Free Ten Pound Pom by Niall Griffiths

which is a brilliant name for a pub. Wish I could stay there too, if it’s still there. And if I knew where it was. And could spare the time. The book doesn’t tell me who Evans was, but it does tell me that Oswald Ziegler wanted to build a posh hotel on Evans Lookout in the 1960s, and to make a kind of Oz Mount Rushmore, with the faces of three explorers carved into the cliff face opposite, across the canyon, but the soft texture of the rock forestalled the project. Thankfully. Oswald the Idiot. Who’d want the power of that view spoiledand broken by a trio of vast blank faces? The States has a Mount Rushmore. The world doesn’t need another one. God, what is it with some people? The unchallenged surety that the natural world can, and must, be improved if it’s forced to take on a recognisably human form. God almighty. For those with the eyes to see, all faces are contained in the folds and nodules and striations and crannies of rocks. Nature offers the geoglyphs; take them. Don’t try to impose your own. And who was this Ziegler? The thought of that question being asked at some future date no doubt led, in part, to his cliff-carving desires, but it’s resulted merely in his memory being linked to megalomania, twisted vision and supreme arrogance. Where was he from? My third book, the Glovebox Guide to the Blue Mountains , written by Peter Meredith and Dan Fuchs, doesn’t tell me, but it does mention that the Evans Lookout was ‘named in 1882 after local solicitor George Evans’. That’s all it says. Good Welsh name, or half of it is; I’d like to know more about him. This is by far the best book of the bunch; pretty well-written, full of maps and anecdotes and nuggets of information. Should I return here, this is the book I’ll bring. It tells me that Blackheath is built at an elevation of 1,065.3 m, and has a permanent population of 4,119 (or it did in the year 2000). Sydney is just 133 km away. The whoops and trills and whistles I can hear in the canyon’s trees below me are made by lyrebirds and whipbirds and currawongs. The place was named by Governor Macquarie, who first, in 1815, called it Hounslow (after the London Hounslow Heath), then forgot he’d done so and named it Blackheath (again after a district of London) on his way back through. The thicko. How can you forget seeing and naming a place like this? The book tells me, too, that Darwin also stayed at the Gardners Inn, once called the Scotch Thistle Inn, and thatWilliam Govett used to love rolling huge boulders off the cliffs here, supposedly as a way of gauging their height, although he did admit that the activity was ‘an amusement with me’. Fair play. And he was remarkably close; 160 m, he calculated. It’s actually 161 m.
    I’d like to hang about here, for a bit; wait until winter, when the snows come, get a room in one of the balconied hotels and do some walking through the gorges and across the plateaus and, at night-time, get rat-arsed in the Gardners Inn and come to Evans Lookout for a drunken gawp on my way to bed and see it all covered in snow under the blue moon. How would that look? I don’t know, but I know I’d love it. Some bits of Australia are okay.
    But that’s it for Blackheath. Never came here as a kid, anyway, so it’s got nowt to do with the trip. Just recuperation, after the hellish Blackpool-in-the-sun of the Gold Coast. Sightseeing and all that. Sydney’s only about two hours away. I remember quite a lot about Sydney.
THEN
    The family knew a couple, John and Margaret, who moved from Brisbane to Sydney, and it is they who they stay with whilst they are in the city, in their flat in the district of Vaucluse. It’s a small flat, so beds are made up with cushions and blankets on the floor in the front room for the children to sleep on. The boy likes it; it’s a nest, he thinks, beneath the bay window, through which he can look down on the revellers below, being as they are in Vaucluse’s party area. One Saturday