A mild winter’s day witnessed a band of field naturalists negotiating the Cape Liptrap Coastal Park to scramble down a steep dune on to Morgans Beach at the Ten Mile.  They were there to see the footprints set in stone found by Gary Wallis earlier in the year and, with Parks Victoria rangers, to watch staff of Museum Victoria prepare the rock to take moulds in order to cast the prints.

During glacial/interglacial cycles 68-112,000 years ago, sea level was 140 metres lower, the sea’s edge at King Island.  The continental shelf was a great sand plain with cold dry windy conditions.  A huge dune complex built up, with xeric vegetation.

Today on a slab of crumbling stone fallen from the cliff, its lower edge washed by the high tide, are prints of the fauna from this period.        

At least 68,000 years old, they are in danger of being eroded.  On the slab are:

• Wombat-like indents with claw marks
• An emu print
• A row of tiny hopping prints.

Nearby are two sets of rocks with diprotodon footprints.

Owing to a great water event 23,000 years ago, water coursed through the dunes, dissolving the lime to leave a contortion of limestone flutes.

Cliffs today are towering turrets composed of calcareous aeolianites, fragile and friable, Cushionbush scrambling for a tenacious foothold up the steep inclines.  Contorted and striated, these cliffs form a vast backdrop to tumbled scree.  Nearby is a wind flume, sand trickling down, only to be blown upwards again by the strong wind.

The Cape Liptrap peninsular beaches continue to surprise.                                                               Terri Allen