The woman who fell in love with a ghost town

In her other life, Valerie was an inveterate traveller and talented photographer, selling her photos to magazines, and for postcards and calendars. After attending her brother John’s wedding in 1949, she took to travel, first visiting England. In 1955 she took a cruise to the Pacific Islands, earning her passage by taking photographs. She would follow that in succeeding years with trips to Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Japan, the Americas, Scandinavia and Russia, Iran and China, Egypt and France.

When her father died in 1965, Valerie moved from the family home into a houseboat he had given her in 1960. With silver prices rising, a Canadian company became interested in developing the Yerranderie mines and sent geologists there, Lhuede fitting out the old two-storey wooden post office to accommodate them. But within a few years, investors lost interest. She continued with her tourism venture, sympathetically restoring the buildings.

The post office became “The Lodge”. Other buildings included the corrugated iron tailor’s shop and Mrs Barnes’ boarding house, a one-roomed slab cottage with a crude kitchen extension. Lhuede was to invest a million dollars in Yerranderie.

One-time marine engineer John Hopwood stumbled across Yerranderie and was delighted, describing the town as “like some apparition from last century’s gold rush … Here were kangaroos resting in the shade of a wonderful old post office, a goanna stalking along the veranda of a settler’s home, parrots everywhere and an emu striding across the town common.”

Hopwood became a caretaker, one of many over the years, while Lhuede split her time between the town and her houseboat, and later her apartment in Kirribilli. She developed an airstrip at Yerranderie, and many of her patrons were flown in from Camden and The Oaks airports.

In 1994, Herald journalist John Huxley wrote that Lhuede was “a remarkable woman who describes herself as ‘a little old woman living in the middle of nowhere’.”

Lhuede said: “This has been my passion, my life. It has always been my vision to make Yerranderie a centre for what is now known as ecotourism. I’d travelled the world taking photographs … and just loved ecological tourism where you learn something. I decided that’s what Australia needed and when I found Yerranderie, everything fell into place.”

Lhuede studied the career of the French explorer Francis Luis Barrallier, the first European to visit the area. This expedition, along with her interest in the local Aboriginal people, inspired Lhuede to write a book of fiction, Yerranderie, My Dreaming, published in 2007. She followed that with The Sunrise of Aboriginal Art in Capricornia Country, featuring stories and descriptions of the Aboriginal artists she had met. She donated the artworks and artefacts she had collected, via the Blue Mountain World Heritage Institute, to the Gun-dun-Gurra Indigenous people of Katoomba.

In 2011, she decided to hand the estate to the National Parks and Wildlife Service. Awarded an AM in 2010 for her contribution to environmental conservation, Lhuede, and her legacy, is remembered in many ways, including events in 2019 when the airstrip she had developed played a critical role in fighting the Black Saturday bushfires.

In 2018, she published Valued Memories of a Happy Life. In the NSW Legislative Assembly in September 2023, MP Felicity Wilson said: “I want to recognise Kirribilli local Valerie Lhuede. I want to wish Valerie a very happy birthday as she celebrates her 100th birthday. On September 27 this year, Valerie Lhuede died at the age of 101. She is survived by six nieces and four nephews, and dozens of great- and great-great nieces and nephews.

Valerie Lhuede’s funeral will be held at St Mary’s Catholic Church, North Sydney, on October 10. Her ashes are to be scattered at Yerranderie.