What significance did crossing the Blue Mountains have?

Crossing the Blue Mountains in 1813 had transformative significance for the colony of New South Wales. It ended 25 years during which the Sydney settlement had been hemmed in against the coast by the rugged sandstone barrier of the Blue Mountains, opening the vast western plains to European settlement, sheep grazing, and agricultural development.

Before 1813, the colony had been confined to a small area around Sydney, Parramatta, and the Hawkesbury River, with the Cumberland Plain producing limited food and the colony repeatedly facing food shortages. Multiple expeditions between 1789 and 1813 had tried to find a route through the mountains and failed, becoming trapped in dead-end gorges and impenetrable bush. The successful crossing by Blaxland, Lawson, and Wentworth followed the ridge tops rather than the valleys and opened the way to the rolling western plains.

The economic consequences were immediate and substantial. Governor Macquarie sent surveyor George Evans to extend the route in November 1813, reaching the open plains around what became Bathurst. Construction of a road across the mountains, completed by William Cox and a convict work gang in January 1815, allowed wagons and livestock to cross. By 1820, about a million sheep had been driven across the mountains to the western pastoral lands. The wool trade boomed and became the backbone of the New South Wales economy for the rest of the nineteenth century, with Australian wool dominating world production by the 1860s.

The crossing also had devastating consequences for the Aboriginal peoples of the inland. The Wiradjuri people of the Bathurst plains and the Dharug, Gundungurra, and Darkinjung peoples of the mountains themselves suffered loss of country, frontier conflict, and depopulation from the 1820s onwards. The Bathurst War of 1824, led by the Wiradjuri leader Windradyne, was one of many frontier conflicts that followed the crossing. The opening of inland Australia to European settlement therefore marks both the beginning of the colony's economic expansion and the start of a long Aboriginal dispossession that continued across more than a century. The modern Blue Mountains, now a UNESCO World Heritage area (2000), are recognised both for their natural beauty and for their Aboriginal cultural significance.