Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This black-and-white clip from the documentary The Land That Waited shows supposed differences between the British and the colonial-born in how they went about finding a route across the Blue Mountains. Supported by paintings, cartoons and drawings, the narration describes the British playing ‘the game of exploring’ and using a ‘cavalry charge’ approach. The focus then shifts to images of Gregory Blaxland and suggests his success in crossing the mountains was because he was a bushman bred in the colony.

Educational value points

• This clip provides a nationalist historical interpretation of the efforts to find a way across the Blue Mountains that praises the insight and skill of the Australian bushmen in following the mountain ridges and denigrates the efforts of the British in ‘charging’ along the rivers. The clip’s account of the futility of the British attempts is reinforced by its use of cartoons and drawings taken from various contexts and different times and given a satirical twist by the narration.

• Drawings in the clip of the ridges, cliffs and precipices of the Blue Mountains reveal why at least seven attempts to cross the mountains had failed before Blaxland’s expedition in 1813. 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.

• The clip captures a time in Australian historiography when a nationalist interpretation of Australian history was on the rise and the importance of the British was downplayed. Russel Ward’s The Australian Legend, first published in 1958, promoted the thesis that the egalitarianism of Australian bushmen largely shaped Australia’s history, and his book was highly significant in the rise of the nationalist interpretation.

• In the clip Gregory Blaxland (1778–1853) is presented as the prime example of the successful colonial-bred explorer – in tune with the local environment and knowledgeable about Indigenous behaviour – but in fact he was born in England and only arrived in NSW in 1806. Of the three joint leaders of the 1813 exploring party that found the route across the Blue Mountains, only one, William Charles Wentworth, had been born locally.

• The clip exemplifies the invisibility of Australian Indigenous people in popular history in the early 1960s. The narration reinforces the prevailing belief in the legal doctrine of terra nullius by describing the land beyond the mountains as ‘a land that waited in some vast silence’. Although Indigenous people feature in many of the drawings as guides and members of exploring parties, the narration makes no mention of their presence.

• Far from organising continual charges at the Blue Mountains and themselves going in useless ‘processional parties’ along the rivers as the clip implies, many early NSW governors successfully encouraged the search for useful land. Initially this was east of the Blue Mountains, but in early 1813 Governor Macquarie (1762–1824), unwilling to make any more large land grants along the coastline, agreed to Blaxland’s exploring party attempting the Blue Mountains.