Katoomba

The plateau is Gundungurra and Darug country, and the valleys below the cliffs carry rock shelters, art sites and walking routes used for thousands of years. European settlement came late because the sandstone gorges were so hard to cross, and it was the railway, pushed over the mountains in the 1860s and 1870s, that created the town. The first settlement here was a quarry siding known as The Crushers; it was renamed Katoomba in 1877, from an Aboriginal word for falling water.

Coal and oil shale were mined in the Jamison Valley from 1878, and an incline railway was cut down the cliff to haul the coal up — the ancestor of today's cliff railway. Almost at once the town found a second trade in visitors. The Carrington Hotel opened above the main street in 1882, guesthouses multiplied, and Katoomba became a resort town for Sydney, reached in a few hours by train. The Paragon, a confectioner's café opened in 1916 by a Greek immigrant and later fitted out in Art Deco, became one of the town's best-known addresses.

Cheap air travel drew Australian holidaymakers away after the Second World War, and the guesthouses declined; artists, writers and alternative settlers moved into the emptying buildings from the 1970s, giving the town its present character. The Greater Blue Mountains Area was inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 2000. Tourism is now the mainstay, and the bushfires of 2019 and 2020, which burned much of the surrounding parkland, showed how exposed that is.

Katoomba is a walking town. Tracks were cut to the waterfalls and lookouts from the 1880s and are still the main reason people come, whether for an hour along the cliff edge or a day down the Giant Stairway and along the valley floor. Canyoning, abseiling and rock climbing are all done in the gorges around the town, and bushwalking clubs have long argued for the protection of the Grose and Jamison valleys.

The second thread is artistic. Cheap property brought painters, writers, musicians and instrument makers up from the city, and the town now has galleries, second-hand bookshops, antique stores and a winter solstice festival of local music, art and handicraft each June. Winter is embraced rather than endured: hotels serve a mid-winter Christmas with roast dinners and fires from June to August, and the fog that sits in the streets is treated as part of the appeal.

The three pinnacles at Echo Point are the emblem of the whole region, and a story of three sisters turned to stone is told constantly to visitors; the formation is culturally significant to the Gundungurra people, whose country this is, and whose place names survive across the mountains. Residents are a mix of long-standing mountain families, retirees, artists and commuters who ride the train to Sydney, and they share a strong local identity built around the bush, the weather and a certain resistance to the city below.

About eight thousand people live in Katoomba, one of the towns of the City of Blue Mountains, a ribbon of close or contiguous settlements along the Main Western railway line and the Great Western Highway. The national park presses in on both sides, so the towns cannot spread outwards; new housing fills gaps rather than new suburbs, and each town keeps its own shops, school and railway station.

Tourism and hospitality employ many residents, along with health care, schools, local government and small businesses; a substantial number commute to Sydney by train, which shapes the rhythm of the day around the timetable. Housing is cheaper than in the city but has risen steeply, and the mix of well-off weekenders and long-term residents on low incomes is visible in the main street, where galleries and op shops sit side by side.

Life is organised around cold and fire. Houses are heated with wood and electricity, chimney smoke hangs over the valleys on winter evenings, and gardens grow northern hemisphere trees that would fail on the coast. Every household in the upper mountains is expected to have a bushfire plan; hazard reduction burns fill the air with smoke in the cooler months, and the fire seasons of 2013 and of 2019 to 2020 are recent memory. Water, wind and fog make the weather a daily subject.

Mountain food is built on the guesthouse tradition and the day-tripper trade. Scones with jam and cream, taken beside a fire, are close to an institution, and the tea rooms of Leura and the hotel lounges of Katoomba and Medlow Bath still serve them through the cold months. Bakeries sell pies and sausage rolls to walkers, and pubs do the standard Australian counter meal of schnitzel, steak and fish.

Katoomba Street has an unusual range for a town of this size, with dozens of cafés and restaurants along a few blocks feeding people who have spent the day on the tracks, and second-hand bookshops and antique stores among them. Blackheath, a few stops up the line, has cafés, restaurants and a large antique centre of its own.

The produce is cool-climate. Apple orchards work along the Bells Line of Road at Bilpin, north of the mountains, whose apples and apple juice are known across Australia; the Megalong Valley below the escarpment runs cattle; and berries, stone fruit and chestnuts grow in the highland gardens. Cool-climate wines come from the western slopes around Orange and Mudgee, both within reach, and appear on most local wine lists. Farmers markets rotate through the mountain towns with produce brought up from the Hawkesbury and the central west.