Quotes of the Day

Sydney was just 16 years old when George Caley, accompanied by a small dog and three of "the strongest men in the colony," began walking towards the mountains that squatted on the horizon to the west of the rough and rowdy settlement. No one had been able to reach that dusky blue range, let alone cross it, and the headstrong young botanist was filled with "an enthusiastic pride of going farther than any person has yet been." Though he did just that, and managed to get home again, what Caley and his convict assistants encountered during their three-week expedition would permanently damage his health and later lead him to describe the trip as "the Devil's own journey." The wildness of the barely explored country they scrambled and climbed through was "beyond description," he wrote afterwards. "I cannot give you a more expressive idea than traveling over the tops of the houses in a town."

Two hundred years later, a group of bushwalkers stands on a ridge overlooking the dense bush into which Caley and his men descended. Of the 62 km Caley traveled to reach the Carmarthen Hills, as a section of the range was then known, less than a third has been swallowed by farming and suburbia; most of it today lies in the Grose Wilderness - an area protected as part of the Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area which covers more than a million hectares of steep gorges, waterfalls, swamps and sandstone escarpments that, in the late afternoon sun, glow the color of warm toffee. From this vantage point, looking west to flat-topped Mount Tomah, the first peak Caley reached, eucalypt-green ridges roll away like swell on an uneasy sea. The leaves of huge gums shimmer in the wind. It looks just as impenetrable as Caley might have seen it, and just as forbidding. "It looks epic down there," someone mutters.

While the self-taught botanist had just a compass and guesswork to guide him, the team - brought together by the Mount Tomah Botanic Garden to mark the bicentenary of his feat by reenacting a segment of it - has all the tools of modern bushwalking. When one of the group injures his leg in a fall, there are mobile phones to summon a car along a fire trail. Caley may have put up with flour, dried beef and the birds the party's dog caught, but these walkers have freeze-dried kangaroo korma and bolognese, fresh snow peas, peanut butter and macadamia nuts. Whenever he gets a chance, Wyn Jones - an expert naturalist and a raconteur known to burst into snatches of song as he ploughs tirelessly through the bush - fires up his coffee maker, the aroma of caffeine mingling with the heady sweet scent of pink boronia flowers.

I also jocosely told them, that when they returned they would know the difference between walking upon a good road and the Blue Mountains; and that it would be easier for to look at them, than to go to them a second time; and that pleasure was unknown to those who had never felt pain.

Pulling ourselves, scratched and sweating, up a rocky bluff out of what Caley named the Devil's Wilderness, it's easy to imagine why he needed to gather his men that night and urge them, as he recounts in his journal, to continue. When they had arrived at the edge of this plunging valley, Caley noted that it seemed "to bid defiance to any man." Going down was brave, says Ian Brown, who leads the Mount Tomah group. A modest, quietly spoken man with a wry sense of humor, he was one of the three men who in 1997 became the first Australians to walk unassisted to the South Pole. "Then again," he adds, "he probably saw that ridge over there as leading to Tomah and thought, if we get across, we'll be right." But Caley was wrong; the ridge on the other side only revealed more ridges and valleys in his path. Two hundred years have not made the descent any kinder; it remains a knee-jarring scramble down to where the Grose River jostles between boulders, and, just as Caley's men did with homemade twine, the team has to lower its packs on rope where the rock face is steepest. The cool Grose waters provide only short relief before a lung-bursting ascent to the top, where Caley and his men tried to quench their burning thirst with native currants. Caley's plan was always to head straight for the hill now known as Mount Tomah. But the country wouldn't let him, continually pushing him along spurs, forcing him into steep gullies and bringing him to the edge of ha-has, the dreaded chasms that on several occasions seemed to open at the party's feet. Often they had to retrace their weary steps. The bush remains as trackless today as it was then, a labyrinth of wood and rock. Few know its secret corners and paths as do modern explorers like Brown, Andy Macqueen and Wyn Jones. Macqueen, his battered hat shading keen eyes and deep laugh lines, navigates with Caley's journal bearings as if he had accompanied the explorer himself. For 40 years the unflappable historian has ventured deep into the bush to retrace the footsteps of long-ago explorations through some of the region's most challenging country. "That sense of exploration and discovery, that's the wonderful thing about off-track walking," says Macqueen, who rates Caley's effort as amazing for its time. "It really was unrelenting hard work over a sustained period of time, in unknown country, with no maps."

Caley's wilderness is not as remote as it once was. Sydney's suburbs lap at the range's feet, and at night the sound of trucks several kilometers away drift faintly into tents. On one ridgetop a mobile phone rings. But these are small intrusions into a stern wilderness. There are few walkers out here, and standing on one of the many ridges, the view in every direction is of implacable bush. There are still unexplored gullies out there; in one such nook, north of Caley's route, the Wollemi pine, which Wyn Jones helped identify, made international headlines when it was found in 1994 after thousands of years of isolation. Macqueen and Jones still find new Aboriginal art sites on their wanderings far from the track. A deflated helium balloon found among the bushes is as surprising as a bottle washed up on a remote island.

The brisk tone of Caley's journal offers little praise for his surroundings. The names he bestows along the way - the Devil's Wilderness, Dismal Dingle (a valley "like a coal-pit"), Dark Valley - hint at his impressions. When his men spotted two crows, they joked that the birds must be lost, "or else they would never stop in such a place as this." Climbing in the heat through one windless gully after another, pushing through prickly scrub amid leeches, flies and furious ants, sweaty and smeared with charcoal from burned trees, it's understandable why he spent little time on poetry. But the avid botanist noticed the strange and beautiful flora he was passing and collected several new and rare species.

And modern walkers, free from the uncertainty and food worries that plagued Caley, have time to revel in their surroundings. Giant red waratah blooms stand on thick stalks like sentinels beside dark pools. Slow slugs colored electric pink and pale green come out after the rain, when the rich brown, gold and silver-gray hues of wet bark glisten. Huge flowers adorn gnarled banksia trees so old they would have been sprouting when Caley passed by. Owls call to another in the dark, and the stars, which Caley thought he was seeing when he found glow-worms in Luminous Valley, glitter fiercely. In the end, lack of food forced Caley to turn back. He'd succeeded, but his feat remains little known today, perhaps because, as his biographer Joan Webb suspects, the outspoken and independent ways of this son of an English horse-dealer didn't impress the colony's most powerful gentlemen. He left Sydney six years later, and despite writing of being consumed by his longing to see the mountains once more, never returned to Australia. Perhaps Caley would be comforted to know that, two centuries on, their wildness, and his prowess in steering through them, remain as stirring as ever.

• Lisa Clausen
• Two centuries on, trekkers retrace the arduous but spectacular route of a little known Australian explorer