Inside Australia's oldest and coldest short-stay accommodation

Sydney Morning Herald

16-06-2025

Long before Blaxland, Wentworth and Lawson crossed NSW's Blue Mountains, First Nations peoples braved its frozen ground in the last ice age to socialise or trade.
They would stop for a night or two and catch up with old friends, having climbed above the treeline and down gullies to seek cold comfort in a cathedral-like cave that archaeologists say is the oldest high mountain site continually occupied by humans in Australia.
Australian research published in Nature Human Behaviour on Tuesday has found evidence that 20,000 years ago, groups of people stopped in the cave – Dargan Shelter near Lithgow, NSW – to warm up in front of a fire, make tools, discuss business or do some matchmaking on the way to a corroboree in the mountains.
'It was short-stay accommodation ... on the way to business,' said University of Sydney archaeologist, cave art specialist and Gomeroi man, Wayne Brennan.
It's still being used that way today. Located on a private property not far from Lithgow, known as Hatters Hideout Cave and Lodge, the cave is sometimes rented to small groups of campers. Owner Mark O'Carrigan said: 'It's the original Airbnb.'
The archaeological dig found evidence of human occupation from the Late Pleistocene (last ice age) to the recent past. This included 693 artefacts, and faded rock art including a stencil of a child-sized hand that is still visible.
The findings upend conventional wisdom. Far from inhospitable glacial landscapes stopping First Nations people from travelling, as previously thought, global research has found people travelled and gathered in high-altitude sites (such as Dargan at 1073 metres elevation) where water would have been frozen for much of the year.
The lead author of the paper, University of Sydney archaeology lecturer Dr Amy Mosig Way, said Dargan is a significant site. Funded by the Australian Museum Foundation, the research was initiated by Brennan and Way to bring archaeologists and Indigenous knowledge keepers together.