Map of the Country between Bathurst and Liverpool Plains. Shewing M.Allan Cunningham’s Route during the Months of April, May. & June. 1823. on a Botanical Tour.

Allan Cunningham (1791-1839), botanist and explorer arrived in Sydney at the end of 1816 and soon after joined a number of expeditions. Between September 1822 and January 1823 Cunningham had explored the botany in the area between Bathurst and the Cudgegong River and to the area east of the Cudgegong. He then outlined a plan of a journey to seek a route from Bathurst to the upper Coal (Hunter) River and thence to the Liverpool Plains discovered by Oxley in 1818. Late in March 1823 he set out for Bathurst and then travelling to Lawson’s Goulburn River, he turned east into the headwaters of the Hunter where he made a wide circuit without seeing any possible opening in the Liverpool Range to the north. He returned to the Goulburn River, then travelled north into the foothills of the range from a peak he saw a little farther west ‘a very considerable depression in the low back of the main ridge’ and through it the open plains to the north of the range. He had discovered the passage he sought, ‘the great route of communication between Bathurst and Hunter River and the Liverpool Plains’. He returned to Bathurst late in June.