Atlas Page 11
By Alexander Sutherland,
R. von Lendenfeldt and Francis Meyers

THE mountains of Australia are not specially remarkable for altitude, they are all below the perpetual snow line, and have no active volcano to enhance their interest. In some far distant ages their height may have been proportionate to their gigantic bulk, and in some dim future they may possess a history and a romance as thrilling or inspiring as those lingering like familiar spirits about every crag, peak and ravine of Europe and Asia. A tremendous geological age, and an absolute babyhood of human interest and effort, are characteristic of Australian mountains, as of everything else on Austral earth. The first broad view of the Australian cordillera shows us, not a comparatively unimportant earth elevation, but a barrier of seven hundred miles in length between two oceans. East and west go the waters from its ridge; these to the Pacific Ocean, those to the Indian. The rivers of the former discharge upon the coast, while those of the other wander sluggishly, and in no great volume, across the great plains of the interior, where they join other rivers, which in turn flow on, still in a south-westerly direction, diminishing in number as they proceed, like the gathered threads of a skein, until they meet the Murray, which discharges into Lake Alexandrina. The most characteristically mountainous part of Australia lies in its south-eastern corner, for here is the highest point, here is the largest area of elevated land, and from this part runs to the north the dividing range of Eastern Australia, and also the great lateral spur to the west, which forms the Dividing Range of Victoria.

The average elevation of the main chain at this part is three thousand three hundred feet and the Blue Mountains proper extend from the thirty-fourth parallel of latitude, northward to the Liverpool Range. At Monaro the height is much less than on the principal part of the Muniong Range, yet it is sufficient to produce a long and rigorous winter, even in the towns that nestle in the valleys, or on the slopes of the hills. But north of Monaro there is a decided drop. The plateau of the main range is here comparatively narrow; there are no towering peaks, no stupendous crags or lofty isolated summits. The backbone is less marked, and otherwise so level and diversified in character as almost to escape recognition. In the latitude of Goulburn the plateau widens out, but the general height is not more than two thousand feet; and on to the northward it grows still more elevated and rugged.

At the blue Mountains —"The Mountains" par excellence to the people of Sydney —the backbone asserts itself and takes bold shape again. The grim escarpment of the seaward face of this section of the big divide is associated with all the history, trials, and efforts of the early Australian colonists. Governor Phillip saw it in his first journey inland; looked out towards it from his Rose Hill farm and his settlement on Toongabbie and Castle Hill. The bold blue bastion guarded all the secret of the inner land through the first twenty years of Australian history. A road painfully made by convict labour, and for years painfully traversed, opened the far west to commerce, but only with the railway did the beauties and pleasures and glories of the mountains become accessible to the multitudes of the city. They are all within an easy journey now. Without serious effort or hardship or privation of any kind, the tourist of to-day may stand on the precise spot where, after much trial and endurance, the gallant little band of first explorers stood; may pass by the graves of the soldiers who kept the first camp at Blackheath; may look at the marvel of Govett’s Leap; at the Grose and Kanimbula Valleys; at the multitude of waterfalls; and —softest and perhaps loveliest picture of all —at the plains and the river below Lapstone Hill. But he who would really know the mountains, must give weeks and months to them; must not only see the mysteries and beauties of the everlasting gulfs, the falling waters, the distant forest carpet and the lace-like fringe of ferns and flowers, but he must let the majestic colouring and clothing of the sunset sink into his being. He must watch while Nature weaves the robes of imperial purple and royal gold; while down in the gorges the pale grey mists and the deep blue shadows are prepared; while every salient point, every unshadowed ridge is flooded with fiery light; while the bare crags gleam and glow as if in process of transmutation, and the gnarled and stunted trees of the summit stand out in spectral light.

The tourist who starts from Sydney to study the scenery of the Blue Mountains finds himself, after a journey of thirty miles, on the Neapean River, the level of whose waters at this point is not more than eighty feet above the high tide mark of Port Jackson. Across the river lies a short plain backed by a steep, densely timbered slope of sandstone rocks. This is the beginning of the Blue Mountains. The railway climbs the escarpment by a zig-zag, achieving in this way, an ascent of nearly a thousand feet. The traveller as he rises gets a view of a lovely landscape —a rich plain, with a river meandering through it; enclosed farms, with their variegated patches of different crops; settlers’ homes scattered irregularly about; beyond, the half cleared paddocks, mostly devoted to the grazing of cattle; and in the distance the white houses of the elevated suburbs of Sydney, and the wreathed smoke from the many steamers passing up and down the coast.

At Wentworth begins the great waterfall country, for here the valleys are deeper, and the hillsides are more abrupt. In dry weather the quantity of water falling over the rock edges dwindles to small proportions, as the gathering-ground is so small. But though the views are mostly named from the falls, the real grandeur of the scenery lies in the valleys, where depth and distance deceive from their very magnitude, and where the sombre hue of the gum forests, far down below and beyond, contrasts with the bright colour of the cliffs reddened with ironstone stains. "The Great Falls," which bear appropriately the name of that famed Australian who was among the first to cross their watershed, make a descent in three successive cascades of a thousand feet, having at their base a tall point, which from above seems but a bank of moss half hidden by the mist of the broken water. At Katoomba there is one great fall, a sheer drop of two hundred feet over the edge of the cliff; but perhaps there is more beauty in the lesser cascades, of which there are many within a mile of Katoomba, on the northern edge of the Kanimbula Valley. Ten miles further on, and southward from Blackheath, is a valley without a waterfall, but with a beauty peculiarly its own. It is called the Mermaid’s Cave. The cave is a channel or cranny in a great grey rock, that almost divides the vale. All above is a rugged coarse, commonplace Australian gully; all below is soft, luxurious beauty. This is the rest and the peace of the mountains. The grandeur, the profundity of gloom, the Titanic force and passion must be sought in another place, and none is better, perhaps, than the Valley of the Grose, at Govett’s Leap.

A mile to the northward of Blackheath Station this greatest marvel of the mountains is hidden, unperceived from the railway track by reason of the mountainous gum forest. The road to the Leap lies to the right of the line, falling by an easy descent; and the first promise of wonderland is given by the characteristic blue of the hills beyond the gorge, seen occasionally through the trees. But the veil is drawn abruptly when the last turn is made, and there is nothing between the spectator and the vastness of the gorge. From a ledge of grey rock, with a few wind-tortured trees and scrub, the view is down into a gulf whose floor, though clothed with a great forest, undulates like the face of a rolling, but unbroken sea. The treetops are one thousand two hundred feet below; the Grose River runs beneath. But it is not heard, and only occasionally is there a glimpse of the tall tree ferns upon its banks, or a flash of its silver current, where, after heavy rains, its flood-tide rush has torn a broader gap through the leaves. Out into the gulf runs a little peninsula whose extreme point bears the name of "The Pulpit," and from "The Pulpit’s " ledge one may look down into the abyss, or glancing across to the right may, see the fall that bears the name of Govett’s Leap, so called after the surveyor who first discovered it. The water is collected and held in a broad morass at the head of a little gully, and, filtering through, gathers in a long shallow basin and overflows its edge, which is the lip of the gorge. In summer weather it is but a fairy fall, a thin veil of spray and transparent water shimmering upon the surface of the brown rock, in every nook and cranny of which shine wet fern-leaves of a bright yet tender green. It falls five hundred and twenty feet, breaks on a protruding ledge at the cliff’s foot, and loses itself in a bank of ferns on the edge of the forest. These different waterfalls —though each with special characteristics of its own —have general features common to them all, and the visitor who tarries long enough at any one may saturate himself with all the inspiration which this bold plateau can give. There is something in all great mountains which impresses men with the sense of their own littleness, and this huge rocky: mass, lying as it does in sight of a great and populous city, is no incompetent interpreter of the lessons Nature teaches to Man.

Four miles beyond Blackheath is Mount Victoria, close to which is Mount Piddington, a favourite point of view with tourists. The last and some of the fairest of the waterfalls are about Mount Victoria, and by an easy drive beyond the mount on the northern side of the line, Mount York is reached, down whose western face Blaxland, Wentworth, and Lawson descended on their first journey. The Lithgow Valley is the western limit of the Blue Mountains proper, but the great ridge continues its northward course, the branch railroad to Mudgee skirting it at some little distance inland. At Capertee the view seaward is down a gorge as deep as that of the Grose, the great cavity here having long ago received the name of "The Gulf." At the head of the Goulburn River, the principal tributary to the Hunter, the range is at its farthest point from the sea. It then trends eastward, and becomes known as the Liverpool Range, first sighted by Oxley, whose name has been given to its highest peak, four thousand five hundred feet above the level of the sea. At the foot of this range, near the township of Scone, is the singular phenomenon of a mountain on fire. It is the one burning mountain of the continent, but its fires are not volcanic. The nether forces beneath Australia do not show upon the surface, and earthquake shocks are rarely felt. Wingen is not a volcano, but a mountain in whose face a coal seam has become ignited, and the flames, eating into the hill, have followed the seam. Mounds of scoriae lie about its mouth, and sulphurous dust is in places solidified, or formed into crystals.

Some of the grandest mountains are set in the extreme northeastern corner of the colony. They, are very little known, and many of them may never have been ascended; but from the tropical fringe of the sugar lands, or the bold headland of Point Danger, to the magnificent height of Mount Lindsay, they, are beautiful in form and in foliage beyond all other hills of the colony. Mount Lindsay, with its castellated summit, may well be described as the giant warder of our northern frontier. Seen from the heights above Casino, or from the great tableland, his grim front rises through the forests a sheer crag, a thousand feet ill height, robed with foliage, and with his wet rocky helmet flashing jewel-like in the sun. The cradles of some of the greatest Australian waters are about these northern mountains.

Here spring brooks which, later on, combine with others to form the great Darling. Westward they all flow from the mountain slopes; and on what a long and marvellous journey they go-out on to the broad western plains, down the tortuous courses of the Darling and the Murray, till they find the sea on the southern coast! And the waters of the eastern slopes, what will they discover? They see such abrupt contrasts; such varieties of vegetation as no other Australian waters are privileged to see. Their birthplace is in the highlands, amongst shrubs of poor and wintry growth; but in a few miles they come down to warm and fertile dales, through which they, gleam and sparkle on their journey to the sea, putting a fringe about the robe of the big Divide, which in its richness is unapproached by any other forest of the continent. The greatest breadth of this tropical verdure, which bears the prosaic and misleading name of the Big Scrub, spreads itself about those feet of the mountains which come down to the sea by the little towns of Richmond River.

At Mount Lindsay ends the New South Wales portion of the mountain chain. The cordillera, running generally parallel with the direction of the coast, comprises either in its principal range, or its lateral spurs, all the great mountains, the water-gathering or water-diving grounds of the colony. Sometimes high, bold, and wild-a serrated or razor-backed divide; at others a broad plateau, affording in semi-tropical latitudes the conditions of the temperate zone; rugged and desolate over many miles, showing nothing but the barren sandstone, poorly fertilized by the decay of its own meagre vegetation, with here and there large fertile patches of the decomposed trap-rock which mark the old volcanic overflows.

The coast ranges occupy an intermediate position between the great cordillera and the Pacific Ocean, and are generally minor ranges running parallel to the tables of the Divide. Mount Seaview is the only, peak of these attaining a remarkable altitude, rising six thousand feet, giving birth to the Hastings River, and looking right out to the Pacific, across sixty miles of varied country. Other prominent mountains of these coast ranges are Mount Coolungubbera, over three thousand seven hundred feet high and Mount Budawang, three thousand eight hundred feet, which are noted peaks of the Southern portion of this mountainous parallel to the Great Divide. Besides these coast spurs, a number of isolated peaks stud the coastline and the plains of the inland country. Some of the most conspicuous of these points have been already described in the chapter on the coast scenery of New South Wales, and, although mountains of this character occur in several parts of the colony, they do not materially affect its geographical features.