Governor Macquarie's Report On What Was Beyond The Mountains

The title is the right door: this is Macquarie’s report, not another three-explorers school-poster. Gregory Blaxland, William Lawson and William Charles Wentworth left the Nepean in May 1813, followed the ridges, and from Mount Blaxland saw grass that looked like an answer to the colony’s hungry flocks. They did not stand on what we now call Mount Victoria, and they did not found a town. Wiradjuri country was already there.

What the governor actually published is in the Sydney Gazette of 10 June 1815 — Government and General Orders from Government House. George William Evans had pushed the line west in late 1813. William Cox and a convict road party then built the carriage road; Cox reported it finished on 21 January 1815. Macquarie and Elizabeth left Sydney on 25 April, named Mount York and Cox’s Pass on the way down, and on Sunday 7 May 1815 hoisted a flag and named Bathurst for Lord Bathurst. They were back in Sydney on 19 May.

Twenty-five years after 1788 is close enough arithmetic. Drop “first inland city” as a slogan; Bathurst is the first inland European town Macquarie marked out, on a river that was never going to float you to a western sea. The report is how the Crown told Sydney that the mountains had a far side.