Gundungurra history print

For tens of thousands of years, Jenolan has been part of the culture of the local Indigenous people.  This beautiful and mysterious place holds special significance to the Gundungurra people who knew it as 'Binomil' or 'Bin-oo-mur'.  According to Gundungurra Elder, Old Jimmy Lynch, who lived the latter part of his life in the Gully in Katoomba until his death in 1913:

"The old natives knew the caves.  They penetrated them as far as the subterranean water, carrying sick people to be bathed in this water, which they belived to have great curative powers.  Sick people were carried there from considerable distances."

Gundungurra people's knowledge of the caves goes back a long way, as there is a dreamtime creation story about how this whole countryside came into being.  The story describes an almighty struggle between two ancestral creator spirits, one a giant eel-like creature, Gurangatch, an incarnation of the ancestral rainbow serpent, and the other , a large native cat or quoll, Mirrangan.  The scuffle resulted in the gouging out of the land to form the river systems of the Cox and Wollondillly Rivers, much of which is now under Sydney's water storage lake behind Warragamba Dam.  In this dreamtime creation story, Gurangatch and Mirragan visited Jenolan as well as Wombeyan (Whambeyan) Caves which were already part of the landscape.
 

 

© 2010 Jenolan Caves Reserve Trust
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