SEEKING ……FINDING
NELLIE’S GLEN
I have been making a haiku journey through Gundungurra
country, exploring its past and
present, and writing of my walks
in the “haibun” style of great master Basho, the seventeenth-century
Japanese poet and walker. These walks were sparked off by a comment made by Jim
Smith, when he led a group of walkers down behind the Hydro Majestic Hotel at
Medlow Bath in Autumn 2000. He said that in the Megalong valley, the
Gundungurra had preferred the mining village of Nellie’s Glen to the reserve.
Seeking …
I wanted to find the site of the village in the Megalong valley which
had formed around mining for shale about 1895. This rock is crushed and
produces a kind of kerosene-like oil. But should I walk by myself? I asked the
I Ching. It came up with Limitations. It said “In nature there are fixed limits
for summer and winter, day and night, and these give the year its meaning.
…Unlimited possibilities are not suited to woman; if they existed, her life
would only dissolve in the boundless. To become strong, a woman’s life needs
the limitations ordained by duty and voluntarily accepted.”After all, Basho had
his walking companion on his “Narrow Road to the Deep North” – Sora, his
devoted disciple. Though Basho was nearing the end of his life. I am in the
middle of mine.
Peter is an old friend – we’ve known each other for about twenty
years.We set off to Nellies Glen via the Six Foot Track on a beautiful winter’s day. We left the ridge-top and
began the steep descent between
two bluffs - dripping mosses, shadowy dark damp places. Would this also have
been a route that the Gundungurra would have used to negotiate the cliffs,
another “black’s ladder” like the passage at Medlow Bath?
I told Peter,”This would have been one of the main routes in and out of
the valley for the miners. There
was no road into the Megalong valley from this end until about 1900. Then they
made a track wide enough to carry tourists in a horse and buggy to Jenolan
Caves. Before the road, they trudged up and down this track.”
The miners who worked for JB North went on strike in 1887 over pay and
again two years later. He would not allow them to unionise.
We looked at the rock face as we went down, which contained some occasional dark pieces of coal.
Peter identified a pale crumbly rock as shale.
“Pressure produces this – trees and plants crushed together, “he said.
I thought about how pressure can make or break people – it depends on
how much pressure over how long, and the particular personality that is being
acted upon. We’d been talking as we went down about people we knew, their
fortunes up or down, jobs, changes
in our group and romances.
The dreams I had
of you and me this summer –
a damp lump of coal
Halfway down we stopped for lunch. It was a picnic on a fallen log,
looking through the trees at tall bluffs and crags. I was thinking about the
death of certain illusions we’d all had about one another.
We kept going down into the glen, named after JB North’s daughter. We
were still surrounded by cliffs on several sides, vertical and remote like the
gorges in Chinese paintings and poetry – the silence broken only by the creek.
The lush cleft opened into the beginnings of the Megalong valley, and the
vegetation changed. As we rounded a corner, the first wattle to bloom in winter
lit up the way with its colour.
Sunshine wattle
splashing me
yellow
The track widened into a four-wheel drive road. I looked around for
signs of human habitation but there were none. The habitations of termites,
vast (to them) complexes of orange mud and termite spittle reared from the
ground, or leaned cosily against the bast of a tree. Since I could not see
anything, I began to tell Peter what I knew about the Gundungurra at this stage
of their history:
“Very little was ever recorded about the Aborigines- I suppose the view
at the time was that they would die out - and there was very little recorded
about the miners either.But there was a piece in the local paper at one time
about a Gundungurra called Billy
Lynch, who lived further down the track – he’d decided he wanted to open a deli
in Katoomba or the Crushers as it was called, and he wanted to do “work
experience”. His great grand-daughter Aunty Dawn Colless has since told me that
he did in fact open a tea and
coffee stall somewhere along the Six Foot track.
We sat near each other in
the sun and wrote “a stream of haiku”.
Peter wrote a few lines about ‘tangled trunks’. This inspired me to
write:
Tangled trunks
he’s rough she’s
smooth
a slight
squeaking
It began to grow late.
Time was running against us. But
there’s something about Peter that doesn’t want to accept limitations.
“ So often I’d just like to throw my watch away, “he said as we walked
back.
A magnificent eagle landed on a branch near us, resting from the hunt. His
neck feathers hung heavy like gold ornaments, the leg feathers like breeches –
his soaring easy flight away, riding the billows of air, hunting again, obeying
the imperative to keep himself alive.
So the day turned out to be more about my own history, rather than
about a short-lived mining settlement in which white and black lived together.
It was a long way up and out.
Chiselled out
the length of a
foot
this worn
sandstone step
…….Finding
Nellie’s Glen
My friend Don has been
exploring the Mountains on foot for years now, mainly for the pleasure of it.
He knew where the ruins of the mining village were, and agreed to guide me
there. We were going down into the Megalong via a different route.
We dropped off the escarpment near Narrowneck, and plunged steeply down
through an eroded path. We were headed firstly to the Devil’s Hole, a feared
place in Gundungurra mythology. It is an abode of the Rock Dog[i]
, who loves to eat human flesh and is as big as a calf. This track was one of
the ways out of Nellie’s Glen for
aborigines (during the day only) and miners, who may have wanted to go
up to the Crushers.
We approached a narrow cleft in the rocks, through which we must pass.
The rocks tumbled down through it, and overhead the walls loomed together,
blotting out the sky. Water trickled through, and bounced from the sides. The
gloom seemed to make greener the
many ferns on either side, whose spines bent down towards the damp. Further
down the steep scramble, (which was just like the “black’s ladder” we had negotiated
a year ago at Medlow Bath) was an enormous sandstone boulder jammed between the
tops of the walls. It was poised
as though possibly waiting for the correct moment, or the right victim, to come
crashing down.
A descent into the dark of the past is often a very
uncomfortable thing. Uncomfortable but necessary. In this case the discomforts
were physical. My toes were jamming into the ends of my boots, my body did not
feel warmed up to the jarring and crashing. We stopped and sat in a cave, drinking
tea and listening to the plink! and splat! and trickle of water.
Dark and dripping
in the sandstone belly –
bread smeared with honey
There is another story told by Jim Smith[ii] about this place. It concerns the
Gobung, which is a huge bird that flies low, and can change into a man or dog
at will. A girl of Gundungurra descent, a member of Billy Lynch’s family, was
making her way from the Megalong valley up to Katoomba via this track. She
looked back and noticed that there was a man following her. She thought he
might be a Gobung and hurried on. But the more she hurried the more he seemed
to be gaining on her. She put all her effort into speed, and still he was
getting closer. She reached the top and went as fast as she could to her
friend’s house, banging on the door and practically falling inside when it
opened. Her friend looked out, and saw a man arriving at her gate, but as she
looked, he changed into a large black bird, and flew off.
Beyond the Devil’s Hole was daylight and the sound of voices. Somewhere
on Narrowneck there were climbers dangling from ropes. We turned west, and then
there was a clear view down into the Megalong and beyond.
Gundungurra country
rippling hills and valleys
is it unsung?
Along the path here and
there were fungi. There were tiny toffee-coloured fungi scattered around the
base of a tree, small brown ones
on a mossy rock. Later on in the valley we found a fungus that looks like
coral, but is soft and wet to the touch.There were large creamy fungi with
acne, which had been caused either by slugs or the action of rain. We saw a
cluster of elegant dark red fungi tottering on stiletto stalks, no doubt as
dangerous as six pina coladas followed by a bottle of merlot.
The vegetation changed to an open forest
of angophora. We looked back , and could finally see the shiny water pipe
ascending Narrowneck , bringing water to Katoomba from the Fish river at
Oberon. Don told me that there was also an old tunnel underneath , a leftover
of the coal and shale mines. Above us were the magnificent orange cliffs, and
one outcrop in particular had been named for its shape.
Snout in the air
Boar’s Head
sniffing clouds
.We stopped for
lunch on a little promontory, looking toward the site of the mine. But who
would know that there had been a mine there? “If we wanted to find the old mine
workings we’d be better to have come down Redledge Pass,” said Don. To the eye
and the mind that does not know the history of the landscape, there is just
bush, ridges, cliffs. And some human interventions sink fast with few
traces. But in the distance on the
rock face, we could see the signs of a wedgetail eagles nest, a splash of white
droppings down the orange cliff. Animals too leave their traces and sites.
Back on the
track, there it was, the scat that is becoming so familiar.
On top of a rock
neat squares crumbling
greenish wombat poo
We found
ourselves on the Six Foot track and it seemed to me that once again I was not
going to find what I was looking for. But here was a paddock, with horses, and
so we strolled over to pat them and sniff their horsey smell and feel their
velvety nostrils. But this
paddock, why was it so
beautifully maintained and spacious? It was dotted about with scribbly gums and
there were a few piles of stones over near some kind of shelter shed. And then
we saw a sign telling us that this
was the site of the shortlived mining village,(which lasted for about twelve
years, 1893 to 1905) in which there had been forty families, a hotel, a public
hall, a bakery, a butcher’s shop. The village had been sited at the junction of
two creeks, on a level piece of ground in the valley, with the cliffs on three
sides. When the mine closed the village was dismantled and the materials taken
to Katoomba for re-use.
All that is
left are some piles of stones, and depressions in the ground where there had
been foundations. The grass was closely cropped and in places there was a
strong smell of horse. In one place there had been quite a large rectangular
building, which would have faced towards Boar’s Head.
Would the drinkers
have leaned on railings here
admired the cliffs?
Gundungurra
from the Lithgow area had come over to live here when their lives had become
thoroughly untenable on what had previously been their territiories. Wywandy
and Therabulat were the clan names of these two subgroups. Further down in
Gundungurra territory a few stragglers remained on the scrappy reserves in the
Burragorang valley. But by this stage, Gundungurra had banded together for
their common survival. Billy Lynch, who was the leader of the Therabulat mob,
lived with his extended family further down the Six Foot track.
An old post
piled about with stones-
lamentations
And from
this place, the Gundungurra moved up to Katoomba, to live in what was called
the Gully.
We set off up the Six Foot track towards
Nellie’s Glen into the darkening afternoon. It was going to be dark by the time
we got out. We plodded through the Bonnie Doon area at dusk, putting one foot
after another, the sunset out past Oberon and the western range sinking from
apricot to copper, thence to rust and the black of night.
Diana
Levy
[i] as
described by Jim Smith in “Aboriginal Legends of the Blue Mountains” p.12 1992
ISBN 0-959-4816-2-1
[ii] ibid. p.12
Published in
“Tomorrow we go to Megalong
Valley – a collection of short stories” 2003.
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