Gregory Blaxland, William Lawson, and William Charles Wentworth, in
Governor Macquarie's time, were the first men to make an appreciable
advance to the west, inland from the sea. Lawson was a lieutenant in the
New South Wales Corps, in the Veteran Company of which notorious regiment
he remained attached to the 73rd when the "Botany Bay Rangers" went home.
Blaxland was an early settler in the colony, and Wentworth was the son of
a wealthy Norfolk Island official, who had sent his boy home to be
educated, and when these three men went exploring, young Wentworth had
just returned to Australia. In 1813, after many hard trials, by keeping to
the crown of the range and avoiding the impenetrable gorges which their
predecessors had thought would lead to a pass through the barrier, they
managed to gain the summit of the main range, and then returned to Sydney.
The work had taken a month to perform, and Macquarie promptly sent out a
fully equipped party to follow up the discovery. So thoroughly did the
governor back up the work of the explorers that by January, 1815, the
convict-made road had been completed to Bathurst, and the Blue Mountain
ranges were no longer a barrier to the good country of the west.

The Humes, Evans, Oxley, and the rest of the land explorers followed as
the years went on, and very soon there was not a mile of undiscovered land
in the mother-colony. Attempts to penetrate the interior of the great
continent followed, and that work and the opening of the far north, with
its too often accompaniments of disaster and death, went on until quite
recent times. Occasionally even now we hear much talk of expeditions into
the interior, but newspaper-readers who read of such exploring parties can
generally take it for granted that stories of hazard and hardship
nowadays lose nothing in the telling, especially where mining interests
and financial speculation are concerned.