A vertigo of exaltation

THE great attraction of the Blue Mountains has always been the sublime spectacle of a vast and ancient place.

King's Table Land, Blue Mountains

SYDNEY is a harbour city where the presence of water is inescapable. It draws our attention outwards and away into the open space and movement that bodies of water always represent; and the vastness of the views available in so many spots from Pittwater to Botany Bay has the unfortunate consequence of making all the landlocked inland areas feel rather claustrophobic.

One doesn't have the same experience in Melbourne, which, though built on a river, doesn't have the same sort of open views. Its builders, therefore, seem to have given more thought to finding space in broad streetscapes and urban vistas.

But if Sydney faces the ocean, it has a mountain range at its back, confining the city to a coastal plain and limiting its spread westward. For the early colony the mountains seemed an impassable barrier, which had its advantages in discouraging the flight of convicts. Barely literate and with only the sketchiest notions of geography, some of them believed that if they could only cross the mountains they would soon reach China. Other settlers dreamed of rich pasture lands or even an inland sea in the vastness on the other side.

Governor Arthur Phillip had called them the Camarthen Hills, but the name Blue Mountains was adopted because of the violet-blue haze that surrounds them when seen from a distance. This is partly the effect of aerial perspective - mountains in early Flemish paintings are regularly blue as well - but is exacerbated by the mist of oils or terpenoids given off by the predominantly eucalyptus forests that cover the hills.

Early crossings of the mountains seem to have occurred in the late 18th century, but the first official exploration party was that of Gregory Blaxland, William Lawson and William Wentworth, commissioned by Governor Macquarie in 1813. A road opening up the inland was built in 1814-15 and the city of Bathurst was established following this.

Later in the century a railway line was built from Sydney through the Blue Mountains (1868), making the area accessible to tourism. This was part of a worldwide phenomenon, new systems of rail transport allowing the residents of ever-greater and more crowded cities to escape to the country for a picnic or lunch in a country restaurant. In Paris, Sunday crowds would go out along the Seine, where the impressionists too went to paint, while others would catch the train - as they still do - for a hike in the forest of Fontainebleau.

In England, the term day-tripper was coined to describe the city people who increasingly descended on picturesque villages and country areas within reach of London. But the trains also made it possible to venture farther afield for short or long holidays, and this is when the great tourist hotels of the late Victorian and Edwardian periods were built, either at the seaside, which now became fashionable, or in the mountains: from Normandy to the south of France, in Italy from the Grand Hotel des Bains in Venice to the Hotel des Etrangers in Syracuse - the French names of these establishments attest to the international nature of the new tourism.

The Blue Mountains experienced the same sort of tourist development and the Carrington Hotel in Katoomba, which opened in 1882 and was quite recently restored after falling on hard times at the end of last century, gives some idea of the leisurely nature of luxury tourism in those days, with dinners, dancing, afternoon teas and evenings lounging around open fires. The days were spent walking in the bush, discovering a world that is in some sense the opposite of Sydney's seaside extroversion: a darker mountain environment of moodiness, solitude, even communion with the sublime.

This was always the attraction of the mountains, as a kind of Janus face of Sydney, a romantic retreat from the brash city, although the glamour of earlier years has been compromised by the shabbiness of more recent times. It was partly to counter this decline, no doubt, that an enormous new cultural centre opened (in November last year) in Katoomba.

The inaugural exhibition, naturally enough, is devoted to the representation of the Blue Mountains from the beginning of exploration and settlement until the present.

As so often, the earliest images are among the most interesting because they record the first encounters with a new environment and the struggles to establish a foothold in difficult country. And perhaps no work better sums up the early experience of travel in the mountains than a watercolour from about 1826 by Augustus Earle, one of the earliest significant artists in Australian history.

Earle's view is painted from a high rocky vantage point and looks down over the new road, which is seen winding away across the landscape - quite literally a lifeline of civilisation through a vast blue wasteland. In the middle ground, on the road below us, a dray pulled by four oxen has stopped and a group of men stand around waiting. On the left in the foreground, two of the men are seen climbing up the rocky height, one already on top and the other seen from the waist up, holding out his hand as if for assistance.

This little figure is perhaps a self-portrait, but in any case the picture has a reflexive quality, illustrating the climb to the outlook from which the view we are witnessing was painted. At the same time it captures both the sense of pioneering energy that was to change so much so quickly in a land where nothing had ever changed before, and the spontaneous aesthetic delight in the discovery of new landscapes. Compared with Earle's picture, Conrad Martens's much later Crown Ridge (1875) is far more overtly romantic and yet lacking in the sense of excitement recorded by Earle.

The great attraction of the mountains has always been the sublime spectacle of a vast and ancient place. Indeed that spectacle is inherently so striking that one can be tempted to think the artist has to do no more than copy the view. But the sublime, which is ultimately the experience of a vastness that dwarfs the human mind and fills us with a kind of vertigo of exaltation, is for that very reason something that is beyond our sense of proportion and lends itself with difficulty to the demands of pictorial composition.

In classical landscape, the sublime is confined to the infinite distance of the horizon, while the foreground and middle ground are structured with more manageable elements such as trees, rocks and bodies of water. Romantic painters attempt to deal with the sublime more directly, but only exceptional ones, such as Turner and Friedrich in their very different ways, are successful. Others often end up with grandiloquent kitsch or vacuity.

The general problem of representing the sublime is aggravated in Australia by the character of our mountain landscape. We don't have the magnificent peaks of the Alps, or for that matter the hills and gorges of China. Australia is a geologically ancient land in which the landscape is worn down like old teeth. The sublime of the Blue Mountains is not an impression of awe-inspiring height and depth, but of a vast uneventful flatness; it is not the energy of geological activity manifested in volcanoes and mountain peaks, but the unimaginable weight of entropy and the infinite passage of time made visible and concrete.

Few painters have been able to deal with a subject that can be both shapeless and fathomless; the most successful is Eugene von Guerard, and that is because of his attention to detail and the care with which he studies geological formations. His painting of Govett's Leap and Grose River Valley (1873) conveys the vast openness of the valley, and the little figures on the left, as so often, cue the admiration of the viewer. They include a woman and child, and - an interesting detail - a young man who is attempting to roll an enormous boulder towards the edge of the cliff so that it will fall crashing into the silent wilderness below.

Howard Ashton's Mountain Steeps (1926) illustrates what happens when you take on such a subject without von Guerard's minute attention to structure; impressive enough at first sight and from a distance, large areas of Ashton's painting dissolve into an amorphous soup on closer inspection. Jamieson Valley (1931) is more effective both because of its smaller dimensions and because of the handling of light and colour in the foreground.

Among other pictures worth seeing are a number of paintings, from Margaret Preston to Fred Williams and Jeff Rigby, as well as drawings and prints. There are many interesting photographs too, from Norman C. Deck's Nature's Cathedral (1944) to Andrew Merry's large, digitally enhanced black-and-white views, but there is something particularly arresting about Harold Cazneaux's Mountain Scene, Katoomba (1908), in which we see two Edwardian ladies, no doubt guests at the Carrington, pausing during a bushwalk. The compositional tension between the foreground figure on the bench and the background one on the fragile stairway down into the bush implies a corresponding personal and affective tension heightening the sense that the two women have ventured away from the norms of society and into the timeless world of the wilderness.

Picturing The Great Divide: Visions From Australia's Blue Mountains
Blue Mountains Cultural Centre, Katoomba, to February 3