those we had passed...From where I was, I could not detect any
obstacle to the passage right to the foot of those mountains...After
having cut a cross of St. Andrew on a tree to indicate the terminus of my
second journey, I returned by the same route I had come."

Barallier concludes his diary by mentioning another projected expedition
over the mountains from Jervis Bay. But no record of such a journey has
ever come to light.

[Illustration. Statue of Gregory Blaxland, Lands Office, Sydney.]

[Map. Routes of Blaxland, Wentworth, and Lawson (1813); Evans (1813);
Oxley (1817, 1818, 1823); and Sturt (1828 and 1829).]

1.4. THE BLUE MOUNTAINS: BLAXLAND.

Whether Barallier succeeded or not in reaching the summit of the
mountains, the verdict accepted at that date was that they had not been
passed; and until the year 1813, they were regarded as impenetrable. The
narrative of the crossing of these mountains, and the chain of events
that led up to the successful attempt is widely known, but only in a
general way. It is for this reason that a longer and more detailed
account is given in these pages; and as the expedition was successful in
opening up a way to the interior of the Continent, it is fitting that its
leader and originator, Gregory Blaxland, should be classed amongst the
makers of Australasia.

Blaxland was born in Kent, in 1771, and arrived in the colony in 1806,
accompanied by his wife and three children. He settled down to the
congenial occupation of stockbreeding, on what was then considered to be
a large scale. Finding that his stock did not thrive so well in the
immediate neighbourhood of the sea coast, and wanting more land for
pasturing his increasing herds, he made anxious enquiries in all
directions as to the possibility of crossing the Blue Mountains inland.
Nobody would entertain such a suggestion, the failures had been too many:
every one to whom he broached the subject declared it to be impossible,
prophesying that the extension of the settlement westward would forever
be obstructed by their unscalable heights. Blaxland, however, was not
intimidated by these disheartening predictions; and, in 1811, he started
out on a short journey of investigation, in company with three Europeans
and two natives. On this trip he found that by keeping on the crowning
ridge or dividing water-shed between the streams running into the Nepean
and those that fed what he then took to be an inland river, he got along
fair