Extract from Dedication:
To John Oxley Parker, ESQ., of Chelmsford, Essex.
London, February 10, 1823.
Dear Sir,--Feelings of gratitude for your kind
attention to me in the early part of life, have induced
me to dedicate to you the following short Journal of my
passage over the Blue Mountains, in the colony of New
South Wales, under the persuasion that it will afford you
pleasure at all times to hear that any of your family
have been instrumental in promoting the prosperity of any
country in which they may reside, however distant that
country may be from the immediate seat of our Government.
Since my return to England many of my
friends have expressed a wish to peruse my Journal. To meet their
request in the only practicable or satisfactory manner, I have consented
to its being printed. Devoid as it is of any higher pretensions than
belong to it as a plain unvarnished statement, it may not be deemed
wholly uninteresting, when it is is considered what important
alterations the result of the expedition has produced in the immediate
interests and prosperity of the colony. This appears in nothing more
decidedly than the unlimited pasturage already afforded to the very fine
flocks of merino sheep, as well as the extensive field opened for the
exertions of the present, as well as future generations. It has changed
the aspect of the colony, from a confined insulated tract of land, to a
rich and extensive continent.
This expedition, which has proved so completely
successful, resulted from two previous attempts. One of
these was made by water, by His Excellency the Governor,
in person, whom I accompanied. We ascended the River
Hawkesbury, or Nepean, from above Emu Island, to the
mouth of the Warragomby [Note 2], or Great Western River,
where it emerges from the mountains, and joins itself to
that river, from its mouth. We proceeded as far as it was
navigable by a small boat, which is only a few miles
further. It was found to lose itself at different places,
almost entirely underneath and between immense blocks of
stones, being confined on each side by perpendicular
cliffs of the same kind of stone, which sometimes rose as
high as the tops of the mountains, through which it
appears to have forced, or worn its way, with the
assistance, probably, of an earthquake, or some other
great convulsion of nature.
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