And further to matters of wildlife, people have a love/hate relationship with the "cockies," which are incredibly destructive birds. Most of the fine detailing on vintage Australian houses is in fact iron lace, rather than scroll-sawn wooden fretwork, a fortunate historical accident due to the cockatoos' enthusiasm for ripping apart anything wooden. And they are no respecters of high culture, either: "Sculpture no match for winged critics," writes Sarah Taylor in the Weekend Australian. "Brett Whiteley's much loved and much loathed matchstick sculpture has been given a thumb's down by perhaps the harshest critics Mother Nature can muster -- a flock of cockatoos. The birds have taken to the sculpture [outside the Art Gallery of NSW in Sydney] pecking it apart and forcing gallery bosses to cover it until a restoration project can begin ... For the 2nd time since the sculpture was donated ... by Whiteley in 1991, the year before his death, the sulphur-crested cockatoos have been unable to resist sharpening their beaks on the burnt charcoal top of one of the matchsticks."

... and we're starting off in Flat 3, the lower one overlooking the back garden, whose entrance you can see at the extreme right of the photo. From the street it's a low bungalow in Arts and Crafts style with mirror-image flats on the main floor divided by a central wall. As the lot falls away quite steeply, there is Flat 3, the third 2-bedroom apartment. Some of the rooms have elaborate art deco plaster ceilings, cup rails and woodwork, and many of the windows are beautiful leaded glass. All three have sunrooms lined with big old sliding sash windows -- perfect south light for a painting studio! We will be giving it some required TLC, live in one of the main floor flats, leave the long-term tenant in the other, and rent out Flat 3 for short-term "holiday lets."

The Blue Mountains lie just inland of the Pacific Ocean but actually form the continental divide. A spot west of Katoomba called Mount Victoria is actually the highest point on the rail line between the Pacific and Indian oceans. The Blue Mountains were first traversed by a road in the early colonial period, nearly 200 years ago, and when the railway went through a generation later people began to see the potential of its scenic spots and develop resort towns (Banff comes to mind). The first impression you get of Katoomba, especially from a place like Sublime Point, where I painted the watercolour above, is of an Italian or southern French hill town.

Katoomba is the biggest of the Blue Mountains towns, with a population of about 8,000, I think. At its core is the railway station and, nearby, a large hotel called the Carrington built in the late 1870s. By a century ago a street of shops had developed near the station and hotel and a number of guesthouses, some quite grand, dotted the nearby streets among the smaller bungalows. Sydney is about an hour and a half away by car on the toll motorway, or 2 hours to Central Station by electric train (16 trips a day for less than $30 return fare). Almost every tourist in Australia comes here to see the view from Echo Point. 

The road and rail line are a corridor through the middle of the huge Blue Mountains National Park, a UN World Heritage Area. Unlike, say, the Rocky Mountains, where the corridors follow the valleys, in the Blue Mountains the corridors follow the tops of the ancient, eroded mountains. The towns sit high on these "benches" that end with shear sandstone cliffs dropping 1,000 feet or more into the valleys, and look out over an astonishing sea of dusky blue-green eucalyptus forest. Somehow it reminds me of the best of the Gulf Islands, except much more dramatic with a different colour of sea. And yet Katoomba, with its fine collection of architecture, is more like Nelson in the Kootenays. To continue the comparison, the Blue Mountains has the same sort of diverse population as the Gulf Islands or the Kootenays -- old money, retired people, aging hippies, the permanently unemployable, backpackers, rock climbers. The oldest organic food co-op in Australia is in Katoomba (yes, we've joined). 

Our back garden ends at a gully full of gum trees that is a "Council Reserve" due to the stream path at its bottom. Flocks of birds, including rosellas (red parrots with blue wings) and cockatoos, mostly the white-bodied, sulphur-crested ones but a few of the larger, yellow-tailed black ones that look like turkey vultures in flight and have a cry like a bald eagle's, hang out in the trees. There are local magpies and currawongs whose carolling is a pleasant contrast to the raucous squawking of the "cockies." Apparently, a half century ago, there was a view from here all the way to Mount Solitary, which stands in the Jamison Valley to the south (left) of the "Three Sisters" in the watercolour above. But all the trees have grown up since.