TheBanyanTree: Blue Mountains Circuit

[Peter Macinnis]

When the whites first landed in Sydney, everything got English names -- 
even the namesake of Sydney was a no-good minor political hack back in 
London.  The minor hills that rate in flat Australia as the Great 
Dividing Range are barely 1000 metres high -- call it 3300 feet, but 
they were mongrels to get over, or even onto.

Anyhow, the nobs in Sydney dubbed them the Carmarthen Hills, but before 
long, sailormen being what they are, they flogged a Jamaican name and 
called them the Blue Mountains.  then they made up a bunch of malarkey 
about how the oil got out of the gum trees and made a haze that made 
them look blue.  In truth, it was just dust, distance and Tyndall 
scattering.

200 million years ago, give or take a spit, Sydney was rather like 
Bangladesh.  It was all dirty great rivers rolled though a sad and 
depauperate sandscape, rinsing out every last skerrick of mineralisation 
that might have left a rock that could make nice soil.  It built up to 
200 metres thick, and got labelled the Hawkesbury sandstone, after a 
river name after another nogoodnik.

Later, there was an uplift to the west, so even though the mountain tops 
are 1000 metres higher than the shores of Sydney Harbour, they have the 
same rocks.  Rivers flowed down through the sandstone, bits fell away, 
and cliffs formed.

Along came Whitey, who settled in this useless place with useless soil. 
  The settlers in Sydney were hemmed in, surrounded by almost worthless 
land where farming was concerned for 25 years until somebody supposedly 
had the bright idea of walking up the ridges to bypass the cliffs.  This 
is a load of old cobblers -- the Aborigines knew how to get over and 
walked over.  There were tracks, but Whitey was too proud to follow 
where blackfella trod.

Aside from that, I sat in the Hunter Valley, about 100 km north of here, 
killing a good bottle of red with my brother-in-law a few weeks back, 
and we looked at a mountain, part of the same Great Dividing Range, and 
traced a path up it from where we sat.  Our selected route (we not being 
complete muppets) went up the ridges, nice and easy.  On the ground, 
there would be some rough going, but it was a negotiable route.

It was purely an armchair exercise for him -- my hobby is walking up 
small mountains slowly, but we could both see that following the ridges 
is the way to go, and after another glass or seven, it hit us that the 
hero-worship of Blaxland, Wentworth and Lawson, for working out how to 
follow the ridges, was a complete joke.  Blind Freddie could've seen it.

My hero is George Evans, a hobbit of a man who pootled over the 
mountains in their track, surveyed, marked and mapped it, and enjoyed 
himself immensely.

I have just cleared three big jobs off the block, so Chris and I set off 
in George Evans' footsteps.  We left home at 6.30 am and got up the 
mountains in time for a breakfast of croissants and coffee/tea in Leura, 
then hopped into a cable car that lowered us into the valley.

Under the sterile sandstone, there are beds of shale with a better 
mineral supply -- and there are also beds of coal, so quite early on, 
people began mining the 'kerosene shales' and coal, to make lamp oil, 
and other useful stuff.  They support rainforest, and some clever people 
have woven a boardwalk down through the rainforest, in among the lawyer 
vine and tree ferns, a walk that carries us harmlessly and sensitively 
through it all.

Now we drill for oil or import it, so the area lies unused and available 
to tourists, but the rainforest that grows there is in an uneasy 
balance.  You see, miners needed pit props and fuel and stuff, so they 
felled trees, and when they did, the thin topsoil drifted away.  The 
trees were deep-rooted, and they came back as coppices, so there is 
cover, but there are no new seeds taking root there.  They fall and 
wither . . .

The topsoil must be slowly regenerating, so there is a desperate race on 
between life and death.  We have to hope that life will win.

West of the mountains, down on the plain, there is a sad wreck of a 
place called Lithgow, once a centre of coal mining, but now just a shoal 
on which souls may be wrecked.  We drive there for one reason only: to 
go back up into the mountains and over to a couple of extinct volcanoes. 
  One is called Mount Wilson, a mark of invasion, filled with English 
and European plants, and now, as September ebbs, the cherry trees that 
have run out on the coast, are excellent, 900 metres and more above sea 
level.

I will come back to Lithgow some other time.

Then it was on to Mount Tomah, one of the branches of our Botanic 
Garden, where the original name has been retained.  Based on an old 
English-style garden, with many additions, this is building as a 
collection of plants that thrive in cooler climates.  The development 
has been going on for about 20 years.

Driving out of Mount Wilson, you come abruptly to the edge of the 
volcanic soils and there is a sudden change back from rain forest and 
wet sclerophyll to dry sclerophyll and heath (and it may help at this 
point to note that Chris and I both trained as botanists -- if you 
hadn't sussed that already).

This was our fifth visit, so we were calling on an old friend.  Right 
now, the waratahs are out in force -- indeed, an endocrinologist friend 
rang us on Sunday to chide us that we were not at "New South Wales 
waratah central" with them -- we have a number of things in common with 
him and his wife, an abiding hatred of 4-wheel drives in the city and a 
love of waratahs among them.

You can pick botanists from a distance.  The ticket lady at Mount Tomah 
looked at us, asked had we been there before, we said yes, she said to 
look out for the waratahs, so I told her we had spotted one a few 
minutes earlier, just outside Mount Wilson.  So then we had to draw her 
a map of where to see it -- she has ever yet seen one in the wild.  She 
has the makings of a botanist about her.

We pootled around, wandered up and down some of the minor sub-tracklets, 
found a 60-year-old Sequoia that is already more than 4 metres across, 
visited our favourite living fossil, one of the original Wollemi pines 
when they were cultivated from rare wild stock, drank some coffee, ate 
some fattening biscuits (90% sucrose, 9% chocolate), laughed with our 
friend the waiter, and I discovered that when you have been eating 
chili-stuffed olives for lunch (with a crusty baguette, brie and 
mandarins), if you haven't washed your hands, you don't itch your eye, 
then Chris found a handbag with waratah motifs while I was sluicing my 
right eye.

Too expensive, she said.  Fine, I said.  I will buy it for me, and you 
can borrow it.  As often as you like, I said, so long as you agree it's 
mine.  No, she said, she would buy it for her sister, and if her sister 
doesn't like it, she will have it.  Memo to me.  Tell sil that waratahs 
were implicated in black magic rituals that involved feeding babies to 
dingoes, ad infinitum.

Suffice it to say that cobwebs are dispelled.


-- 
   _--|\    Peter Macinnis        petermacinnis at ozemail.com.au
  /     \   Feral word tinker on the right side of Oz at Manly
  \.--._* <-NSW, where they also surf who only stand and wade
       v    http://members.ozemail.com.au/~macinnis/index.htm