Three Sisters

I just watched Season 4, Episode 1 of the excellent Travel Channel (U.S.) series "Expedition Unknown", "Plummer's Gold", about a legendary quartz and gold deposit (or "reef") in the Australian outback. The exact location died with with Harry Lasseter, or more likely, as proposed in this episode, with the prospector Mr. Harding (first name unknown). Records show Harry was in England during the years he claims to have visited the reef without and then with Harding, so the new theory is that it was actually Harding who had discovered the reef, and Lasseter appropriated the story. Per a 1983 Canberra Times article, however, seen at http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/116408077 and http://www.lasseteria.com/HOME/NEWS.htm, the whole story of the reef was a hoax perpetrated by two camel-train drivers to make some money.

In any case, the guy who thinks the reef is real and was discovered by Harding took host Josh Gates to the location of a huge 13-mile-long quartz reef in the outback (in eastern Australia rather than western, as everyone else thought it was). Along with the matching description of the reef, the researcher believed he'd found the right place because he'd found good candidates for the landmarks near the gold deposit that Lasseter is said to have described, primarily the Three Sisters, "three hills which he said could not be mistaken. They looked like three women in sun-bonnets talking to one another." The triple peaks the guy showed Josh could indeed be interpreted so (though the "sun-bonnets" are a lot more clearly suggested than the "women talking to one another").

In any case, that's my guess for the origin of this song's title. "Three Sisters" is not the most unique phrase, so it may be a coincidence, but this seems like the kind of thing that might have fired Tim Farriss' imagination. Arguing against it would be the lush, almost "tropical"-sounding environment the song conjures in the mind, with all the bird calls and such. Doesn't really bring a gold reef in the mostly barren outback to mind (unlike, say, "Kiss The Dirt (Falling Down The Mountain)"). Although per Wikipedia, the kookaburra, one of the birds heard during the song, is "found in habitats ranging from humid forest to arid savanna". The spoken line at the end of the song, "And that's all she wrote" doesn't really provide any support one way or another, though it could refer to Lasseter's untimely death in the desert after being abandoned by the rest of his prospecting team, and the subsequently uncertain location of the Three Sisters.