Gil Jones

I have mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand it’s about a part of Sydney...in fact its very under-pinning, that has always fascinated me. Even more so as I’ve learned more about it. And certainly the author has increased my knowledge. I have only just realised, for example that the great river/s that deposited the sand that has formed the Sydney sandstone were actually flowing from what is now Antarctica. And he has some interesting extracts from the early European explorers of show more the blue mountains. However, he really seems to be drawing a very long bow with his wishful thinking in the latter chapters about a “natural initiation ground” north of St Albans (Mogo, where he lives). I think he should stick to his geology.
Nevertheless, I enjoyed the book overall. The diagrams are a very weak feature. The fonts chosen in the diagrams and maps are almost unreadable. They need to be a simpler type and just larger. A significant weakness in the book. Some nice photos but overall, slightly disappointing. He doesn’t seem to understand the significance of the basalt derived soils around the ancient volcanoes in the Blue Mountains, for example. Overall, I give it three stars. Not great but not without merit.
I’ve included some extracts below that appealed to me or caught my interest.

In the Autumn of 1815, the Macquaries set out from Sydney on the most ambitious of their excursions - across the Blue Mountains along the newly constructed road to Bathurst. It followed the route surveyed by William Lawson two years before along the dividing ridge between the catchments of the Warragamba/Cox and the Grose rivers. Lawson's diary of distances and bearings gives only terse descriptions of the Blue Mountains terrain: "very poor rocky and sandy country": "very sandy and rocky covered with thick brush"; "very rocky with thick scrub". Only after scrambling down the western escarpment does he succumb to enthusiasm: "Got into fine country ... went through a fine meadow. Encamped beside a fine stream of water. We have now entered a fine grazers country".
For the Macquaries and their party, the Blue Mountains' first tourists with a track to follow and ample provision for camping in comfort, the response to the Mountains is very different.......Reaching "the summit of the Western Mountains", writes Macquarie, "a most extensive and beautiful prospect presents itself to the eye... On the southwest side of the King's Tableland the Mountains terminate in abrupt precipices of immense depth, at the bottom of which is seen a glen, as romantically beautiful as can be imagined".
When William Lawson set out to explore and survey the Warragamba/Grose divide as a route across the Blue Mountains, he was recently returned from England to a substantial land grant at Prospect on the Cumberland Plain. He was joined in the venture by two others with substantial grants on the Nepean - "a persevering assistant" in Gregory Blaxland and an "agreeable companion" in the precocious young native-born William Wentworth.
Wentworth wrote... [The Blue Mountains] are excessively barren, and are covered generally with a thick brush, interspersed here and there with a few miserable stunted gums. They bear, in fact, a striking similarity, both in respect to their soil and productions, to the barren wastes on the coast of Port Jackson. They are very rocky ... Sandstone thickly studded with quartz and a little freestone are the only varieties [of rock] which they offer ...[For two hundred miles] to the westward of these mountains, the country abounds with the richest herbage... The whole of this western country indeed, is much more open and free from timber than the best districts to the eastward of the Blue Mountains.
Govett's description of the Blue Mountains north of the Bell's Line, looking over Bowen's Creek and the headwaters of the Wallangambe, reads much the same but more so:
“One vast, wild, abrupt, deserted, barren country, intersected by impassable ravines and gullies even to the Colo and Capertee rivers, about thirty miles distant. Some of the ridges are, in places, so actually bare, so completely deprived of earthy substance with which they might have been once covered, that nothing but the naked rock is seen ... In general, however, the ranges are covered with short timber and scrub, which appears always green. They are jumbled together in many forms and directions, sometimes in chains, lying parallel to each other, but of no great extent. The summits of all are very narrow, and of various shapes, and the distances between each range short, consequently the ravines are much confined and deep. It will remain forever, as it is now, a desolate and uninhabited region.”
Ironically it is in this "desolate" landscape that Govett's single memorial remains in the waterfall that bears his name - Govett's Leap.
Back in 1859, when the first such photos had been taken, Martens' Victorian counterpart, Eugene von Guerard, had paid a brief visit to Sydney and the Blue Mountains. But it was not until 1873, the year in which Trollope's travelogue was published, that von Guerard transformed his 1859 sketches of the Grose Valley from near Govett's Leap into a painted panorama.
From his first contact with Australia on the Victorian goldfields, von Guerard developed an eye for the bones of the landscape - the rocks which break through the skin of the soil and vegetation. But his naturalist's eye did not impress all. "His landscapes", writes a contemporary critic, "offer a minutely laborious description of almost every leaf upon the gum trees, and of every vein and crevice in the rocks, which would make them delightful illustrations of a treatise on the botanical or geological features of the colony".
Beneath the western escarpment of the Mountains between Wallerawang and Wolgan....."I saw scarcely a place without the marks of fire" writes Darwin; "whether the stumps were more or less black was the greatest change which varied the uniformity". Riding to Bathurst the following day (January 20 1836) "we experienced the sirocco-like wind of Australia, which comes from the parched desert of the interior. Clouds of dust were travelling in every direction; and the winds felt like that which had passed over a fire". Returning through the Cox River catchment three days later "we passed through large tracts of country in flames, volumes of smoke sweeping across the road. Before noon we joined our former track and ascended Mount Victoria".
"The special character and uniqueness of the Australian flora is due mainly to the
omnipresence of the genus Eucalyptus", writes the botanist Mary White.
No other comparable area of land in the world is so completely characterised by a single genus of trees as Australia by its gum-trees ... Dominated by Eucalyptus, the dry sclerophyll ['hard-leaf') areas are the 'Australian bush' as most of us visualise it - Gum-trees, Grass-trees, riverbanks with Paperbarks, Casuarinas and Tea-trees.
This vegetation type is specially evolved to suit the low nutrient soils to withstand droughts and to regenerate after fire.
On a testing three-week exploration which took him from Kurrajong by way of Mount Tomah to Mount Banks, George Caley encountered, at the base of Tomah and beyond, the same vegetation which Wentworth later described along the ridgeline south of the Grose Valley.
“Approaching Tomah from the east, "the land here was very barren ........ Mount Tomah, by contrast, where it was "void of brush" was
thickly covered with timber, and with a species of fern, which as it increases in age forms a tree .... Sassafras trees I noticed in great abundance ... Ceratopetalum Monopetalum ['coachwood'] was very common ... These two trees having a thick and dark foliage, caused the places they grow to be so damp and dark... The soil was very damp, and of a brown colour, being a vegetable mould”........ By the time William Govett surveyed Tomah in late 1832, a thousand-acre grant had been made of the summit and slopes within the perimeter of the basalt soil, and the eastern slopes were promptly cleared and cultivated. But the soil alone does not account for the marked difference between the vegetation on the weathered sandstone and on the basalt soils capping Mount Tomah, and its neighbours to the north and west, Mount Irvine and Mount Wilson....[I suspect the author is wrong here...and it is, in fact, the volcanic soils of Mt Tomah and Mt Wilson that DO account for the big differences in vegetation].
Sydney sandstone is a blanket of rock with a preserved extent of over 20,000 square kilometres and in places a thickness of several hundred metres, spectacularly visible in the sandstone cliffs of the Grose Valley. Following its deposition, this essentially horizontal sheet of sand was buried beneath a substantial thickness of mud. Consolidated to sandstone and mudstone (shale), these flat-lying strata were warped into a shallow basin - the Sydney Basin - the mudstone then being eroded away from much of the rim, though not wholly from the basin floor where it underlies the Cumberland Plain......Some of the cross-bedded strata composing Sydney's sandstone are as much as five metres thick, so they must have been formed by sand waves at least five metres high. Sand waves of this order of size have been recorded in the sandy bed of rivers at flood time, but only from the largest of rivers - like those which drain the Himalayas. So where were the mountains which fed this great ancient river? Because sand waves travel downstream forming inclined laminae on their downstream face, the cross-bedding in the sandstone gives us a clear indication of the direction of flow. Measurement of thousands of cross-beds throughout the expanse of the sandstone country shows a strongly polarised inclination towards the northeast. Hence, to travel upstream to the mountain source, we turn to the southwest.
We now know that when Sydney's sandstone was deposited more than 200 million years ago, Australia was welded to Antarctica in a Great South Land - Gondwana. So when we consider that the sandstone was laid down by a great river flowing from the southwest, we must view what is now Antarctica as the possible location of the headwaters......That possibility has recently become probability. The sandstone, consisting largely of grains of quartz derived from weathered granite in the headwaters, contains trace amounts of zircon, a mineral whose age of formation can be dated. While bedrock to the southwest within the present Australian continent cannot have been the source, a plentiful source is to be found in Antarctica's Victorialand which was then welded via Tasmania to mainland Australia.
For Sydney's surrounds, the great events of the last 100 million years have been the opening to the east of a new ocean basin, the Tasman Sea, and the uplift of the Eastern Highlands.
As the Tasman reached full dilation about fifty million years ago, Australia's separation from Antarctica accelerated, carrying the southeast of the continent from latitudes in the fifties to the thirties at present, Against this grand backdrop of continental separation and equatorwards drift, Australia's once-gondwanan flora and fauna has evolved to its present utterly distinctive character.
The rising sea which flooded Australia's continental shelf and coastal estuaries in the span of the last twenty thousand years was experienced around the world as the great ice sheets of the last Ice Age' melted. Along the coastal edge of the sandstone country, not only the valley of the Parramatta River, but the valleys of the Hawkesbury and Hacking rivers were inundated. And everywhere sea level stabilised about five thousand years ago.
Wilderness is defined in my dictionary as a tract of land inhabited only by wild animals......But prior to 1788 the sandstone country, like the rest of the continent, was far from being that.
It seems probable that the upper Blue Mountains was visited seasonally by Aboriginal people, in particular the Gundungurra of the Cox/Wollondilly catchment. And the entire Blue Mountains plateau shows a broad scatter of hundreds of sites visited and used by Aboriginal people, whether for shelter, toolmaking and maintenance, or ritual. And the plethora of Aboriginal place names recorded by early surveyors like William Govett leaves no doubt about Aboriginal people's extensive use and intimate knowledge of the sandstone country.
In 1845, in reply to a government questionnaire on the Aborigines, the Wollombi
magistrate replied:.....The Aborigines of the Wollombi and Macdonald River district are seventy-three in number... Their condition during the winter is miserable in the extreme; women who are perhaps suckling infants, will be for half a day or night in the water spearing eels. At other times they may be seeking for grubs or mimosa gum, with their young infants tied on their shoulders. In the Spring and Summer months, they have guanos [goannas], flying squirrel [glider possums), and opossum, in tolerable quantity...
Their regular and continuous means of subsistence have been decidedly diminished since the district became so much more densely inhabited. The kangaroo has entirely disappeared, the wallaby, the black swan, wild duck, wanga-wanga [pigeon], bronze pigeon, and pheasant [lyrebird], are daily decreasing.
Along the Hawkesbury at the southern boundary of Darkinyung territory the story was much the same. Macquarie's military campaign of 1816 brought an end to all but sporadic reprisals which continued into the eighteen-twenties. By 1850 the Pitt Town parson, whose parish extended downstream towards Wisemans Ferry, reported: "We see no blacks here now".
Daramulan was found by Mathews and others to be held in reverence and awe, not only by the Darkinyung, but by their neighbours, the Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi. For Mathews "traces of all their ceremonies are distinguishable in the Burbung of the Darkinung", and he intimates that these neighbours participated in initiations in Darkinyung country. In the language of the Wiradjuri, taramulin is the bullroarer, whose awesome sound at initiations was the thunder-voice of Daramulan. He had a particular association with trees from which the bullroarer was cut, and among a number of carved treps around the Darkinvund initiation ground, one from which a sinuous strip of bark had been cut to simulate the effect of a lightning-strike was to be found near the image of Daramulan........ Mathews speaks only of "a colossal representation of Dhurramoolan". But beyond the limits of the sandstone country several representations were of a one-legged human-like figure.
Of the paired most conspicuous carvings at Burragurra, the one with one visible leg and one raised arm, perhaps seen in profile, may well be Daramulan - the spirit of thunder and lightning, the awesome rainmaker.
The first mention of Biami is to be found in the writing of an American visitor to Wellington in Wiradjuri country around 1840, and it is probable that the cult of Biami, recorded by Mathews and others in the late eighteen-hundreds, was strongly influenced by Aboriginal exposure to the God of the Bible. "I, like every Aboriginal person, believe in and acknowledge the existence of the Great Spirit" said the Aboriginal elder Burnum Burnum recently.
Some of us know it as God, others by other names such as Biami. It is believed that around Wollombi, in a cave there is a physical manifestation of Biami in the form of a huge cave painting that has exaggerated arms outstretched to embrace all beings.
For thirty years I have lived in the valley of a tiny tributary of Mogo Creek, itself a tributary of the Macdonald River, a little way up from their confluence north of the village of St Albans.
Around the time I found the place I first viewed a satellite image of the Sydney region. To my great surprise I spotted a crudely circular landform centred only ten kilometres north of my land, defined by arcuate creeks and ridges. Segments of the Macdonald River and Mogo Creek form the outline within which the adjacent ridgelines emphasise a goblet-like symmetry about a north-south axis. West and north the most prominent ridgeline is called the Bala Range.
Its unnamed eastern arc carries eight kilometres of the Boree Track, the former Aboriginal highway, disused stockroute and now fire trail between St Albans and Wollombi.
..... Step into a sandy creek or river in days following a flood and you will sink to your knees in soupy, saturated sand, rucked and wrinkled into sandwaves from knee-high to ripples. By the time you can safely wade, stream flow will have dropped to the point where the larger sandwaves have halted in their downstream procession, but smaller bars and ripples are still on the move.
Commonly in the sandstone country the channel will be confined by cliffed outcrops of cross-bedded sandstone, the very structure you will see in natural swathes in creek channel sands as flow declines, or in channel-parallel cuts made with a spade, As a backdrop to these incoherent creek-bed sands, on the move yesterday or the day before, or during the last fresh maybe months or even several years before, are rocks formed from that same sand transported in flooding rivers (though much deeper and broader) nearly two hundred and fifty million years ago. show less