Blue Mountains Dreaming, the Aboriginal heritage, 2nd edition

Contents & blurb, new edition available from Megalong Books, 183 The Mall, Leura, (02)4784 1302, www.megalongbooks.com , rec. price $60.00

My first video

The Katoomba train arriving Springwood station 5.17 pm, camera - Canon Powershot, edited - MS Movie Maker, music - Beethoven from Windows XP sample, shadow - me.

Yes we are mindful that one of the earlierst pieces of moving film was 'Arrivee d'un train en gare a La Ciotat', made in 1896 by Louis Lumière, which demonstrates a movement towards the camera that became a standard method for staging action for years to come. Audience reaction to the film was great - stories tell of patrons backing away from the screen to avoid the oncoming train. We don't need to go that far though...we now have office chairs with wheels, wheeeee!

On the Six Foot Track, with a poet and a piebald.

The six foot track was originally developed as a bridle path six feet wide, covering the 26 miles from Katoomba to Jenolan Caves in 1884. Lord Carrington, then Governor General, and Lady Carrington, traveled the track in September 1887 in company with the noted local guide Harry Peckman, known from his versifying as the Poetical Whip, who entertained them along the way with his songs and recitations. When Lady Carrington found it hard going, Harry told her to catch hold of his piebald horse's tail, she at first refused until her husband remarked, "Now then, Lil', do as the guide tells you", her ladyship took the advice and from then on she was alright. They camped at Little River and broke out the champagne and other good things, Harry gave them billy tea and finished off the bubbly with his brother. Some time later the piebald died, Harry cut off the tail and kept it as a souvenir of Lady Carrington. The track passes through some of the most beautiful, rugged and inaccessible country of the southern Blue Mountains National Park and may take up to 4 days to traverse or as little as 5-6 hours for runners in the six foot track marathon, definitely not me. My younger son and I drove in along the fire trail from the Jenolan end as far as the Cox's River and camped overnight at Little River. I photographed these wild ponies as they grazed on fresh pasture after rain. They probably descend from pit ponies released by the miners after the Katoomba coal mines closed in the 1930s. The rivers were still low with no spawn run fish showing, although a few smaller resident fish showed interest in a dry fly. A school group arrived and took over the Cox's camp ground, they had walked in from the Katoomba end, so we left early and headed back the way we came. No sign of old Harry, just the ponies, there was a piebald one.

Some trout flies

Mainly river and stream patterns at the top and some lake patterns below. Dressing flies is not unlike cooking: one begins by following recipes in books and learning the techniques until branching out and creating variations and original patterns incorporating new materials to meet specific needs or conditions. more

A number of patterns are named after women, for example the traditional Mrs Simpson is named for Wallace Simpson, others refer to my favourite places, people I know, life events and may incorporate reference to the types of fly such as b.h. for a bead head or simply wet or dry.

I designed a salmon fly pattern called Elsa Garrett to honour a Blue Mountains girl who dressed flies for Zane Grey in the 1930s.

I have also like to design and name individual flies or sets as memorials to anglers who have gone to rest, note the Purple People Eater is in there somewhere. I wonder how an all black fly would go, maybe with a flash of silver, called the Johnny Cash or simply the man in black.

Fly fishing problems are essentially aesthetic problems that lead to aesthetic solutions: colour, visibility, shape, size, sparkle, motion, drag, movement, silhouette, sink rate, how a dry fly sits upright on the surface and catches the light at sunset, how an emereger pattern sits just so in the surface film. As John Goddard and Brian Clarke have remarked in The Trout and the Fly, the trout fly is a clean device that lends delicacy, mobility, lightness and elegance to the pursuit of trout.

In recent times there has been a terrific expansion of fly fishing in Australia to include salt water tropical species such as bone fish, barramundi, golden trevally, saratoga, mangrove jack, sooty grunter, jungle perch and temperate species such as bream, mullet and whiting, as well as warm water native species including bass, cod and perch. Some of these critters have big razor sharp teeth and can pull like a horse - delicacy and lightness are inmost cases best left at home. more

It does however demonstrate how successful the fundamental principles of fly design have been over the last 500+ years since first described in print in the "Treatyse of fysshynge wyth an Angle" by Dame Juliana Berners in 1496.

Finally we may turn to Isaac Walton, from The Compleat Angler first published 1653, wow what a language:

O sir, doubt not that angling is an art. Is it not an art to deceive a trout with an artificial fly? a trout! that is more sharp-sighted than any hawk you have named, and more watchful and timorous than your high-mettled merlin is bold; and yet I doubt not to catch a brace or two to-morrow for a friend's break­fast: doubt not, therefore, sir, but that angling is an art, and an art worth your learning. The question is rather, whether you be capable of learning it? for angling is somewhat like poetry, men are to be born so: I mean, with inclinations to it, though both may be heightened by discourse and practice: but he that hopes to be a good angler, must not only bring an inquiring, searching, observing wit, but he must bring a large measure of hope and patience, and a love and propensity to the art itself; but having once got and practised it, then doubt not but angling will prove to be so pleasant, that it will prove to be like virtue, a reward to itself.

Mt Banks walk, September 2007

The main view is from the walking track on the western approach to Mount Banks. In 1804 George Caley and his party approached from the eastern side, suffering from hunger and exhaustion they could continue no further and struggled back to Sydney. The Blue Mountains were to remain impenetrable to the colonists until 1813 when Gregory Blaxland, William Charles Wentworth and William Lawson followed the ridges not the valleys and found a route to the fertile inland west of the great dividing range.

The vegetation changes as you approach the mount from Montane heath on the exposed Narrabeen sandstone dominated by Eucalytpus stricta, allocasurina nana, Leptospermum attenuatum, Patersonia sericea (see flower pic above); to Moist basalt cap forest on the slopes, dominated by E. fastigata, we found a rich deep soil with wombat warrens and active birdlife.

The flesh of the common wombat (Vombatus ursinus) is described as tasting like ham and was a prized traditional food; children would be sent down the burrow feet first and would call and beat on the tunnel when they located an animal which was then dug out; they would also be night stalked and speared.

It is interesting that the word for wombat in the Dharug language of the lower Blue Mountains is wombat, although in Gundungurra, which was used in the upper mountains around Katoomba and in the high valleys, it is goolung. The inland Dharug language is related to the coastal language used around Sydney Cove in 1788, whose speakers, the Eora, acted as informants to the colonists and provided much of the local nomenclature, hence the animal's common name as we know it. If the settlers had asked the mountain people their name for the animal instead, we might now be calling them goolungs not wombats; not quite the same ring to it though...

Axe grinding grooves

Look closely and you can see the axe grinding grooves in the sandstone bedrock in one of the many dried out rain water pools adjacent to Mt Banks in the Blue Mountains National Park. Almost every depression contains multiple grooves which have been revealed by the continuing drought.

Water in the pools was used to whet the grinding process to polish and shape the axe blank and a man could sit for many hours sharpening a fine axe. Each groove represents the manufacture of a single stone axe head which was then hafted to a wooden handle. The earliest grooves may date from around 14,000 years before present. Stone axes continued to be made until soon after white settlement in 1788 when they were swiftly replaced by steel hatchets.

Mt Banks was named by the explorer George Caley in 1804 to honour his patron Sir Joseph Banks the noted English botanist, and marks the furthest westward point of his futile attempt to cross the Blue Mountains.

Prehistoric rock engraving

I rediscovered this hand sized circle engraved into the sandstone under a layer of rotting leaves on the cliff edge at Katoomba. After trying some ordinary shots for about half an hour, the late afternoon sun slanted through the cloud for a few seconds and revealed it in relief. The second photo shows the view from the cliff edge with the engraving in the foreground in front of the rocky spire. You can stand on top of the spire, carefully, and look out over the vast space to the cliffs on the other side of the valley at Sublime Point - breathtaking.

The Gundungurra people occupied this part of the Blue Mountains in the recent past and it may date from that period of more intense use beginning around 3-4,000 year ago, or from the end of the last ice age around 10,000 years before present when regular seasonal use appears in the archaelogical record or even from a period of earlier intermitent occupation around 22,000 years BP.

Engravings like this one were made with stone tools by first pecking a series of holes and then abraiding the connecting walls, you can see a small remaining section of the left. It is one of only two known circular stone engravings in the Blue Mountains and like many religious objects its simple form belies its deeply sacred nature.