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.

I found myself scanning that confusion of rock and shadow, darkness and light, trying to make sense of it. It was like watching the sea: from moment to moment the light fell differently on the recesses and bulges, so that a pattern of gold and grey that I’d seen a moment ago was gone when I looked for it again.

I didn’t remember the cliffs from my visit here all those years ago. I remembered Mum standing here exclaiming and pointing, but I hadn’t seen a thing.