§1. Blue Mountains

The Blue Mountains west of Sydney is a series of sandstone plateaus and escarpments, and one of our ancient continent’s most dramatic vistas. 

Mid last century this part of the Great Dividing Range was crossed by a winding two-lane road through a string of mountain townships clustered along ridge-tops. At the western edge of this great tableland lay Katoomba, where the overly-famous Three Sisters stand. The triple rock formation casts southward to broad timeless valleys beneath majestic rock walls. 

Katoomba was widely known for it's health resorts and occasional winter snowstorms, fame that reflected on the small neighbouring communities that dotted the tortuous incline from the Nepean River. By the mid-twentieth century a mild infamy added to their mystique as artists and eccentrics took a liking to the mountain air. 

Amid all this was the village of Springwood, where our story begins.

From Springwood stretched a dusty road south along a ridge. At the end, in the Eucalypt wilderness, sat a farmlet with a lonely woman and her young children. How she came to be in this place, against all her hopes and dreams, was not clear.  But there she was, trapped far from town in a shabby five-room cottage with three little girls and pregnant with a son.

The Australian author Henry Lawson wrote an evocative short story, The Drover's Wife, that relates the hardship of a woman alone with her four children. The husband is away for months herding sheep along the stock trails while she contends with the needs and safety of the children in their isolated hut, disquieted by occasional strangers and, more so, by dangerous wildlife. 

The two-roomed house is built of round timber, slabs, and stringy-bark, and floored with split slabs. Bush all round – bush with no horizon... As a girl she built the usual castles in the air; but all her girlish hopes and aspirations have long been dead.

Bonnie Patricia Voysey was a young mother traumatised by a war in which her younger brother was killed. During which she, along with the entire nation, feared invasion by an unstoppable Japanese military. 

Yet when the war ended she was, like the drover's wife a century before, still alone and trapped with her young children in a primitive homestead, pregnant with a fourth by a husband travelling the state for work. She never imagined her once comfortable and promising life would lead to such destitution and uncertainty.