Further West 1993

Forced by family circumstances to spend some years in the Blue Mountains, I found myself exploring the country on the western side of the range.

In Lithgow, I found not just the site of Australia’s largest blast furnace, but also a town of great topographical beauty, that fitted its valley as a hand fits a glove. At Wallerawang, where the electricity was being churned out to Sydney’s grid, I discovered a mini-cathedral, and also the place where Charles Darwin (yes, that Charles Darwin) had strolled one afternoon in January 1836, and had his first insight into the universal force of Natural Selection. He also saw his first platypus (shot for him by the local pastoralist, who was modelled for me by Darwinian philosopher, Alan Olding.)

If history was all around me, there was no sense in those early years of the 1990s that King Coal would one day be dethroned, and Climate Change would become accepted as an uncomfortable fact of life. I knew I was depicting the industrial archaeology of the nineteenth century, but I didn’t realise that the belching chimneys of Portland would soon become politically problematic.