For tens of thousands of years, the Jenolan area has been part of the culture of local indigenous peoples. This beautiful and mysterious place hold special significance to the Gundungurra people, who knew it as 'Binomil' or 'Bin-oo-mur'. Gundungurra people's knowledge of the caves goes back a long way, as there is a Dreamtime creation story about how the whole countryside came into being. The story describes an almighty struggle between two ancestral creator spirits - one a giant eel-like creature, Gurangatch, and the other, Mirrigan, a large native cat or quoll. In the early years of the 20th century, the Gundungurra people penetrated the caves as far as the subterranean water, carrying sick people to be bathed in this water, which they believed to have great curative powers.