Blue Rivers: A Narrative of Time in the Blue Mountains

There is nothing in the world half as wonderful as a river. My memories of days with rivers are as clear and bright as if I had been there yesterday and it seems to me that the best times of my life have been spent on or near them. I have camped beside the river called Virgin in Utah and the river called Rio Grande in Texas; seen the feluccas silhouetted by the sun setting above the river called Nile in Egypt; followed a river in Norway that plunged through a magnificent granite valley and paddled on an Alaskan river in a two week journey, the details of which will be with me when I draw my last breath. And I have rafted that most special and sacred of Australia's wild rivers, the river called Franklin in South West Tasmania. And yet, these are other people's rivers.

I have lived all my life in the shadow of the Blue Mountains, that high, blunt, sandstone plateau that can be seen from just about anywhere near Sydney, but although they are the hills of home, virtually in my backyard and I have hiked there for many years, after watching them dissolve in the fire of the setting sun one evening from the ridge at Pennant Hills, I realized that I knew very little about them or more particularly, the rivers that they sheltered. And the discomfort persisted in the days that followed. The rivers were in my mind but all I knew was names and on many occasions in the weeks that followed, I looked long and hard into the west at the distinctive profiles of the distant mountains, trying to conjure ways of getting to know the country better.

With a little more purpose I could continue what I had been doing, haphazardly, over the years - walking to the rivers from the passes, finding routes down side canyons - but the contact with the rivers this way would necessarily be piecemeal and fragmented and I wanted something more complete. I could walk down the rivers but there was little pleasure in this and then it came to me: my experience had shown me that the only way to get 'into the country', was to float its rivers, and I saw then the beginnings of a grand odyssey; I would raft, one by one, the wild rivers of the Blue Mountains - those called Wollondilly, Kowmung, Grose, Colo and Macdonald. The Blue Rivers. But there would be method in my madness; in the rivers of a land is the story of a landscape and I decided then that I would float through time, from the oldest rocks that cradle the Wollondilly River in the south, to the more recent sandstone of the Colo and Macdonald Rivers in the north. And, by the greatest good luck, such a direction also coincided with the chronology of discovery by the adventurers who first walked over the landscape in the twenty years between 1798 and 1818.