Beyond 'the Crossing': The Restless Frontier at Bathurst in the 1820s

Abstract

There is a grandiloquent notion, fundamental to the legend of 'the crossing' of the Blue Mountains, that it was a pivotal moment in the transition of colonial New South Wales (NSW) from a confined prison to an expansive, free and democratic society. Having cracked open the imprisoning ramparts that had hemmed the fledgling penal settlement for thirty years, European Australia set upon its rapid conquest of the entire continent. As Russel Ward phrased it in the 1950s, the crossing 'foreshadowed the end of New South Wales as a predominantly convict colony'. This recalls a romantic strand in American thinking, where the colonial frontier - the great American 'West' - is seen as the forging ground of a new, independent nation. As the Wisconsin historian, Frederick Jackson Turner, put it in the late nineteenth century, 'the west', for Americans, was 'a gate of escape from the bondage of the past'. Historians have wished to see the Australian frontier in similar terms. After all, the 'bondage' of Australia's past was very real and literal, and something we long wished to escape from. It has been an enduring idea. On the day before the Crossings seminar in May 2013, columnist Elizabeth Farrelly romanticised the 1813 expedition as the 'first scrape of teaspoon against rock ... an attack on the prison wall'. The three explorers 'could not have known how fast and emphatically it would transform the prison colony into a nation'.