AUSTRALIA: Three Sisters
The Three Sisters tourist attraction in the Blue Mountains town of Katoomba,
100 km west of Sydney, is a sacred Aboriginal site. Legend says the sisters
Meehni, Wimlah and Gunnedoo fell in love with three brothers from the lower
Nepean river district but inter-tribal marriage was forbidden, and a battle
ensued. And so they remain, three rocks soaring up from the Jamieson Valley.
Many Blue Mountains sites have immense spiritual significance to Aborigines
of whom the Gundungarra and Darug are the main tribal groups. Features in
the landscape which tourists perceive as merely a rock, or a waterfall, have
powerful mythological and ceremonial links with the ancestral Dreamtime. The
Blue Mountains National Park covers nearly 250,000 ha of the Great Dividing
Range between the coastal plain and the hinterland. The name `Blue
Mountains` derives from the blue haze produced by oil exuding from the
gum-trees. More than 91 eucalypts are identified in often impenetrable bush.
The park was inscribed on the World Heritage list in 2000.