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South Australia.

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The twenty-eighth of May, nineteen seventy-three.

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Four divers are on their way up through a flooded cavern, four hundred and sixty feet long.

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Below them, in the dark, they can see two torches.

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They are not coming up the slope toward the way out.

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They have gone straight up instead, into a dome in the ceiling of the cave.

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There is no way out of the dome.

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The two beams sweep back and forth across the rock, fast.

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One of the divers makes a signal.

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It means: we are lost.

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This is Caving Stories: Cave Diving. True stories from flooded caves, told from the record.

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Today, a sinkhole in a farmer's paddock in South Australia, known as The Shaft.

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Eight divers went into it. Four came back.

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The country around Mount Gambier, in the south-east corner of South Australia, is limestone. And the limestone is full of water.

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In nineteen thirty-eight, on a farm near the township of Allendale East, a horse put its foot into a hole in the ground about a foot across.

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Under the hole was a drop of about twenty-three feet to the surface of a lake.

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The hole was later widened, to about three feet, so that a person could get through it.

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The first divers went in during the nineteen sixties, and reached about seventy feet.

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What they found, as the exploration went on, was enormous.

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The main chamber is about four hundred and sixty feet long, and two hundred and sixty feet wide.

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All of it is underwater.

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All of it is under a roof of rock.

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On a clear day, a single beam of sunlight comes down through the hole in the paddock and stands in the water like a pillar.

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That beam gave the place its name: The Shaft.

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Directly under the hole, about a hundred and thirty feet down, is a mound of broken limestone. Divers call it the rock pile.

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From the rock pile, the floor slopes away on every side.

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One tunnel goes down to about two hundred and sixty feet.

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Another has been followed to more than four hundred.

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Away from the sunbeam, there is no light at all.

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And the slopes are covered in loose silt.

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By nineteen seventy-three, it is estimated, about eight thousand dives had been made in The Shaft.

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It had a reputation as a place you could dive safely, as long as you stayed at the rock pile.

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On the twenty-sixth of May, nineteen seventy-three, a party of nine arrived at the farm, and signed the visitors' book at the farmhouse.

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Eight of them were there to dive: John Bockerman, Peter Burr, Christine Millott, Glen Millott, Stephen Millott, Larry Reynolds, Gordon Roberts, and Robert Smith.

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The ninth, Joan Harper, stayed at the surface, and kept hot soup ready for the divers.

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They were not beginners. They described themselves as experienced, and four of the eight were diving instructors.

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But the coroner would later make a distinction.

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None of them, he found, was experienced in diving sinkholes.

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Their equipment was the ordinary equipment of the time.

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A wetsuit, and a weight belt.

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One torch each, and not a powerful one.

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A cylinder of air with a single regulator.

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Most divers then had no pressure gauge. Instead, the cylinder had a reserve valve, worked by hand: when breathing became hard, you pulled a lever, and you had a little air left to get home on.

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They had no guide line.

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They had no spare cylinders left on the way up, in case someone needed to stop there.

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And nobody in the party was in charge of the plan.

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On the twenty-seventh of May, they dived The Shaft for the first time.

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They hung a weighted line down through the hole, with about a hundred and fifty feet of it in the water.

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It did not reach the floor.

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They went down it, reached the rock pile, swam a little way around its edge, and came back up.

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It went well.

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They agreed to come back the next day and see more.

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There was no plan to leave the rock pile.

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The slope beyond it, narrow, dark, and thick with silt, was understood to be the limit.

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The next morning they refilled their cylinders in Mount Gambier.

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At about half past one in the afternoon, on the twenty-eighth of May, all eight went down the line.

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They had not paired off. No diver was responsible for any other.

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This time they went past the top of the rock pile, and down its side, to the edge.

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Robert Smith looked at his depth gauge. It read about a hundred and eighty feet.

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At that depth, breathing ordinary air, a diver is affected by nitrogen narcosis.

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It has been compared to being drunk.

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Smith knew the feeling. He recognised it, and he signalled to the others to go back up to the top of the rock pile.

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They signalled back.

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They were going on.

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Smith had not expected the group to go as far as it already had. He went back up alone, and for about eight minutes he swam around the rock pile, looking for animal bones.

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Glen Millott was watching his air. He knew they were out of time.

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He reached out to tap Christine Millott on the arm, to remind her.

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Before he could touch her, they were separated.

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He turned back. Smith saw his torch coming up the slope.

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The two of them surfaced together.

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Larry Reynolds had already come up.

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Half a minute after Smith and Glen Millott, Peter Burr broke the surface, with almost no air left.

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That made four.

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They waited for the others.

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What happened to the other four is known only from what the survivors saw as they left.

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Christine Millott and Gordon Roberts were seen trying to get back to the rock pile, quickly.

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But they did not go up the slope.

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They swam straight up, and the ceiling stopped them.

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They were in a dome in the roof of the cave.

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Their torches were searching the rock for a way out.

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Roberts signalled that they were lost.

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Larry Reynolds said afterwards that they looked frightened.

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It was the last time anyone saw them alive.

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John Bockerman was seen swimming strongly.

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He was swimming downward, further into the cave.

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Stephen Millott may have been seen under the ceiling, lost, shortly before the survivors surfaced.

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Almost nothing else is known about his last minutes.

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The finding, for all four, was the same.

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They ran out of air, and drowned.

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The next day, the twenty-ninth of May, the South Australian police sent in their Underwater Recovery Squad.

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The police divers went to two hundred feet, searched briefly, and found nobody.

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They tried again on the thirtieth, and found nobody.

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The officer in charge, Chief Inspector Wallace Budd, later called it a learn-as-you-go exercise.

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His divers were not trained or equipped for a place like this.

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The search was put off until they could be, and that was expected to take months.

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The four stayed in The Shaft through the winter, the spring, and into the next summer.

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In January of nineteen seventy-four, a television crew went into the cave to film a documentary about cave diving.

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They brought professional lights, powerful enough to light the cavern like day.

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At about fifty feet, a technician noticed what looked like a third person behind them.

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It was a body in a wetsuit, under a ledge, against the sloping roof.

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It was Stephen Millott. He was wearing a buoyancy vest, and he was found far shallower than the others.

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His torch and his camera were found deep, at the base of the rock pile.

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On the ninth of March, a team with much better equipment went back to the bottom.

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At a hundred and eighty-five feet, one of them, R. G. Trayner, saw a body lying on its back.

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A second body lay directly beneath it.

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They were Christine Millott and Gordon Roberts.

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They were below the dome that the survivors had seen them swim into.

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Twenty feet deeper, beneath a rock ledge, was John Bockerman.

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Trayner tried to move him. He did not have the air to do it, and he left.

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Two days later, Millott and Roberts were brought up.

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The attempt to reach Bockerman, at two hundred and fifteen feet, was called off when the divers themselves were overcome by narcosis.

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The team was sent home for a month, to rest, and to train.

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They came back with a plan that took three days.

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One day to run a guide line to him. One day of rest. One day to bring him out.

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Even so, they were badly affected by narcosis on both days in the water.

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John Bockerman was recovered on the ninth of April, nineteen seventy-four.

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Ten and a half months after the dive.

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One of the survivors, Robert Smith, believed he knew what had gone wrong.

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He believed it was the air.

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At a hundred and eighty feet, on a cylinder filled in Mount Gambier, he had felt severe narcosis.

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He said he had then taken a spare cylinder, filled in Sydney, gone back down, and felt nothing.

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Something, he said, was wrong with the local air.

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It was tested.

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The air left in the cylinders was clean. There was no carbon monoxide in it. The compressor in Mount Gambier was in good condition.

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The expert who examined it, a doctor of diving medicine, reported that the allegation was entirely without foundation.

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The coroner, Special Magistrate R. F. Stokes, found that the four had stayed too long at the bottom, and run out of air.

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And he listed what was missing.

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No system for getting back to the surface if things went wrong.

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No emergency cylinders staged on the way up.

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No buddy system of any kind.

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And no one person responsible for planning the dive, or for the safety of the group.

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The Shaft was not the first.

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Between nineteen sixty-nine and nineteen seventy-four, eleven divers died in the sinkholes around Mount Gambier.

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The day after the accident, the deputy premier of South Australia announced a government inquiry.

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In September of nineteen seventy-three, the Cave Divers Association of Australia was formed.

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The sinkholes were closed to anyone the association had not assessed.

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From nineteen seventy-four, a diver had to pass a test to get in. In nineteen eighty-nine the test became three levels of training.

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The death rate fell.

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For the police recovery squad, too, The Shaft is recorded as a turning point. They trained differently, and equipped differently, afterwards.

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A few years later, in Florida, a cave diver named Sheck Exley set down five rules, drawn from the study of deaths like these.

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Training. A continuous guide line. A limit on depth. A third of your air to go in, a third to come out, a third in reserve. And three lights.

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Set them beside the dive of the twenty-eighth of May.

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There was no cave training.

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There was no guide line.

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The depth limit was the rock pile, and it was passed.

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There was no rule for the air.

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And there was one torch each.

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The Shaft is still there, under the same paddock.

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It is on private land, and it is still dived.

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But only by divers accredited by the association that was founded because of it.

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Eight went down the line that afternoon.

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Four came up.

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The sources for every fact in this episode are in the show notes.

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This has been Caving Stories: Cave Diving.

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Thank you for listening.