y as a settlement site. In March, 1825, he
left Parramatta, threaded the Pandora Pass once more, and ascended to
Liverpool Plains, returning to Parramatta on the 17th of June. In 1826
and the beginning of the following year, he visited New Zealand.

5.3. THE DARLING DOWNS.

It was in the year 1827 that Cunningham accomplished his most notable
journey of exploration, one which eventually threw open to settlement an
entirely new area of country; country destined to mould the destiny of
the yet unborn colony of Queensland, and afford homes for thousands of
settlers. It was mainly by his exertions that the young community at
Moreton Bay was able to stretch its growing limbs to the westward
immediately after its birth, instead of waiting long weary years and
wasting its strength against an impassable obstacle as had been the fate
of the settlement at Farm Cove.

Cunningham started from Segenhoe, a station on one of the head
tributaries of the Hunter River, whence he ascended the main range
without any difficulty beyond having to unload some of the pack-horses
during the steepest part of the ascent. He had with him six men, eleven
horses, and provisions for fourteen weeks. He left civilisation, or the
outskirts of it, on the 2nd of May, and on the 11th he crossed the
parallel on which Oxley had crossed the Peel River in 1818, and once
beyond that point he was traversing unexplored country. The land was
suffering under a prolonged drought in that district, and most of the
streams encountered had but detached pools of water in their beds, at one
of which, however, his party caught a good haul of cod, which were such
ravenous biters and so heavy that several were lost in the attempt to
land them.

Travelling through open forest land, which was suffering more or less
from the want of rain, Cunningham came on the 19th of May to a valley.
Here, on the bank of a creek he encamped on "the most luxuriant pasture
we had met since we had left the Hunter."

"We were not a little surprised," he says, "to observe at this valley, so
remote from any farming establishment, the traces of horned cattle, only
two or three days old, as also the spots on which about eight to a dozen
of these animals had reposed.

"From what point of the country these cattle had originally strayed
appeared at first difficult to determine. On consideration, however, it
was thought by no means impossible that they were stragglers from the
large wild herds that