For me, in October 2000, it was an hour and a half in the car. The farther out I went, the more garages each house had. After the three-car-garage belt, the retirement villages started. Elmsleigh Gardens. Surrey Manor. Then the market gardens, the orchards, the riding schools.

I knew I’d left the city behind when I passed a pile of bulging bags on the roadside outside a farm with a big handwritten sign: POO $2.50.

All this time the road had been climbing, and now the gardens and orchards gave way to a high dry ridge where bush pressed in against the road, dark-trunked stringybarks and a dense tangle of undergrowth.

What would it be like to visit Wiseman’s house after all these years, with glasses on this time?

It seemed I’d been driving forever along the tunnel of trees when the road tilted down and the bush changed, the sombre stringybarks giving way to paler grey gums with gleaming silver skins. Hawkins Lookout, the sign announced. I swung off the road and there it was: the spectacular gorge of the Hawkesbury.

I stood at the lookout, on the edge of a sheer drop. I had to hang onto the railing. I was floating away, lost in this place.

It was a landscape out of a legend, monumental, almost melodramatic, too big for the eye to take in. Way below, the river—half a mile wide—was a gigantic band of khaki, pressing up tight against its banks. It sparkled brown under a slant of sun, a sheet of moody brilliance, and curved majestically between ramparts of rock and bush, almost-vertical escarpments like the one I was standing on, where slabs of sandstone tumbled and frayed down the slope.

I felt I’d travelled to a foreign country. For a moment I even worried that I didn’t have the right kind of money.

After it left the lookout, the road coiled down the escarpment in the hairpin bends I remembered from when I was ten. Suddenly I was at the bottom, outside the house that my ancestor built.

Wiseman’s villa was still the highest building in the settlement, pressed up against the base of the hill. So naked in the watercolour, it was covered up now, hidden away. Enormous trees smothered the buildings from the street side and additions at the back had obscured the original structure. Behind it, the steep hillside pressed down, overgrown with bush where in the watercolour it was cleared.

But from the front, it was exactly as it was in the painting: the verandahs, looking down to the river, the elegant curved fanlight over the front door and the semicircular stone steps.

A few other buildings clustered on the slope below: the school, a few shops, the post office. Below these buildings was a parched expanse of grass with a concrete cricket pitch and swings. That was where Wiseman’s formal garden must have been. Beyond that, a fringe of she-oaks and reeds, and then the river.

And across the river, stupendous cliffs. They seemed to rise straight up out of the water, a wall of rock a couple of miles long, penning in the river and the settlement: the bedrock exposed by the action of the river the way a knife opens up a cake. In places the wind had breached the mouse-grey skin of the sandstone so that the golden flesh beneath was revealed in glowing overhangs and caves. Twisted trees seemed to grow out of rock, their trunks a scribble on the face of the cliff.