You may have driven or been driven across the Blue Mountains at some stage, following the Great Western Highway east or west. Your journey may have been in the air-conditioned comfort of your family car, with some favourite tunes on your mp3 player or CD to help pass the time as you transited through the many towns that sit astride the route. Nearly two hundred years ago, three English colonists stood at the base of the eastern side of the Blue Mountains and looked up at the dense, almost impenetrable forest on the slopes, realising that to cross the mountains would be a test of endurance and resourcefulness. These colonists, Gregory Blaxland, William Lawson and William Wentworth were determined to find a way across. The need for new pastures and farming land was becoming urgent as the fledgling settlement of Sydney grew in size and population, which put stress upon the new primary producers to feed the colonists. An expansion in farming was called for, and land to accommodate this was at a premium in the Sydney Basin. Consequently Blaxland, Lawson and Wentworth combined their resources and set out to ‘tame’ the Blue Mountains and to see if the unknown land beyond held any prospects for more agricultural production.
In anticipation of the bicentenary in 2013 of the crossing of the Blue Mountains by Blaxland, Lawson and Wentworth, Ryebuck Media, in partnership with the National Museum of Australia, is producing a History Mysteries case study on the crossing. Production of the case study began in earnest in May, and for two days that month the Ryebuck team (Bob Lewis, Tim Gurry and Kevin Manning) and yours truly decamped to Western Sydney and the Blue Mountains to film segments for use in the case study. I’ll share a few of the highlights of the trip, including some photographic evidence of trying to trace the route of the explorers and get a sense of the significance of their achievement.
Tim Gurry, intrepid presenter, prepares to take to the air.
Wednesday 16th May began with a little ‘airborne’ fun for Tim (presenter) and Kevin (cinematographer) via a helicopter trip, starting at Bankstown airport. The aim was to get moving images of the route up over the mountains, and the challenging nature of the landscape. As luck and possibly good planning would have it, the weather was superb, with excellent visibility and a benign air mass ensuring that breakfast stayed down for the passengers. The conditions for filming could not have been any better, so Tim and Kevin were able to get some compelling images of the route and the surrounding environment. A good deal of their success was also attributable to the skill of Tim the pilot, who was very accommodating and flexible in regard to the needs of the filming session. With the airborne images under the collective belt, it was time to move on and attempt to pick up the remnants of the early stages of the track as taken by the three explorers.
A relatively short drive took us from Bankstown to St Marys, where the expedition is said to have begun. Finding the spot where it is claimed this happened proved to be difficult, given the passage of time and the shortage of detail, so it was decided to move on to Penrith and record some segments showing the barrier of the Nepean River and the daunting sight of the main range rising up beyond the river’s western bank. Crossing the river these days via the local bridges now spanning the water is not given a thought by motorists or other travellers, however in 1813 it was a major undertaking, as the explorers had to get their provisions, equipment, horses and themselves over to the western bank and on toward the range.
While in Penrith we found the monument erected in 1938 as part of the sesquicentenary of the non-Indigenous settlement of Australia. This monument refers to the crossing of the Blue Mountains by Blaxland, Lawson and Wentworth and the significance of the Penrith area as part of their path to the west. The opportunity to record a segment on the monument was taken by Tim and Kevin, while Bob kept a check on the segment content and reviewed the schedule for the remainder of the day. With the segment ‘in the can’ (to use a hip movie industry phrase), we returned to the hire car (soon to be named the ‘Ryebuck Rover’) and set out to climb the mountains using a far easier and much less taxing method than that deployed by the explorers in 1813.
Upon reaching the plateau of the range, we headed to Glenbrook and the Blue Mountains National Park, where we were to find the Red Hands Cave, a site of much significance for local Indigenous people. The cave is on a walking track that leads down into a deep gully in the park. Finding it was easy; finding a set of marks at an Indigenous tool-sharpening site was much harder, given the fading daylight and the nature of the walking track. We had to settle for the cave footage, and leave the notion of Indigenous tool-sharpening sites for another time. Seeing the way in which the Red Hands Cave is managed was thought-provoking; the cave (or deep overhang in a large rock formation) is protected by a steel mesh fence, that has apertures in it for visitors to take photographs of the hand stencils on the back wall of the cave. It is encouraging to see efforts taken to preserve the Indigenous mark-making, but also a little sad to think that the sanctity and significance of these markings has to be preserved by isolating visitors from them.
Kevin records Tim's piece to camera at the Red Hands Cave site. The cave is to the right of where Tim stands.
The filming in the Blue Mountains National Park had consumed the rest of the daylight, so it was time to move on to Leura where the team was to stay overnight. After an excellent evening meal in a robust cafe in Katoomba, we all made for our respective rooms and an early night, as the next day needed a prompt start. Thursday 17th May presented another glorious round of weather, which was a continued blessing given that all of the filming for that day was to be outdoors. The first stop on the itinerary was what is known as the ‘Explorer’s tree’, which sits at the side of the Great Western Highway just to the west of Katoomba. This is the remains of a tall blackbutt tree ( Eucalyptus pilularis ) upon which William Lawson is said to have carved his initials. Imagine our mix of disappointment and bemusement when we arrived at the site to find the tree remains closed off from the public and covered in a well-secured large black plastic sheet. No to be daunted, Tim still did a piece to camera, and Kevin made use of the setting to get some segments of the tree and the ‘backdrop’ of the busy highway.
Moving further west took us to Mt York, which is a major location in the story of the 1813 crossing. It was from here that the explorers looked down in the direction of where Hartley, Lithgow and other local towns now stand. They thought they had found the ‘gateway’ to major tracts of potential pastureland, however it was only the beginning of the tablelands to the west of the Blue Mountains, as further exploration would show. For Blaxland, Lawson and Wentworth it was a significant moment to stand at the edge of the mountain plateau and see a vista that suggested expansion and possibilities for personal gain. The Mt York location is liberally supplied with memorials to the exploration party, the original road surveyor George Evans and William Cox, who led the team that built the first road across the mountains. It is sobering to see the remnants of Cox’s Road descending to the valley floor, hewn from the very rock, and to think of the exhausting labour that went into creating the road.
The remains of the 'Explorers tree', snug in its black plastic wrapping!
From Mt York, the way was down and then up again to the last stop for the Blue Mountains filming, Mt Blaxland. The ‘Ryebuck Rover’ took us down into the valley and to the property of Mr Glen Ryan, at South Bownfels, south of Lithgow. It is on Glen’s property that Mt Blaxland stands, which marks the most westward extent of the exploration by Blaxland, Lawson and Wentworth. Glen runs cattle on about 1800 hectares of land, and is well versed in the story of the first non-Indigenous crossing of the Blue Mountains. His offer to take us to the top of Mt Blaxland was eagerly accepted, as we wanted to see and film the monument up there, as well as the large sheets of corrugated iron that have been placed upon the eastern side of the crest. These sheets are visible from Mt York (to the keen eye, or better still with binoculars), and give a great sense of scale in regard to the last leg of the exploration party’s crossing. Getting to the top of Mt Blaxland in Glen’s ute was much better than any amusement park ride, and the payoff in regard to the views at the top was considerable. Tim and Kevin wasted no time in getting some great pieces to camera, while Bob engaged Glen in conversation about the crossing and other aspects of local history. All of this activity was confidently overseen by Glen’s dog Pete, who is the latest in a long line of Petes, which removes any naming crisis, regardless of gender, when one dog dies and is replaced by another!
After a successful session perched upon Mt Blaxland, the ‘Ryebuck Rover’ was primed for the trip back to Canberra via Oberon and Goulburn. Arrival at the Museum late that afternoon was not the end of the journey, as there remained a filming session in the Museum’s Landmarks gallery where a module on the topic of the Blue Mountains contains objects and information relevant to the 1813 crossing. The services of Museum curator Daniel Oakman were called upon; he and Tim did several pieces to camera in front of the module, discussing the relationship of the objects to the crossing and some of the popularly-held notions about the crossing that are part of the mystery of the exploration. Daniel contributed some valuable insights into the crossing, which enriched the story and gave the Ryebuck team some ‘meaty’ content for the history mystery.
And so the filming trip came to a close at the Museum, after several hundred kilometres across NSW, a couple of thousand metres up and down and thousands of years back in time. Tracing the path of Blaxland, Lawson and Wentworth had been an involved and multi-layered experience, as it took in notions of colonialism, Indigenous journeys across the mountains before non-Indigenous settlement, the expansion of farming and the settlement of thousands of people in an area that now contains major transport routes. Linking up the various sites of significance along the way was most compelling, and provided a tremendous sense of the evolution of the path across the mountains. The History Mysteries case study will present the crossing in a new light, and encourage school students to investigate it not from the point of view of what is known, but from the point of view of what is not known, or what is unclear due to incomplete records, the passage of time and interpretations of Australian history by those with differing notions of what stories need to be told. It will be a compelling study – a crossing in its own sense.
cool, nice adventure through history