Blue Mountains

Distinguished and Famous people from Blue Mountains

The Blue Mountains have been more than scenery for Australian writers and artists. In Katoomba and Faulconbridge, homes became working places where novels, illustrations and paintings took shape—and where those creative lives can still be traced.

📚 Eleanor Dark

Eleanor Dark moved to Katoomba with her husband, Dr Eric Dark, in 1923. Their home, Varuna, became the place where she wrote most of her ten novels, including The Timeless Land, published in 1941. A separate writing studio was added in the garden in 1938, giving her work a particularly tangible local setting. She spent more than sixty years of her life at Varuna. In 1989 their son Mick gifted the house and gardens for use as a writers' retreat; the property now supports other writers through residencies and literary programmes.

🎨 Norman Lindsay

Norman Lindsay and Rose Soady bought their Faulconbridge cottage and surrounding bushland in 1912. It became a home, studio and steadily expanding artistic project, with fountains, sculptures, colonnades and a Roman courtyard added over the years. Lindsay produced paintings, etchings, drawings, ship models and books there, including The Magic Pudding. His nearly sixty-year association with the property is preserved through the Norman Lindsay Gallery and its original studios. The range of work is part of the fascination: the creator of a famously argumentative pudding was also a painter, printmaker and model-ship enthusiast.

The pudding’s companions were a suitably unusual travelling party: sailor Bill Barnacle, koala Bunyip Bluegum and penguin Sam Sawnoff. Their meal could walk and talk, be eaten and still remain available for the next occasion. Lindsay supplied both the story and the drawings, bringing his different creative skills into one enduring children’s book.

📻 Peter Carrodus

Peter Carrodus and his wife Roni moved to Leura in 1990 after earlier retirement years at Mullumbimby. He had managed Canberra’s 2CA and helped strengthen the Canberra Symphony Orchestra before working in Sydney. At the classical station 2MBS-FM he coordinated hundreds of volunteers to maintain continuous broadcasting. The move into retirement followed a career in which local sport, community events and serious music all found a place on air. The documented home adds a quieter geographical chapter to the professional life, without suggesting that his earlier stations operated locally.

👞 Ted Meller

Ted Meller and his family kept a large house and garden at Katoomba and visited often. His main business was based in Sydney, where he built a shoemaking and retail enterprise after arriving as a refugee from Austria in 1938. Outside work he was an enthusiastic skier, swimmer and sailor who also played violin and enjoyed classical music. He continued skiing in Europe into his early eighties. The Katoomba property was part of that broader family and recreational life, rather than the location of his factories or principal shops. It adds a personal connection to a businessman remembered chiefly through his footwear.