Image and text source:
NSW education; school A-Z |
Why people exploredWhen Australia was colonised, little was known about the inland areas. The imagination of those among the colony prompted ideas of a paradise existing just beyond the settlement, of being able to walk to China and the presence of an inland sea. In search of a better life, many convicts escaped only to find themselves lost in the dense, rugged and seemingly never-ending bushland.
To understand the country, explorers (generally professional surveyors) were officially sent out in search of rivers and land suitable for agriculture, to survey the land and to later source routes for lines of communication. They were often accompanied by convicts, Aboriginal trackers or those who had developed strong bush survival skills. Major expeditions were documented through reports and journals, which were made up of sketches and maps noting rivers, mountains, plains and deserts, and sometimes information about Aboriginal groups the explorer came across. One of the first major expeditions took place in 1813, led by Gregory Blaxland, William Lawson and William Charles Wentworth. Unable to travel west into the country's interior because of the Great Dividing Range, the party found a way to cross the Blue Mountains, opening up the rest of the continent for further exploration and farming. |
So, here you are, it is 1813, and this is the view that you have of the Blue Mountains.
Why do you think people would want to cross the mountains? And, how would they do it?
Reasons behind crossing the Blue Mountains |
The Blue Mountains was a vast natural barrier that stretched north and south beyond sight and had thwarted all attempts to cross or go around it.
In 1813 New South Wales remained a British penal colony, but competing ideas about its future were developing. Governor Lachlan Macquarie saw New South Wales as predominantly a place where freed convicts would engage in self-sufficient, small-scale agriculture to feed the growing colony, so finding a way through was important. New grazing land would allow farmers to spread out and the settlement of the region to expand. In 1813 he authorised three wealthy immigrants — Gregory Blaxland, William Lawson and William Charles Wentworth (who was born on a convict ship on the way to New South Wales) — to organise an expedition to find a way of crossing the Blue Mountains. The party found a particular ridge line, and succeeded in reaching the end of the Blue Mountains and observing some open land — although they did not complete a crossing of the Great Dividing Range, and did not see the great plains towards Bathurst. After the party returned to the colony, Macquarie sent a surveyor, George Evans, to check on their findings. Evans followed their route, and then went much further, seeing the Bathurst plains. He returned, and Macquarie commissioned a narrow and rough road to be mad Despite attempts to limit expansion of the colony, it gradually happened, and the plains were opened up to settlers who then took up the land, displacing the Aboriginal inhabitants in a series of bloody conflicts. Blaxland, Lawson and Wentworth and their crossing of the Blue Mountains was seized upon as one of the great nation-forming achievements. |
What was their individual reason's for crossing the Blue Mountains? |