Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This clip portrays the last stages of the 1813 expedition led by Sydney landowner Gregory Blaxland that found a passage west though the Blue Mountains in New South Wales. The first scenes show the party unable to proceed past high cliffs blocking their way to the west and south-west. The next sequence shows the party’s route as they trek north and their discovery of a difficult but feasible way down the Mountains. Finally the party is depicted on the plains below. Re-enactments and dramatic aerial footage matched by background music all feature in the clip.

Educational value points

• This clip presents a vivid but necessarily abbreviated impression of days 12 to 21 of the Blue Mountains expedition of Gregory Blaxland (1778–1853), William Charles Wentworth (1790–1872) and William Lawson (1774–1850). The three men, accompanied by four servants, five dogs and four loaded horses, set off on 11 May 1813 to cross the Mountains by following the ridges rather than seeking a pass through the gorges.

• Aerial footage of the ridges, cliffs and precipices of the Blue Mountains reveals why at least seven previous attempts to cross the mountains had failed. Approximately 100 km west of Sydney, the Blue Mountains, part of the Great Dividing Range, are not really mountains but a series of cliffs surrounding a sandstone plateau uplifted to 1,000 m above sea level, with basalt outcrops even higher, and rugged eroded gorges 760 m deep.

• By 1813 the flocks and herds of large pastoralists such as Blaxland were expanding beyond the limits of the coastal lands and, since Governor Macquarie (1762–1824) was unwilling to grant any more land for anything other than raising crops, Blaxland decided that the solution to his land shortage lay in discovering a route across the Blue Mountains. By early 1813 he had received Macquarie’s approval to organise a private expedition for the purpose.

• On day 12 (22 May) the party had their first view of the land to the west of the Blue Mountains and it was a great disappointment. Not only was their way to it blocked, as illustrated by the first scene in the clip, but the land was of poor quality with Blaxland describing it in his journal as 'sand and small scrubby brushwood, intersected with broken rocky mountains’ (http://gutenberg.net.au).

• The explorers backtracked, 'expecting to find a passage down the mountain more to the northward’ (http://gutenberg.net.au), and so it proved when on day 19 (28 May) they reached a precipice and on the following day, as re-enacted in the clip, they forced a way down to much better country than they had previously seen. It was the pasture land they were seeking. The next year a road was constructed over the mountains by William Cox using convict labour.

• The party’s achievement in finding a way across the Blue Mountains, and the road that followed, transformed the colony; stations established by pastoralists for their flocks of merino sheep spread to the west and south. Within two years Blaxland was able to write: 'It has changed the aspect of the colony, from a confined insulated tract of land, to a rich and extensive continent’ (http://gutenberg.net.au).