Toscana del sud

A little after dawn. Riding in a car with my father. I'm entranced by the topography — angular, fissured hills; sere grassland with stands of spindly eucalypts. Barbed wire five-strand fences, old, silver-greyed strainer posts, ragged split timber fenceposts. A two-lane bitumen road running along the flats, the hills a few hundred metres beyond the fence line. But it's the shape of the hills that holds me. The endlessly varying but eternally uniform shape of those hills. As a small boy, say five or six, I don't have the language to describe them with any precision. But the shapes reach out, beguile, capture my imagination. I can see myself walking across the concavity of the river flats, to foothills, then scrambling up a gully to the ridge line, the gully split by smaller and smaller gullies; the low ridges giving way to higher and higher summits. Not huge mountains, but gentle, human-sized hills — the size where you could climb to the top in an hour, or less.

Not huge mountain ranges, for this is the Central West of NSW. If there is a part of Australia that feels like my bit of country, it's here. I'm a city boy — Sydney, born and bred, but the Central West is something special in my interior landscape. It was a place I learnt about early. My father was born in Wellington, at the northwestern end of the Central West, schooled in its heartland at Orange, then lived in Canowindra. That's where I first came to know the region, on visits to my grandmother, my Nanny, Dorry. They were the only holidays we ever had as kids. 

My Nanny, Dorry, and my father, at his graduation

Canowindra was a long way away, a drive to a place that was a different world from my home in the Inner West of Sydney. A place of climatic extremes — dry heatwave summers, when I spent all day at the swimming pool with my cousins, and cold, cold winters, when Nanny would — wonder of wonders — light a fire in the living room. A land of curiosities — two stoves in the kitchen: a wood stove that also kept the room cosy in winter; and an electric stove, for summer, to avoid heating the house up any more than it already was. A chip heater in the bathroom, that, along with drought, meant lukewarm baths in a few inches of water. All the wood burning gave the house a distinctive, smoky smell — not strong, but rich and warm, a dark brown smell. Like tobacco, and the leather of my grandfather's collar box, that sat on Dad's bedroom dresser, as it now sits on mine.

Other curios and oddities abounded. Nanny lived in a freestanding house — a wonder to a child who'd only ever lived in a small city flat. It had timber verandas on several sides, which meant you heard visitors long before they arrived at the door. There was an old garage, but no car — she didn't drive, and had been widowed for as long as I knew her. The garage was a magnet. Dark, dusty, with benches and cupboards full of potentially interesting things — tools, jars of nuts and bolts; it drew me, until Nanny saw a snake in there, and I was banned. Two big water tanks up on high stands; I learnt to knock the rings to see how deep the water was.

Further down the backyard was a corrugated iron dunny, which stunk, and resulted in a reluctance to go to the toilet. Next to it was a chopping block, where she split timber for the stove and chip heater. The washing line was up on clothes props — a Hill's Hoist was nowhere to be found in those days. Beyond the washing lines was a low fence, separating the grassed area from a rougher weed-strewn patch down the back, intended as a vegetable patch. I remember a photo of my father in his twenties, standing there, weedy rough ground then as well, holding up two chooks by their legs. I never learnt the fate of the chooks, but have always assumed they were dinner.

 It's not for decades after that early morning drive that I learn that the landscapes I see are fractal geometry — they exhibit repeating patterns that display at every scale. It's also later, as a geology student, that I gain the language to describe the topography that had held me. It's called a mature landscape, in the theoretical cycle of landscape evolution developed by geographers like William Morris Davis.

William Morris  Davis' model of landscape evolution

I realise that a trip from Sydney to the Central West is a trip through Davis' landscape model. The flattish Cumberland Plain of western Sydney could be the "Old" stage, as is the landscape beyond Parkes or around Hay, all big plains with minor residual ridges of harder rock. The Cumberland Plain is followed on the drive by the uplifted plateaux cut by box canyons of the Blue Mountains. They look like Davis' "Youthful" stage, but I quickly realise the impact of geological history here. They are actually a "Rejuvenated" stage, where uplift of the plateau at the Lapstone Monocline has kicked off the Davisian cycle again. But it's the Central West — part of the Western Slopes topographic division of NSW, that grabs me. And so perfectly exemplifies Davis' Mature stage of topography. 

That monotonically repeating landscape — all fractal slopes with nary a flat spot — is very appealing. On a world stage, the landscapes that capture popular imagination often resemble this. The lands of central Italy — Tuscany and Umbria, for instance; The Lakes District and the Cotswolds; or Appalachia (Davis was a Philadelphian, and Appalachian geology informed much of his thinking). Tuscany and Umbria are popular, I feel, not just because of their abundance of Mediaeval hill towns, good vineyards, and annoying renovating authors. The hills of central Italy are very similar in form to those of the Central West.

Tuscany

The Central West

The uplifted, eroded plateau — think of the Blue Mountains, or the Colorado Plateau cut by the Grand Canyon — is spectacular. But also intimidating. It overwhelms the individual; inducing awe, certainly, but not necessarily a sense of comfort or ease.

The Grand Canyon of the Colorado River, Thomas Moran, 1904.
A spectacular but intimidating landscape

 Mature landscapes like the Central West, or Tuscany, have a human scale and a more intimate feel. They are, I think, immediately appealing. I can immediately imagine myself in them, and fit them out with people and culture — roads, farms, villages, pasture, crop lands, railways and canals — that are unthinkable in a youthful and cliff-bound landscape. Whilst many people love the Blue Mountains, and, indeed, live there, for me they have always been the bit you have to drive through to get to the Central West.

My connections are not just childhood ones. As a geologist I've worked there a bit. For students in Sydney, it draws. Sydney has some fascinating geology, but it's all of a type, and lacks the diversity, the exposure to a wide variety of rocks in a small area. So, for me, the landscape and the memories make me want to say that the Central West is my patch.

This simple statement can be controversial amongst some circles in Australia. It's clear that Aboriginal Australians have a long connection to country. Over 40,000 years of it. It's a spiritual and custodial link. The Aboriginal people of what we now call the Central West are called the Wiradjuri. This is their country. They are the people of the goanna totem. They are the largest Aboriginal group in NSW, and Wiradjuri country is huge — ranging from the change from woodlands to open grassland in the east — approximately the alignment of the Great Dividing Range, to the more arid plains to the west. Wiradjuri country covers three major rivers in NSW — the Macquarie, Lachlan, and Murrumbidgee, and continues south to reach the Murray. They maintained a cycle of ceremonies that moved in a ring around the whole tribal area, that led to tribal coherence despite the large occupied area.

Wiradjuri country

I'm not denying the crucial, central role of Aboriginal custodianship in Australian culture. And I'm not comparing my connection to that of Aboriginal people. My ancestral links go back to England, mainly, with a bit of Scotland and Ireland as well. A multiple-times great grandfather arrived in Sydney town in the second fleet, courtesy of His Majesty, for helping himself to a few necessities. It's the typical Anglo-Celtic version of an Australian story. And anyone of my generation who grew up in Australia is steeped in British culture. But I didn't actually get to England until I was in my 40s. I enjoy going there. But it's not Home. That's Sydney, but with a strong touch of the Central West — Wiradjuri country. The Tuscany of the South.