Australasia / Eight Lectures Prepared for the Visual Instruction Committee of the Colonial Office

by A. J. Sargent

We must now look beyond the actual harbour, and try to place ourselves in the position of the early settlers. We have great distances to cover, since New South Wales is just half as large again as France; we must therefore keep fairly closely to the railway; but we shall not lose much by this as the railway will carry us through all the important districts of the State.

We may travel north, south, or west, and the map can give us some idea of the character of the country 12 through which we shall pass. Sydney lies near the middle of a long strip of coastland, shut in on its western side by the steep edge of a great plateau. In the neighbourhood of Sydney this edge goes by the name of the Blue Mountains. Here the barrier is about forty miles inland; further north, in the valleys of the Hunter and Hawkesbury rivers, the lowland widens out to nearly a hundred miles; while in some parts of the south the highlands come right down to the sea. This narrow strip was the original New South Wales.

New South Wales and Victoria: Orographical.
By permission of the Diagram Co.

We can travel now by railway along the coast strip 13 to Newcastle, then up the valley of the Hunter, and finally climb the Liverpool Range on to the plateau beyond. But the journey was far from easy for the early settlers. In fact, until 1820, when a stock route was discovered from Sydney to Newcastle, the only intercourse with the north was by sea, and Newcastle grew up almost as a separate colony in consequence. The valleys of the Hunter and other rivers gave a natural direction to early settlement, since in their lower courses they flow through wide alluvial flats which are very fertile and easy to cultivate. But they are subject sometimes to devastating floods, as the settlers found to their cost, while the heavy summer rainfall is not well suited to certain of our crops, such as wheat. So in the early days the colony was often in difficulty as to its main food supply.

The name Newcastle at once suggests coal; and coal is everywhere in this district. The surface of the country round Sydney is largely a barren sandstone; but underlying the whole of the area, from Newcastle on the north to Bulli on the south, and extending westward to the other side of the plateau edge, is a vast coalfield. Its chief development at present is around Newcastle. Here is a view of Hetton colliery, 14 Newcastle; both the name and the picture remind us strongly of the North of England. We see the coal being wound up from the shaft as in our own mines, and in the distance vessels lying at the wharves in the fine harbour. Here again is a general view of the 15 harbour in which we can clearly distinguish the loading of the coal and merchandise.

A journey southward from Sydney to the other end of the coalfield will bring us to a less familiar type of mine. At Clifton the early explorers found coal strewn on the beach; the actual seam is in the face of the cliff, and shows as a broad black band, while 16 the coal is mined by means of adits, and then run on to the little pier to be shipped. The coal is found under Sydney itself, and mining is now in progress on the south side of the harbour; but the shafts are much deeper here than at Newcastle, since the coal measures lie in the shape of a saucer, and Sydney is near the middle. We may notice here that the southern railway line ends at Nowra on the Shoalhaven river, and beyond are only a few small coast towns; so we need not at present explore further in this direction.

We will now leave the coast district for a time and climb the plateau edge to survey the country beyond. First let us consider the nature of the obstacle by which the early settlers were faced. The Blue Mountains are merely a part of the eastern rim of a great tilted tableland of sandstone, with a steep face towards the sea and a long and more gentle slope towards the west. Down this face a series of comparatively short streams come tumbling to the sea; while on the other side of the ridge, almost within sight of the sea, are the sources of the slow westward-flowing rivers, whose courses are measured by thousands of miles.

In this sandstone block the torrents have carved out deep gorges, which often widen out up-stream into broad valleys; but these valleys are deceptive and do not provide a road to the interior, since they 17 end in steep cliffs over which the streams plunge in waterfalls. Here is a view of the country at Govett’s 18 Leap; we may notice the flat tops of the ridges, all about the same level, which suggest the old surface of a plateau. It was a long time before the early settlers found a path over this edge, and the available roads are still very few all along its length, as we may see by tracing them on the map; our train must twist and tunnel up one of the ridges between two of the valleys by a most difficult route, with steep inclines, instead of following the bank of the stream below. We realise that climbing a plateau is a far more serious matter for the engineer than piercing through a narrow ridge of mountains.

At Victoria, on our way up, we leave the train for a coach drive, to Jenolan. Here the scenery changes; the rock is no longer sandstone, but limestone, and the streams have burrowed out many curious gorges and underground channels as in our own Derbyshire. Here we have one of these in the form of a huge rock 19 archway through which we catch a glimpse of the country beyond; while far down below us flows the stream which bored out the arch. A little further on we find the stream running at the bottom of a lofty 20 cavern, and out into a deep and narrow gorge. Here again is a view of the interior of one of these caverns, with its huge pillars hanging from the roof and rising up from the floor. These limestone tunnels and 21 gorges, and the sandstone valleys with their steep surrounding cliffs and narrow outlets, are a fine subject for the artist and tourist in search of beauty, but do not suggest opportunities for settlement or farming; at the same time they are evidently a serious obstacle to movement. The bare surface of the plateau is little better; in fact, the highlands in this district are still among the most thinly populated areas in New South Wales, in spite of their nearness to the capital and the oldest settlements. So we pass through quickly, and coming out by a 22 long tunnel drop down to Lithgow, where we enter an entirely different kind of country. Lithgow is a manufacturing town, with coal mines, ironworks, smoke and dirt. It really belongs to the coast region, and is here, on the inside of the ridge, only because a small piece of the Newcastle coalfield, which underlies all the country which we have been crossing, crops out in this district from under the sandstone. On our journey inland we shall not meet with any other town of the same type, as we are now entering the great wheat-belt of Eastern Australia.