We’d been to Sydney before but never to the nearby Blue Mountains. Among many things, the Blue Mountains are famous for their vast mountain and eucalyptus-forest vistas. The mountains are blue because of the volatile oils that eucalyptus trees give off, which create a haze that tints blue.
The eastern edge of the Greater Blue Mountains Area lies only about 60 km / 38 mi west of central Sydney, so not very far. Just a two-hour commuter-train ride.
The Greater Blue Mountains Area is huge — which means we only saw a tiny part of it. Its overall area is about 10,000 square kilometers or 3,900 square miles, about the same area as Lebanon, or somewhat smaller than Puerto Rico or Connecticut.
UNESCO recognizes the Blue Mountains area for its biodiversity, and specifically its living evidence of the evolution, radiation, and ecological diversity of eucalypts, showing how these species adapted and diversified on the Australian continent after Gondwana broke up. That was about 180 million years ago! (Gondwana was an ancient southern supercontinent that once joined together what are now South America, Africa, Arabia, Madagascar, India, Australia, Antarctica, and a number of smaller blocks. It was fully assembled by roughly 600 million years ago.)
The start of our visit was a leisurely afternoon walk amid the tree-fern forest along a cliff edge. We had tree ferns in our garden when we lived in Hawai’i, but they were like little kids compared to these Australian species.
From here, we enjoyed some of our first views of the cliffs, mountains, and blue-tinted vistas.
We came upon a pair of these Crimson Rosella parrots casually scrounging for seeds (we had to look them up). These birds are native to southeast Australia and common. Not common to us!
This Yellow-tailed Black-Cockatoo paid no attention to us.
The small town of Katoomba, where we stayed, sits along the cliff face of Jamison Valley of the Blue Mountains National Park. We finished our forest walk with a stroll back through the town. Not quite in a leafy setting, this Sulphur-Crested Cockatoo was also strolling around.
We saw quite a few of these cockatoos flying around over Katoomba and the forest. They are generally monogamous, and notoriously loud and intelligent. Some say their level of intelligence is on par with a four-year-old child. Which can be a nuisance since they can figure out how to get into a trash bin, rather like a raccoon. Definitely preferable to see them out and about rather than in some cage in an apartment.
Here also is Mike in his natural habitat.
Katoomba is the home of a fun, well-designed forest-exploration development called Scenic World.
Back in the late 19th and early 20th century, this part of the escarpment down into the valley was the Katoomba Coal Mine. To move coal up to the Main Western railway, a steep cable-hauled tramway was built down the cliff in about 1878.
After the closing of the mine in the 1930s, a local entrepreneur saw the potential of this inclined railway and the views and forests to attract tourists. Here’s an image of the first repurposed rail ride.
It’s been modernized since…
And given new gondola companions.
More lovely forest walks below the cliffs.
And vistas of the valley and of the region’s most famous sandstone formation, the Three Sisters.
Included in our admissions ticket was an hour-long cultural presentation about the native peoples of the Australian continent.
Upon arrival, we were directed to what they called the Yarn Circle. Yarn, as in story. We found Stephanie, a very Caucasian-looking young woman who greeted us with good cheer and didn’t stop talking from that moment. But that was a good thing because she was full of fascinating information, and more importantly, her own cultural history. As well as an almost militant openness.
Her program included orienting us in the map of Australia to explain the pre-Western weave of First Nations. One of our fellow tourists asked about the use of words aborigine, aboriginal, and indigenous – what is considered appropriate today? Her answer was that aborigine is considered highly insensitive because its use goes back to the worst racism of the colonial and even modern days. Aboriginal as an adjective is acceptable when referring to the peoples descended from the first arrivals to Australia starting probably around 60,000 years ago. Indigenous includes Aboriginal as well as other peoples living on many of the islands to the north and northeast of the continent.
The main point of these distinctions, as well as many of the other things that Stephanie explained, was that the scar of racism and racist actions and policies remains deep and unhealed. For example, when we asked about DNA testing as a technique for individuals to learn more about which First Nation they descend from, Stephanie’s answer was that native people don’t trust the institutions of the state; they have experienced too much discrimination in their lives and the lives of their forebears. If they learn specifics of their lineage, they fear that the State will use that information against them.
One of the threads of Stephanie’s presentation was that she knows that she looks about as white as you can get. Nonetheless, her mother is First Nation (on her map, she showed us which Nation, in the Melbourne region) and her father is Australian-German. She said that she has an older brother who got most of their mother’s dark skin color and curly hair texture; her older sister is a bit lighter, and her younger sister is even more “translucent” than she is. She joked that the four of them are like prints from a toner cartridge that was running out of pigment. But her real point was that the heritage of discrimination against First Nation peoples extends beyond skin color. Years of mixed-race offspring confuse the raw prejudice, and the raw prejudice remains tenacious.
We asked her about her approach to living her First-Nation self at the same time as her modern Australian high-tech self. She used her experience in the Scenic World park as an example. She’d discovered that almost all of her fellow staff members come from “white” Australian culture, many from Katoomba, the town where Scenic World is, and have had no or almost no education about First Nations. She finds herself explaining her own story and helping build their consciousness of the complicated and actual history of their land and its peoples.
Her answer made us think about the history of the Hawaiian people and Western colonizers, and what we have learned over our years living in Hawai’i. It seems that there are many parallels between the dark periods of the history of Hawaiian peoples and Australian Aboriginal peoples, and there are stark differences. For one thing, there was a Hawaiian Kingdom with its institutions, unifying language and literate culture — which was not the case in Australia. We are grateful and proud (even as non-Hawaiians, which we hope is OK) that many brave visionary Hawaiians fought back against prejudice, especially during the so-called Hawaiian Renaissance starting in the 1970s. So today, while not yet perfect, Hawaiian culture and Hawaiian peoples are essential, visible, valued foundations for modern Hawai’i.
Stephanie mentioned that most of the guides on the funicular and cable-car rides refer to the prominent bluff in the distance as Mount Solitary; a few use one of the local Nation names, Korowal, which means “the strong one.” Only a few years ago, no one used the indigenous name. A bit after this conversation with Stephanie, when we were on those rides, our guides used the Anglo name. There’s more work to be done.
By the way, if you have access to the ABC (Australian Broadcast Company) show You Can’t Ask That, we can’t recommend it enough for all its episodes. One episode focuses on Indigenous peoples and is particularly enlightening: link.
February 2026