Blue Mountains [antikvár]

1THE BLUE MOUNTAINSThe convicts of Sydney Cove believed that their way to freedom ran through the Blue Mountains. They told each other that a colony of free white men, living in happy idleness, lay beyond the ranges. Some convicts believed this strongly enough to risk hanging or flogging, and made a break for the ranges. Most came limping back again, tattered and starving. Others disappeared: proof to their comrades that they had escaped to freedom. Governor King was so exasperated by such yarns that he sent four convicts, with supplies and an escort, to find and report on the legendary paradise. Their dreams of freedom turned into a nightmare of struggles with dense bush and attempts to climb huge cliffs, but their abashed return did not have the desired effect of quashing the legend.The deep, intense blue of the mountains seen from a distance, or of distant ranges seen from within the mountains, has an emotive beauty which can be felt but not described. One prosaic theory is that this blue effect is caused by a haze of eucalyptus droplets suspended in the atmosphere. Or It may be a special effect caused by the brilliant light of Australian skies being filtered through the moisture rising from the mountains. Such explanations are not really necessary, because it is enough to see and feel the beauty without questioning Its cause.For a long time, the mountains guarded the mysteries of the Australian continent agalnstthe Invaders. Several parties made direct assaults upon them, and each returned with stories of an impassable barrier. Ensign Francis Barralller struggled among them for forty-two days in 1802, and returned to write a report in which he described the mountains round the Kowmung River as, "Like as many pyramids at the side of one another; that should It ever be practicable to get to the top of one of them, it would be necessary to descend it and ascend another."Each party told similartales. "Horrible perpendicular mountains," they were called In an account written by a Frenchman, Peron, of the attempt made by George Bass. There was no urgent need to conquer the mountains until 1813, when the colony had grown too big for its confines between the ranges and the sea, and in that year a party set out under Gregory Blaxland.The problem was that the whole mountain complex Is really an enormous plateau, sloping gradually eastwards from Its highest points of about 3,600 feet. Thetop surfaces are of hard sandstone, resting on layers of softer rock. As the latter wear away, they cause overhangs of hard rock which eventually split and fall, leaving huge vertical cliffs and filling the ravines and gullies with tumbled masses of boulders.Millions of years of erosion wore the plateau away Into scores of winding, flat-topped ridges. Between them Is the tangle of ravines, gullies, and gorges, full of dense bush and boulders and with steep sides of scree or overhanging cliffs, which baffled the first explorers.Blaxland decided to keep out of the gullies, and to climb along the ridges. After fifteen days, he and his party scaled the 3,480 feet of Mount York and saw forests and meadowland stretching into the hazy blue distance; "Sufficient to feed the Stock of the Colony for.the next thirty years."Once the way was open, progress went rapidly. By 1815, a hundred miles of mountain road had been built to the site of Bathurst, and since that date the building and renewing of Blue Mountain roads has been almost constant. The automobile age accelerated construction, and the highway from Sydney to Penrith, Katoomba, and Lithgow is one of the world's best-engineered and most beautiful scenic roads.Most travellers along the first road through the ranges were intent on taking up land In the Bathurst area, and within a few years the flocks and herds of thirty stockowners were grazing there. The next great migration was of men heading for the new lands which had been opened up in Victoria, and these were followed, from 1851 onwards, by the diggers swarming towards the goldfields. Until 1863, travelling to and through the mountains was on foot, on horseback, or in one of the horsedrawn vehicles which made such hard work of the steep roads that passengers had to get out and walk beside them. But In 1863 the railway was completed between Sydney and Penrith, and over the next four years it was extended through the mountains to Lithgow. It was one of the engineering marvels of the era, and the descent to Lithgow, made with the aid of three viaducts and two reversing stations, was given the name of Zigzag Railway.The railway enabled a fresh invasion of the mountains, this time by holidaymakers, "the air being very bracing and remarkably pleasant for invalids." One attraction was the scenery and natural wonders such