MOONLIGHTING IN ANCIENT PHILOLOGY in Blue Mountains NSW, Australia:

Airs and graces

Mandy Sayer | March 02, 2009
Article from: The Australian

At Katoomba, in the heart of the Blue Mountains, the local characters rival the majestic scenery.
I’d heard about the small Blue Mountains town long before I first stayed there. In the ’30s and ’40s my father led a jazz band in “Homesdale”, one of the popular holiday resorts on the main street where the musicians also boarded. As a child I’d listened to many a story about their boyish pranks (stealing road signs and blocking off all traffic access to the resort; carrying the bed of the heavy-sleeping bass player, with him still slumbering naked in it, on to the tennis court at sunrise). Seventy years on, Katoomba, with its history of attracting ­vacationers and honeymooners, is still a fertile place for playful and irreverent behaviour.

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For me, however, the charm of a given town is not only realised through breathtaking landscapes and beautiful buildings, but also through the people who live there year-round. In one second-hand bookstore, my husband discovered the 75-year-old owner sitting by a heater behind the counter, swathed in a blanket, teaching Latin to a teenage boy. The next day, when Louis was mooching between the shelves, he noticed the same man teaching Sanskrit to a buxom woman who turned out to be Katoomba’s resident belly dancer. A fairly accomplished linguist himself, Louis struck up a conversation with the owner (in English) and discovered he also provided informal tuition, as he presided over the store, in Ancient Greek, Coptic, Hebrew and Aramaic. His well-read wife, apparently, spoke even more languages than he did.

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