THE GARDENS OF STONE

I will be leading walk in the Blue Mountains Wilderness this weekend in an area not too far from the magnificent Gardens of Stone about which I write in my book. Today's blog is an excerpt that chapter: THE GARDENS OF STONE

'Sandstone pagodas rise like massive mushrooms from the plateau. In between them are secret little groves of rock orchids, moss and ferns living lives of quiet dignity in their remote sanctuaries. Very occasionally they are disturbed, usually by friends of mine, who have walked this country most of their adult lives. I know most of them but Michael Cartier and Michael Jackson (yes, that’s his name) are good mates. They disappear into the remote Gardens of Stone and the 500,000 hectare Wollemi Wilderness that neighbours it, squeezing through rock holes, dropping from dissected plateaus into gorges, tracking Aboriginal occupation sites. 

Their team of bushwalkers and academics has been responsible for major finds in this wilderness. They are guided in their research by Google Earth, seeking suitable landforms from outer space. On sandstone ledges they find ancient engravings, while rock art survives in the shelters and overhangs. In 1995 a group of them found Eagles Cave, which holds 200 paintings dating back to 2000BC. Two years earlier another bushwalker, David Noble, found the Jurassic-era Wollemi pine, a plant thought to have been extinct for 150 million years. The Wollemi nobilis, part of the 200 million year old Araucariaceae family, having existed alongside the dinosaurs, is now available in a nursery near you. Turns out they propagate extremely easily, a genetic blueprint designed to adapt for life over the long haul. It even has its own website. 

In 2006 three groups of bushwalkers and archaeologists were dropped off by helicopter in the Wollemi National Park. Michael Cartier’s party found an extensive cave art network, but the mother lode, discovered by archaeologist Matthew Kelleher and Michael Jackson, was extraordinary. On an enormous slab of sandstone 100 metres long and 50metres wide, like an Aztec platform or Mt Olympus, was Gallery Rock, covered with carvings and drawings. All of the most powerful ancestral beings are here: the supreme spirit Baiame, his son Daramulan, another forty two figurative motifs, ancestral emu women and men, as well as an evil child-eating spirit with a club foot, a spectrum of the most powerful spirits of the Aboriginal universe and all assembled in this pantheon of Gods. Hold in your mind that this place exists: now, alone, exposed to the sky and the wind, to the rain and lightning, to animals and the occasional adventurer, an expression of whatever it is in the minds of mortals that seeks to link the forces of nature with the struggle of human beings. On a giant rock in the wilderness that borders the town of Lithgow, with its car yards, smoke stacks and prison, lies a barely known and pure expression of the human soul.'

Excerpt from The Electronic Swagman - A Man, a Dog, the Road and a lot of Dead People.