http://www.theaustralian.com.au/archive/news/valerie-reluctant-to-give-up-the-ghost-town/story-e6frg6po-1111114327539
NOT many people own their own ghost town. Valerie Lhuede does.
Since the 1940s, Ms Lhuede, 84, has invested time, love and considerable amounts of money in the preservation and restoration of the uniquely atmospheric old silver mining town of Yerranderie, surrounded by steep sandstone cliffs in the heart of the Blue Mountains National Park, west of Sydney.
Ms Lhuede realises that despite being the town’s owner, custodian, protector, storyteller and financial supporter, she cannot live forever.
Many stories attach themselves to Yerranderie, full as it is of ghosts both from its ancient role as the centre of the Gundungurra tribe and from its brief days as a boom town between 1907 and 1914, when its population peaked at 2000. A century later, the question of Yerranderie’s future is a perplexing one.
Ms Lhuede has no direct heirs and with each passing day the need to decide whether to gift Yerranderie to the nation or to somehow maintain it in private hands becomes more compelling.
How Ms Lhuede came to own her own ghost town and a 465ha plot of private land in the centre of a world heritage area is in itself intriguing. Her father, Aubin Lhuede, bought Yerranderie and its environs in the 1940s with the hope that one day the price of silver would make it viable again.
While sceptical, his daughter, struck by its beauty, was convinced Yerranderie could become a self-supporting international education and tourism centre. Starting in the 1950s, she began acquiring the shares in the holding company Tonali, taking decades to buy it out completely.
But Ms Lhuede’s dream never came true. Only a succession of caretakers, their wages paid for by her company, have lived permanently at Yerranderie since the 1970s.
The town’s location in the upper reaches of the Sydney catchment area means it has been deserted since the 1950s when the then NSW Water Board distressed the last inhabitants by ordering them to evacuate as part of the building of Warragamba Dam.
Ever since, Yerranderie has been cut off from easy access, with only the most determined bushwalking groups finding their way there.
“Yerranderie has been an ongoing labour of love for more than 50 years,” Ms Lhuede said. “There is so much here, a special beauty. I want people to be able to see it, to stay here, to experience it.”
The traditional National Parks policy of isolating places from ready human access is abhorrent to her.
“National Parks keep putting up fences and gates all around, I am frightened that ultimately no one will be able to get here,” she says.
As a woman of independent means, Ms Lhuede has been able throughout her life to pursue her passion for exploring and photographing the world’s “special” places.
But nowhere has been more special to her than Yerranderie.
She says it is the history of Yerranderie, with its European component stretching back to 1802, that she feels compelled to both protect and to make available to the public.
As part of this process she has just published the book Yerranderie Is My Dreaming, a novel 20 years in the making which interweaves fact and fiction to depict the life of explorer and cartographer Francis Luis Barrallier, the first European in the area.
A director with NSW National Parks, Bob Conroy, said the extremely generous gifting of Yerranderie to the people through their fundraising arm, the Foundation for National Parks and Wildlife, would make a superb addition to the world heritage Blue Mountains National Park.
He said NSW National Parks had agreed to Ms Lhuede’s requests for Yerranderie to remain open to the public and for her caretaker to be kept on, but she was yet to commit.
“It is a very difficult decision for her to make and we are not pressuring her in any way,” he said. “She has such a love for the place she finds it really difficult to let go. No one blames her for that. I would feel the same.”