that the effort to cross the range was a task "as chimerical as
useless," an opinion strengthened by the fact that, as Allan Cunningham
had related,* the aboriginals known to the settlement were "totally
ignorant of any pass to the interior." (* On "Progress of Interior
Discovery in New South Wales," Journal of the Royal Geographical Society
1832 Volume 2 99.)

It was not, indeed, till 1813 that Gregory Blaxland, with Lieutenant
Lawson and William Charles Wentworth (then a youth), as companions,
succeeded in solving the problem. The story of their steady, persistent,
and desperate struggle being beyond the scope of this biography, it is
sufficient to say that after fifteen days of severe labour, applied with
rare intelligence and bushcraft, they saw beneath them waving
grass-country watered by clear streams, and knew that they had found a
path to the interior of the new continent.

Bass's eagerness to explore soon found other scope. In 1797, report was
brought to Sydney by shipwrecked mariners that, in traversing the coast,
they had seen coal. He at once set off to investigate. At the place now
called Coalcliff, about twenty miles south of Botany Bay, he found a vein
of coal about twenty feet above the surface of the sea. It was six or
seven feet thick, and dipped to the southward until it became level with
the sea, "and there the lowest rock you can see when the surf retires is
all coal." It was a discovery of first-class importance--the first
considerable find of a mineral that has yielded incalculable wealth to
Australia.* (* It is well to remember that the use of coal was discovered
in England in very much the same way. Mr. Salzmann, English Industries of
the Middle Ages, 1913 page 3, observes that "it is most probable that the
first coal used was washed up by the sea, and such as could be quarried
from the face of the cliffs where the seams were exposed by the action of
the waves." He quotes a sixteenth century account relative to Durham: "As
the tide comes in it bringeth a small wash sea coal, which is employed to
the making of salt and the fuel of the poor fisher towns adjoining."
Hence, originally, coal in England was commonly called sea-coal even when
obtained inland.) He made this useful piece of investigation in August;
and in the following month undertook a journey on foot, in company with
Williamson, the acting commissary, from Sydney to the Cowpastures,
crossing and re-crossing the River Nepean, and thence