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Activity page
13B
Blue Mountains Looking for land Crossing the Blue Mountains
Soon after British colonists established
their first settlements in New South
Wales, they began searching for new
pastures for their stock. They explored
north and south, and inland as far
as Evan (now Penrith), but found
their way further west blocked by the
Blue Mountains.
Local Gundungurra, Wiradjuri,
Wanaruah, Darug and Darkinjung
peoples knew and used two main
routes to cross the Blue Mountains.
But most Europeans saw the range
as a forbidding maze of sandstone
bluffs, deep gorges and dense bush.
Then, several expeditions managed to
penetrate part way into the mountains,
travelling up the Burragorang Valley,
inland from Richmond, and around the
range to the south.
In 1813 Gregory Blaxland, William
Lawson and William Charles Wentworth
forged a route directly west from Evan.
The following year a road tracing their
route was built across the range and
settlers began moving stock into the
inland slopes and plains of Wiradjuri
country. In the following decades the
Blue Mountains became a holiday
destination for Sydneysiders, and today
more than three million people visit
each year to admire the rugged views
and walk the forest trails.
All the difficulties were surmounted
which had hitherto prevented the
interior of the country from being
explored and the Colony further
extended.
Gregory Blaxland, 1813
From his arrival in New South Wales,
Governor Lachlan Macquarie sought
to increase the colony’s capacity to
produce its own food. He instructed
settlers to grow grain rather than
raise sheep and cattle, but many large
landholders refused to comply and
continued to increase their stock. When
drought struck the Sydney region they
grew desperate for new pastures.
In 1813 William Charles Wentworth,
William Lawson and Gregory Blaxland,
keen to expand their holdings,
persuaded Macquarie to support an
attempt to cross the mountains. They
departed Emu Plains with horses, an
Aboriginal guide and three convict
servants. Twenty-one days and about
93 kilometres later they climbed what
is now Mount Blaxland and saw to the
west country suited to sheep and cattle.
They had proved that colonists could
cross the Blue Mountains.
I am more pleased with the Country
every day; it is a great extent of
Grazing land
George William Evans, 1813
After Blaxland, Lawson and Wentworth
returned from the Blue Mountains with
reports of promising land beyond,
Governor Macquarie instructed
surveyor George Evans to plan a road
across the range. Evans traced the
explorers’ trail of blazed (marked) trees
and then followed a pathway made by
local Aboriginal people down onto the
inland slopes. He found rich grasslands,
mostly created by the Wiradjuri people’s
practice of periodic burning.
Macquarie then commissioned
ex-soldier William Cox to build a road
through the mountains. In six months
Cox’s team of 30 convicts and eight
guards completed more than 160
kilometres. Bathurst, the first settlement
west of the range, was established
in 1815, and pastoralists flooded
into the inland. For the next decade
there was armed conflict in the region
as the Wiradjuri, led by the warrior
Windradyne, resisted the invasion.
2 Add any information to your summary table on activity page 3A.
3 Write a brief paragraph or do a comic strip sketch for your own history textbook (in box 9
of activity page 3C) to explain to readers how the crossing of the Blue Mountains might be
presented differently by different historical representations. (Use the Museum display and
other textbooks to answer this question.)
4 Looking at activity page 3A, what are your final answers to each of the questions, based on
the evidence, information and ideas that you have summarised throughout this unit?
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Myths and Mysteries of the Crossing of the Blue Mountains