Newsletter No - Blue Mountains Association of Cultural Heritage ...

Continued from page 5
To the Europeans the Mountains
were for a long time an infernal
nuisance full of ‘impassable
chasms’ , with the plateau an arid
and unattractive area to hurry
across to get to the other side.
It was only gradually in the
nineteenth century that the
mystique of the Sublime gathered
force and, as Kate Hartig felicitously
observed: ‘the aesthetic appraisal
of the mountain landscape was
cloaked in a romantic image and
was expressed by sentiments of
exaltation and delight.’
The grand concept of the Sublime
in the nineteenth century fostered
an appreciation of the savagely
scenic.
In Europe, the Alps ceased to be a
confounded nuisance for travellers
to surmount and became instead
somewhere to walk, to climb, to
sketch, to admire. It is one aspect
of the invention of the holiday.
Once it was known in the 1810s that
there was another side to the Blue
Mountains, leading to promising
plains for European animals to
graze and erode, the stretch from
Glenbrook to Mount Victoria was
seen primarily as a hazardous
intermission between the good
grazing on the Cumberland Plain
and the next accessible patch in
Hartley Vale.
And in that intermission there was
precious little for animals or people
to eat or drink. This perception took
half a century to moderate. The
Mountains road was still ‘dreary and
desolate’ to Louisa Meredith in
1839.
What happened in the Blue
Mountains, as elsewhere in the
course of the nineteenth century, is
a very European realisation that,
while a road may very well have
been constructed to lead from A to
B and that one ventured on that
road at A with the sole wish to reach
B as safely and expeditiously as
possible, nonetheless there may be
pleasures to be found along the way
of which one had not dreamt.
It is not quite the world where ‘It is
better to travel hopefully than to
arrive’, but it is a world where new
possibilities and new realisations
were gradually opened up.
The gardens at Nooroo, Mt Wilson - the summerhouse framed by
wisteria, maples and rhododendrons
So mountain retreats sprang up,
often in spectacular situations, like
Yester Grange at Wentworth Falls
or Eurama at Faulconbridge, cool
places for the well-to-do to escape
the discomfort of summer weather
in Sydney or Newcastle.
Two became recognisable hill
stations in the pattern of the Indian
raj: these were Mount Wilson and
Kurrajong Heights.
And country retreats and hill
stations called for gardens, like
those which Silas Clifford-Smith will
be talking about this morning. And
this is true not only of the hillstations;
it is equally true of the later
gardens, symbolised in the
twentieth century by the work of
Paul Sorensen, that ambivalent
icon.
Many of these gardens, and their
successors, are now on display
every year as part of such things as
the Leura Festival. They are no
less manicured and have created
no less ruthless clearings of the
environment within throwing
distance of the World Heritage park.
That does not mean that I do not
admire them nor that I do not
recommend many of them for
heritage listing, often at a state-wide
level of significance.
But there is a tight-rope to walk
when weighing up just what has
been the impact of some of these
gardens on the heritage values of
the Mountains.
...the irony of
classic gardens
which we love
so much at Mt
Wilson...
It always strike me as an irony that
the classic gardens which we all
love so much at Mount Wilson are
in fact exotic importations created
by the deliberate destruction of the
rich natural vegetation of the basalt
cap, with its rain-forest and tree-fern
under-storey.
The character of Mount Wilson is
complex, just as its Indian
counterpart, Simla, is complex, for
reasons both similar and dissimilar.
Neither has a simple,
uncomplicated relationship between
the original environment and the
modified.
And because each has a seasonal
occupation by the wealthy
professional folk who need to
escape hot and humid cities, each
has also a different sort of
permanent resident, those who take
care of the estates and form their
own very different community
throughout the year.
HERITAGE 6
November - December 2012