Along the back roads

 

I was doing a reporting trip to the upper Hunter Valley earlier this week, an area northwest of Sydney just outside the range of weekend holidaymakers and so with a genuinely rural, backwoods feel to it.

The drive back to Sydney is about four hours whichever way you do it, so I decided to take the most obscure and Deliverance-ish of the three possible routes. The main road, you're on freeways almost all the way; on the larger backroad, these eventually dwindle to narrower, two-lane roads winding through the forests and valleys of the northern Blue Mountains. The last time I went that way, there was little except broken-down old cottages, and horses grazing on a strip of grass hugging close to a stream. Above, the gully walls were lined with gumtrees. The road I took yesterday was even more remote.

I first noticed it on Google Maps. Thinking about places to go for a rural break close to Sydney, it's hard to miss the fact that there's a vast expanse of green north of the city--the Wollemi national park. This is an incredible place in itself: in 1994 a park officer rapelled into an isolated valley and discovered the few dozen wild remnants of the Wollemi pine--a living fossil whose last relatives died out millions of years ago. The whole park is the size of several English counties, and there's a road leading through the deepest part of the forest. Bang in the middle of it Google Maps puts a single word: "Putty."

What was this place? I zoomed in on the satellite view but couldn't tell much more. At one point, the trees hugging the road peel back in the tetris shapes of cleared land, and some smaller roads--tracks, really--branch off from the highway. A few buildings are scattered about the clearings, but not much else. I was intrigued.

I don't know how universal this feeling is, but the European imagination has always seen something magical at the heart of forests. It's where you find gingerbread cottages inhabited by witches, or wolves dressed as grandmothers. So maybe it's sentimental or romantic of me, but something seemed special about such a nondescript place, itself surrounded by such a huge expanse of wilderness. You could draw a circle of unbroken forest around Putty and fit the whole Sydney metro area into it.

The start of the drive is anything but magical. The middle Hunter Valley is one of the world's biggest coal districts, and the turnoff to Putty takes you from rolling vineyards to a nightmare landscape of vast geometric pits, waste heaps, and berms, studded with the dwarfed outlines of tower-block sized diggers and trucks the size of three-storey buildings. But suddenly this peeled away and I was driving through a winding gorge in the dusk, with a stream surging half-hidden beneath tree ferns to one side. At times, we drove through lashing rain and low, clinging clouds which condensed on my windscreen. Breaks in the mist would show tendrils of vapour breaking from the ceiling of cloud and settling over the treetops. We crawled up and down hills; through flat, straight sections, and then another knot of gorges.

An hour of this brought me to Putty. It was much as it looked from the satellite: pastures running towards forest, a crumbling roadway studded with cattle grids. A sign from the main road pointed to some tea rooms--which were closed long before I came near--and something called "Putty Hall". I was envisaging something like Downton Abbey, but it turned out to be a forlorn single-room hut, whitewashed and locked up in the driving rain, close to the point where the asphalt gave way to dirt. There was a community noticeboard outside; the last event was dated in September.

I suppose this place started out as a logging camp before the national park was gazetted, and nowadays it seems to be supporting a very meagre dairy industry. Perhaps there are some weekenders here too. It feels like the ends of the earth, but it was only two hours' drive from central Sydney.