Who were Blaxland, Wentworth, and Lawson?

Gregory Blaxland, William Lawson, and William Wentworth were three Australian-born explorers who in 1813 became the first Europeans to cross the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. Their successful 21-day crossing from 11 May to 31 May 1813 opened the western plains to European settlement and changed the future of the colony of New South Wales.

Gregory Blaxland (1778 to 1853) was an English-born free settler who arrived in Sydney in 1806. A farmer with property at South Creek (now St Marys), he had lobbied for permission to find a route west and led the 1813 expedition with his own financial backing. William Lawson (1774 to 1850) was an English-born surveyor and military officer who had migrated to Sydney in 1800. William Wentworth (1790 to 1872) was the colonial-born son of convict surgeon D'Arcy Wentworth, later a leading colonial politician, journalist, and founder of the University of Sydney.

The crossing took a different route from earlier failed attempts. Previous explorers had tried to follow the valleys and rivers, becoming trapped in dead-end gorges. Blaxland, Lawson, and Wentworth followed the ridge tops, moving slowly along the spine of the mountains with their party of five servants, four pack horses, and five dogs. After about 18 days of slow progress they climbed a high peak (later named Mount Blaxland) and saw the open country beyond. They returned to Sydney with the news on 6 June 1813.

Governor Macquarie sent the surveyor George Evans to follow their route in November 1813, and Evans extended the route to the open plains around what became Bathurst. Construction of a road across the mountains (later called the Great Western Highway) was completed in 1815 by William Cox and a convict work gang. The opening of the western plains transformed New South Wales: by 1820 about a million sheep had been driven across the mountains, the wool trade boomed, and the inland exploration of Australia accelerated. The crossing also had devastating consequences for the Aboriginal peoples of the Bathurst plains, who suffered frontier conflict from 1822 onwards including the Bathurst War of 1824 in which many Wiradjuri people were killed. Today, the route is marked by monuments and historical trails, and the three explorers' names appear on electorates, suburbs, mountains, and many other Australian places.