Blaxland, Wentworth & Lawson – Crossing the Blue Mountains

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In May 1813, Gregory Blaxland, William Lawson and William Charles Wentworth did what a generation of valley-hunters had failed to do: they took the ridges across the Blue Mountains. They left the Nepean on 11 May with servants, horses and stores, cut and marked their way west, dropped from Mount York, and pushed on to the sugarloaf later called Mount Blaxland — enough grass, they thought, to change the colonys fortunes. Leadership arguments came later; the journals read as a joint slog.

Macquarie sent George Evans to go further, then set William Cox to build a road in 1814–15 that still shadows their line. That road opened pastoral expansion onto the Bathurst plains — Wiradjuri country — with all the frontier consequences that followed. The much-photographed “Explorers Tree” near Katoomba is later folklore, not a journal entry; don’t navigate 1813 by a 1860s tourist marker.

This post is the crossing, not a Sydney CBD laneway. Keep the live plates; fix the title spelling; let the ADB trio and the journals carry the facts. Blood-and-wattle rhetoric without sources stays off the paste.

William Charles Wentworth, 1861–62 — Dalton’s Royal Photographic Gallery (SLNSW / Wikimedia Commons, public domain). One of the 1813 trio; Blaxland and Lawson portraits also survive in library collections.

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