The ‘other’ way through the hills

 

Beyond the Richmond plains and vill,

The asphalt steep ascends,

Another way through the Mountains Blue

With sinuous turns and bends

 

Not as full as the other one –

Where lively towns abound,

The Bells Line is the quieter one

More full of Nature’s sound

 

For beyond the orchards - Bilpin’s blooms,

Beyond Tomah’s garden patch,

There’s wilderness of the gumtree groves

That cannot find a match

 

That emptiness of human touch

That solitude in the bluff,

Where melancholy floats through lonely clouds,

And the silence is enough

 

Mile after mile of emerald hills,

Cockatoo specks of white,

Untouched, as it was aeons ago

Under the same sunlight

 

As if, under some rocky arch

You’ll find the Darug folks,

Foraging in winter hills of time

Wrapped in possum cloaks

 

Or even beyond, from Gondwana

A giant bunyip stares,

Or a phantom cat that still today

Plods and prowls and dares

 

(And yet, somewhere in a hidden glade,

Lies English gardens too,

Did someone say, a chestnut farm?

An observatory out of the blue?)

 

Primeval here, this stretch of hills,

With hidden falls that dance,

Cathedral Creek, Poets Rock -

All wrapped in lost romance

 

That every time, I pass by you

Solitude drains the heart

Yet, antiquity fills this olden soul

As if here, anew we start

 

Stay thus then, oh wonder road

That the souls that pass you by,

Lose their way to find again,

A new world in your sky…

 

13^th October’ 23

 

Dedicated to the Bells Line of Road – the alternate road through the Blue Mountains, after the busier, livelier and more populous Great Western Highway. The former was shown to explorer Archibald Bell by local Darug aboriginals a decade after the latter was used by early explorers Lawson, Wentworth and Blaxland to cross the Blue Mountains.

The Bells Line of Road is less bustling – though it has amazing European and British gardens at Mt. Irvine, Mt. Tomah and Mt. Wilson, rich orchards at Bilpin (including a chestnut and walnut farm at Kookotonga) and even an old observatory at Crago, yet its wilderness amidst the Blue Mountains National Park is incomparable, this close to the busting cosmopolis of Sydney. I have been mesmerised and humbled, every single time I have passed through this stretch. And every time, the beauty of the aloneless helps me appreciate that far from the madding crowd, here lies the secondary, alternate. ‘other’  way through these hills.

(N.B.. there are also rumours of a mysterious feline, a large cat that prowls in the Blue Mountains, often called the Blue Mountains Panther, either living here since primeval times or escaped from black markets in more recent times)

Cover image - Autumn at Breenhold Gardens, Mt Wilson, author's archives