A grand canyon all our own

When Henry Lawson wrote his poem, Song of the Old Bullock Driver, in 1891 he became the first notable Australian to put into words the rugged beauty of the Capertee Valley, though it's fair to wonder how many more verses he may have devoted to the valley had he known he was looking at barely the westernmost tip of the world's second-largest enclosed canyon.

The Capertee Valley is said to be longer than US's Grand Canyon by almost a kilometre. Capertee's sandstone escarpments soar to hundreds of metres in height and encircle the valley from south of Mount Marsden near the town of Capertee all the way to the short-lived mining town of Glen Davis, 20 kilometres to the west, and beyond, broadening out as it goes until the escarpments are in excess of 30 kilometres from north to south.

Pantoneys Crown, an Uluru-type sandstone monolith, is now the centrepiece of Pantoneys Crown Nature Reserve and dominates the western end of the valley.

The Grand Canyon. Uluru. It all sounds rather pretentious, this Capertee Valley. Which is why you have to come here and see it for yourself. This is geology on a grand scale, a world of slot canyons, towering limestone formations and prehistoric Wollemi Pines - world-class scenery that is wild and breathtaking and it's all just a three-hour drive west of Sydney in the Central Tablelands, a 30-minute drive north of Lithgow.

Getting in among it all requires more than the usual family sedan and that's where Peter Roberts comes in. The proprietor of Wheely Good 4WD Tours has lived in the area all his life and his day-long four-wheel-drive tours introduce you to panoramas that will reignite your love of the bush. One of the options is a drive up precipitous Mount Airley, following fire trails, past abandoned diamond mines dug into the mountainside by Col Ribaux that once, Roberts told me, produced diamonds as big as peas. Ribaux, a former prospector and geologist with mining giant De Beers, once found 77 diamonds in six days and still lives in the area with a horde of uncut opals and a fossilised dinosaur egg that bears an uncanny resemblance to a granite bowling ball.

There are billabongs lined with water reeds in the shadows of banded granite outcrops, with water so pure and deep that they never dry up. Aboriginal rock art of stencilled hands, boomerangs and throwing sticks painted by the local Wiradjuri people speaks of a 2000-year history of corroborees with other tribes from the adjacent Wolgan Valley and beyond. Small clearings like Heffron's Hole were once prized by bushrangers, who hid their stolen cattle there as recently as the 1920s. Surrounding mountains and valleys are laced with old bush tracks, bridle paths and dray tracks from Nulla Mountain all the way to Putty. Ken Sampson, an old fire-control officer at Rylstone, used to walk them on patrol and sometimes wouldn't come back for days. Billabongs, bushrangers, Aborigines - the Capertee Valley is a microcosm of everything that is Australian.

The valley first came to prominence in the 1930s, not for the landforms that rose from its floor but for the vast geological deposits that lay beneath. The Capertee Valley, it turned out, was far more than just escarpments, canyons and rugged, towering monoliths. It was also home to one of the planet's largest reserves of high-grade oil shale.