Читать книгу Australian History For Dummies - Alex McDermott - Страница 105

Macquarie encouraged expansion of settlement by establishing new peripheral settlements in the colony, such as Windsor, Wilberforce and Liverpool. But the biggest challenge to expansion was the Blue Mountains, which essentially lay in a ring around the settlement. Various attempts had been made to penetrate the forbidding range since the first few months of the First Fleet’s arrival at Port Jackson, but so far none had been successful. The arable land available in the settlement was by now nearing exhaustion and Sydney was in danger of becoming a permanent ‘limpet port’ — a small-scale settlement that clung to the side of an unknown continent, depending solely on its maritime flow, ready for abandonment if and when the British Government decided to give up the project as a bad exercise. People didn’t even know what lay on the other side of the mountains. Desert? An inland sea? Or, as some convicts continued to believe, China?

In June 1813, three settlers — Gregory Blaxland, William Lawson and William Wentworth — and their convict servants finally found a way over the Blue Mountains, discovering enough grassland on the other side to ‘feed all the stock in the colony for thirty years’. Macquarie sent his surveyor, George Evans, to investigate and Evans returned greatly impressed with what he had found: ‘I cannot speak too much of the country. The increase of stock for some 100 years cannot overrun it’.

A new vista of what Australia might become opened up, and Macquarie set to work building a road out along the route through the mountains and proclaimed a new township — Bathurst.