History
The name "You Yang" comes from the Aboriginal words Wurdi Youang or Ude Youang meaning "big mountain in the middle of a plain". Aboriginal people enlarged natural hollows in the rocks to form wells that held water even in dry seasons.
Explorer Matthew Flinders was the first European to visit the You Yangs. On 1 May 1802, he and three of his men climbed to the highest point. He named it "Station Peak" but the name was changed in 1912 to "Flinders Peak" in his honour.
The You Yangs have always attracted artists to paint them and feature most strongly in works by one of Australia's greatest artists, Fred Williams. Williams spent long periods developing his plein air representations of the You Yangs, and these have now become classics of Australian art — rugged, dramatic, yet sparse in their imagery — unquestionably of the Australian bush.
Read more about this topic: You Yangs
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“They are a sort of post-house,where the Fates
Change horses, making history change its tune,
Then spur away o’er empires and o’er states,
Leaving at last not much besides chronology,
Excepting the post-obits of theology.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“Don’t you realize that this is a new empire? Why, folks, there’s never been anything like this since creation. Creation, huh, that took six days, this was done in one. History made in an hour. Why it’s a miracle out of the Old Testament!”
—Howard Estabrook (1884–1978)