It doesn't help the international hunt that, like a gust of wind, dark matter is an invisible force.

So where do you look for something you can't see? The answer is a kilometre underground. In a gold mine in Stawell.

The quiet Victorian country town, three-hours northwest of Melbourne, is soon to become home to the southern hemisphere's first dark matter detector.

Construction begins this month on the $3.5 million subterranean laboratory that will draw teams of scientists from across the globe down a tunnel that is literally large enough to drive a truck through.

For their journey underground, the scientists will need to don protective glasses, hard-hats fitted with head lamps, high-vis vests and steel-cap boots. Not to mention carbon-filter masks to breathe through, should there be a collapse.

"It's like we are miners," says laboratory director and principal investigator Elisabetta Barberio. "Looking at us, you wouldn't think we were physicists."

The underground laboratory is reached by four-wheel drive, with only the headlights to illuminate the tunnel's dusty darkness. It takes 20 minutes to get to the cavernous site that will host the lab – assuming the truck doesn't have to give way to an oncoming traffic working at the still-operating gold mine.

At 600 metres underground, it starts getting warm. By one kilometre down, the temperature is hovering between 35 and 40 degrees. The dust in the air is as fine as talcum powder. It's humid.

But it won't be like that inside the purpose-built lab, which will be set at a comfortable 18 degrees year-round. Scientists will be able to shower and change into a clean pair of clothes before they begin working – although the hard hat, vest and boots are not negotiable. It is after all, a working mine.

Among the mind boggling experiments to take place a kilometre underground will be the search for dark matter – that invisible cosmic glue with so much pulling power that it is able to hold our universe together. It accounts for 84 per cent of the universe but scarcely anything is known about what it is.

"Dark matter is one of the great mysteries of our time," says Swinburne University astrophysicist Alan Duffy. "This experiment is truly groundbreaking and it will place Stawell at the forefront of one of the biggest quests in science."

In the four decades since American astronomer Vera Rubin first proposed there was another form of matter binding the universe, dark matter has stubbornly remained one of modern physics' most important and tantalising questions.

What we do know is that dark matter is the reason galaxies exist. It provides the gravitational seed for the galaxy to grow. It gets its name because it does not interact with light. It's the dark side of the universe.

If the international team of scientists do strike gold in their mine lab in Stawell, Melbourne University's Professor Barberio has no doubt it will be Nobel prize-winning work.

"What we know about what the universe is made of is the tip of the iceberg," she says. "If we understand dark matter, we will understand how the big bang occurred and how the universe evolved and how it might continue to evolve."

Duffy, one of the project's chief investigators, agrees.

"If you can actually identify the particle, or whatever that dark matter is, that is Nobel prize-worthy. There is no doubt about that."

But why a mine? Why does the hunt for the elusive dark matter that holds the universe together have to be undertaken a kilometre underground by researchers trucking to and from the lab, wearing hard-hats and high-vis vests?

Simple. It's a way of escaping the constant stream of cosmic radiation arriving on Earth from space.

The kilometre of volcanic rock between the mine's surface and the cavernous laboratory acts as a natural barrier, blocking most radiation within the first few hundred metres.

However having gone to some trouble to escape cosmic radiation, scientists still have to consider other sources. For a start the laboratory's basalt rock walls are a source of radiation, albeit at very low-levels. Ditto for the scientists.

Even at the lowest levels radiation is enough to contaminate the super-sensitive experiment, which relies on materials being extremely pure to eliminate radioactive "noise".

A collection of seven sodium iodide crystals, each weighing six kilograms, will act as a target for the ghostly dark matter that has made it underground.

The ultra-pure crystals, custom-made for the Stawell experiment by Princeton University, boast extraordinary low levels of radiation.

When a dark matter particle strikes the crystal's nucleus, light will be generated, transformed into energy and collected. This energy is what the researchers are looking for – it will tell them about the mass of dark matter particles.

Of the more than 10 laboratories in the northern hemisphere already hunting for dark matter so far only one, DAMA/LIBRA at Gran Sasso near the central Italian town of L'Aquila, has detected strong evidence of dark matter. That was in 1998.

"There is a quest all over the world to repeat this experiment and see it," says Barberio, who was a key member of the international team that confirmed the Higgs boson or "God particle" in 2012.

Physicists have long wondered if there are seasonal differences in the amount of dark matter that reaches Earth. Due to be completed in 2017, the Stawell laboratory is the best candidate to settle this dark matter dilemma because it is the only laboratory in the southern hemisphere.

If Stawell experiments conducted in December and June deliver the same result as the Italian experiments conducted in the same months, then it will confirm that the amount of dark matter reaching Earth is not seasonal.

"If we can do the same experiment and get the same results here in the southern hemisphere ... we will know that we have discovered dark matter," Barberio says. "That's big."

All will not be lost if the results from the twin experiments differ. While scientists will have to accept they were unable to detect dark matter, they will have gathered enough information to rule out other hypotheses. Given the mystery surrounding dark matter, this would still be an achievement.

Meanwhile, there will be any number of other experiments going on at the Stawell Underground Physics Laboratory, with its low-radiation environment a valuable setting for groundbreaking work in chemistry, biology and even defence science.

For example, Duffy says, we don't know how cells deal with radiation damage, which can lead to cancer, or how they grow without radiation because we are never in an environment free of radiation.

Experiments could also lead to new gold mapping techniques which involve taking an X-ray of land around a mine.

"Just as an X-ray is blocked by a bone in your arm, so too is radiation from space blocked by things like gold," Duffy says. "This will allow us to see a shadow and locate the gold."

Among the Australian partners in the project is the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation, which is interested in developing radiation detector technology sensitive enough to track or detect smuggled dirty bombs.

"There are a lot of cool technologies and applications that you can pursue when you build something as unique as this underground lab," Duffy said.

While there is much excitement within the scientific community, enthusiasm for the project is shared far beyond the boundaries of the mine, which sits in a bush setting two kilometres out of Stawell.

The Northern Grampians Shire Council has been an active supporter of the project, well-aware that the international attention will put the Wimmera town on the map and generate jobs.

Mayor Cr Murray Emerson also hopes the underground physics laboratory will inspire a generation of local students to pursue a career in the sciences. He is so enthusiastic that he has visited year seven students at the local secondary school to talk about the benefits of finishing school and the opportunities a career in science can present. With international partners including the Universities of Rome, Milan and Princeton, as well as the Italian Institute for Nuclear Physics, it's an easy sell.

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews also sees the global picture. When he announced the state government would chip in $1.75 million to convert part of the gold mine into a particle physics lab last November, he enthused that it could possibly be "the world's next great scientific discovery".

The federal government has matched the funding and the project has also secured $1.18 million from the Australian Research Council.

The mine's operator Stawell Gold Mines will provide in-kind support including necessities such as ventilation, power and water. There will even be an internet connection linking the lab to researchers working remotely. The presence of such essentials made the Stawell mine an ideal candidate for the project – that and the fact that very little digging was required because much of it had already been done.

The same can't be said for a similar lab being built in South America, which includes the costly exercise of tunnelling under the Andes. The added time of literally moving a mountain means the Stawell project will be the first dark matter detector in the southern hemisphere. But there is more than just bragging rights here. There is serious science at stake.