There's silver in them there hills

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Andrew Feinberg

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I am in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, bumping along a bone-rattling stock route towards a ghost town called Yerranderie. The town is owned by Val Lhuede, an architect in her eighties, who, over the past 25 years, has single-handedly rejuvenated this old silver-mining town, perched on the edge of an extinct volcano in the middle of a World Heritage wilderness.

Getting to Yerranderie is not easy. There are two possibilities – a 20-minute flight from Camden, which is 30-minutes south-west of Sydney; or a long drive. Although Yerranderie is not far from the centre of Sydney, as the crow flies, it is a tortuous five-hour trek by car through the mountain towns of Katoomba and Mount Victoria to Oberon, then on through pine forests and into the Blue Mountains National Park. It was raining at Camden, the sort of squally rain that soaks you through half a dozen layers of high-country leathers, and not great flying weather. So by road it would be.

My driver, Rob Sloss of Wilderness Transit Services, is driving the dirt track as if his 17-seater bus was glued to rails. But the track grows narrower as we move from state forest into Sydney Water Board territory, and then through to the National Park.

Here, as black iron-bark and pink salmon-gum trees reach for the sky to the left of the bus, the valley wall falls rapidly away on the right. You could stand a credit card on its side in the space between the wheels and the 1,000m drop to the valley floor below. The area has recently been given a World Heritage listing, so, along with Kakadu, the Great Barrier Reef, and the Tasmanian Wilderness, it is one of the earth's great natural treasures.

These mountains are wilderness in the truest sense. Sheer sandstone cliffs and deep gorges mean that some areas remain virtually untouched, while a distinctive natural blue haze shrouds the mountains. The stock route winds through The Peaks. Beyond is the area known as Colong. In between these is Yerranderie. After the innumerable bumps and dips, twists and turns that would bring a wide-eyed smile to any 4x4 enthusiast but do little for the arrangement of my internal organs, we arrive.

It is early evening, and there, standing on the wide steps of the renovated post-office-cum-lodge is the owner of the town, Val Lhuede. The frail appearance of the diminutive octogenarian belies her tenacity.

Yerranderie is actually two towns – Private Town and Government Town. While Government Town once housed the local amenities, Private Town is a remnant of a once-thriving community of 2,000 residents. In its glory days between 1900 and 1914, it boasted a school, two butchers, one hotel, a tailor, a boarding house, a general store, and a silent-movie theatre. At that time, over five million ounces of silver, almost 10,000 ounces of gold, and more than 12,000 tons of lead were extracted. However, war, depression, and the damming of the Burragorang Valley in the 1950s to provide Sydney's water supply, cut off easy access to the town and it fell into decline.

Lhuede ushers us inside and, over dinner, tells her story. In the 1950s, her father and a group of entrepreneurs bought the land, leases for the silver mine, and a number of old houses that they rented out for about six pence a week. The old mines in the area are still rich in silver, and Lhuede's father tried to bolster interest in reopening them, but the difficult access made the proposition untenable.

Val Lhuede, while working as her father's secretary, fell in love with Yerranderie and took over the company that owned the town in 1971. She had an idea for "educational tourism" and wanted to encourage study groups to visit and learn about the town and the mountains – well before ecotourism became fashionable. Despite extensive travel overseas to out-of-the-way places, Lhuede said that Yerranderie's beauty always drew her back. In the end, she loved it so much she bought it. "Mind you," she said, "I didn't know it was going to be such hard work."

Typical of the state of the town was the recently renovated Slippery Norris's Cottage. The cottage, once owned by an old miner, had fallen into disrepair. No one knows why Norris was called Slippery, but his brother was Meanie and his cousin was Knocker – such is the rugged nature of mountain men. Slippery's grave lies out the back, in the shade of a tree just a few steps away. Converting the ramshackle cottage into a cosy retreat was typical of Lhuede.

The town's decay was just one of Lhuede's hurdles. She also had to overcome the lack of fresh water, and the absence of electricity and telephone communications. Lhuede transformed the tailor's shop into a souvenir shop, restored the original slab boarding-house, and the bakery has become Gundungurra Gallery – a collection of Aboriginal and islander artefacts.

If bush-walking and camping are your thing, Yerranderie offers visitors plenty of walks, from short easy trails to the old mines, to longer more challenging treks to caves and high mountain peaks. Campers can also make use of a well-equipped kitchen beside the camping ground.

I stayed in Slippery Norris's cottage. Waking in the morning and peering out of the window, I was in time to see the passing parade of western grey and red-necked wallabies, emu and koala on a street literally paved in silver. Later, walking over to the iron carcasses of the old mines hidden among the rainbow of green ferns, sulphurous yellow soil and pink salmon gum trees, I understood why Yerranderie had drawn Val Lhuede back.

For more information contact the Australian Tourist Commission (0906 8633235, www.australia.com) or check out www.yerranderie.com Wilderness Transit Services offers group trips to Yerranderie, by appointment, from Canberra or Sydney. For details, contact Robert Sloss (00 61 2 468 32344)