Photos

Graham liked my other photos, so I hope he will be happy with this view of his native land too. I met Graham aka burra burra during my wonderful TE-meeting in Sydney. Thank you for a great time!

This is view of the Blue Mountains from the Skyway. We see here the Jamieson Valley and Mount Solitary. As far as we can see, there are mountains in a blue haze.

The name Blue Mountains is derived from the blue tinge the range takes on when viewed from a distance. The tinge is believed to be caused by Mie scattering which occurs when incoming ultraviolet radiation is scattered by particles within the atmosphere creating a blue-greyish colour to any distant objects, including mountains and clouds. Volatile terpenoids emitted in large quantities by the abundant eucalyptus trees in the Blue Mountains may cause Mie scattering and thus the blue haze for which the mountains were named .

When Europeans arrived in Australia, the Blue Mountains had already been inhabited for several millennia by the Gundungurra people. Gundungurra people's knowledge of the area goes back a long way, and there is a dreamtime creation story about how this whole countryside came into being. The story describes an almighty struggle between two ancestral creator spirits, one a giant eel-like creature, Gurangatch, an incarnation of the ancestral rainbow serpent, and the other, a large native cat or quoll, Mirrangan. The scuffle resulted in the gouging out of the land to form the river systems of the Cox and Wollondillly Rivers. In this dreamtime creation story, Gurangatch and Mirragan visited Jenolan as well as Wombeyan (Whambeyan) Caves, which were already part of the landscape.

The main attraction in the Blue Mountains is the rock formation Three Sisters. “Legend of the Three Sisters”, which had been taught to generations of Australian children as a genuine Aboriginal myth (and sold to millions of international tourists), had in fact been made-up by a non-Aboriginal man. In the fallout, even that claim turned-out to be untrue – the first fake was actually written by a caucasian schoolgirl Patricia Stone.