an hour long video about how the area was formed when Australia broke away from Antarctica. Fascinating.

Today (05/02/2020) we went on a tour of Englebrecht Cave which consists of a sinkhole with two major passages (The east passage which extends about 70m from the sinkholes opening, leads to a lake where a water-filled passage leads to an air chamber. The west passage which extends about 300m is only accessible by cave diving for the majority of its length and includes a major air chamber) located under the town. It’s amazing seeing the cave system superimposed onto the streets above (should have taken a picture…). 

The tour goes into each passage and includes seeing the water which is incredibly clear almost translucent. The depth is far greater than you think visibly (the illuminated edge below runs down to 8m).

We then visited Blue Lake a crater lake located in a dormant (luckily) volcanic crate: huge (surface area: 70 hectares, circumference: 5 km, depth: 70 m, volume: 36,000 million litres) and blue. It is the water source for Mount Gambier using 3,600 million litres annually.

Then a quick visit to Mount Schank (a 100 m high volcanic cone south of Mount Gambier) and Port MacDonnell (the ‘beach’ for Mount Gambier).

Tomorrow we head to the coast for the Labour Day weekend staying at Kingston SE. Hoping for some R&R and maybe a dip in the sea :-).