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. In order to protect the sisters from harm a witch
doctor turned them into stone but before he could reverse the spell, he was
killed. And so they remain, three rocks soaring up from the Jamieson
Valley. Geologists say they were formed by wind and water slowly eroding the
soft sandstone cliffs and that eventually the `sisters` will erode away
completely. 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 - which cover the area in impenetrable bush. The first
crossing of the Blue Mountains was made by the explorers Blaxland,
Wentworth and Lawson in 1813. The Blue Mountains National Park
was inscribed on the UN World Heritage list in 2000.