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20/03/2005: "South Australia's fresh water springs"

Valerie Taylor decending into Piccaninnie Ponds, Tanya Binning snorkels on the surface. One of the first 35mm stills to win an International Photo Comp in the sixties.

Ron Taylor stopped off at these ponds while returning from a Kangaroo Island (SA) spearfishing championship in January 1964 and did brilliant pictures with his bride, Valerie, (diving without a wetsuit in the cold crystal clear springs).

And so began several years of photography and filming in the region where numerous limestone caves and sink holes offered a new world of underwater adventure.

In 1966 a 16mm uw documentary "The Cave Divers" was sponsored by .......(ahem)... tobacco company WD & HO Wills for free hire from their library. It shows many uw photogenic dives possible in the Mt Gambier area of South Australia. The Pines, Hell's Hole, Ewen Ponds, Piccaninnie Ponds, The Shaft.

The next year a tobacco company, Rothmans, commissioned a 35mm theatre commercial (based on the content of that first Ron Taylor documentary) titled The Hands of Man. It was to re-creat discoveries made in underground water-filled springs at The Pines - where the high-calcium content water was preserving bones of extinct species of kangaroo.

The same uw team was hired along with an above water crew of more than thirty film production people. It was a BIG project over several days with truck-loads of gear from Sydney.

But the expensive production never saw the light of day. Axed before completion. The fickle world of advertising.

In the following years several tragedies occured, in one terrible example three young divers (two from the same Sydney family) were lost in the infamous location The Shaft. More about this location eventually.