page_title: Allan Cunningham (botanist)
section_title: Further exploration of eastern Australia
hierarchical_section_title: Allan Cunningham (botanist) / Further exploration of eastern Australia
caption_attribution_description: English: Memorial to Allan Cunningham's exploration of the Darling Downs and Cunningham's Gap, Cunningham Highway, QLD. The Advertiser (Adelaide), 13th June 1927.
context_page_description: Allan Cunningham was an English botanist and explorer, primarily known for his travels in Australia to collect plants.
context_section_description: In September 1822 Cunningham went on an expedition over the Blue Mountains and arrived at Bathurst on 14 October 1822 and returned to Parramatta in January 1823. His account of about 100 plants met with will be found in Geographical Memoirs on New South Wales, edited by Barron Field, 1825, under the title "A Specimen of the Indigenous Botany ... between Port Jackson and Bathurst".
  In 1823 Cunningham set out from the upper Hunter River to explore inside the Great Dividing Range. With five men and five horses, he set out from Bathurst to explore from the Cudgegong River, passing through Rylstone to Coolah and then eastwards to Scone and returning to Coolah through Merriwa. He examined the Cudgegong and Goulburn Rivers. On 2 June passing through Coolah to the north east, he explored Pandora's Pass, which could have opened out a fair and practicable road to Liverpool Plains. He returned to Bathurst through an undeveloped Mudgee on 27 June 1823. 
  In September 1824 Cunningham accompanied John Oxley on his second expedition to Moreton Bay and explored up the Brisbane River.
  Cunningham also undertook an expedition to what is now Canberra in 1824. He travelled with three convicts, three horses and a cart and he travelled via Lake Bathurst, Captains Flat and the valley in which flows the Queanbeyan River. Poor weather prevented him from continuing his journey south.
  Cunningham had long wished to visit New Zealand and on 28 August 1826 he was able to sail on a whaler. He was hospitably received by the missionaries in the Bay of Islands, was able to do much botanical work, and returned to Sydney on 20 January 1827. Accounts of his work in New Zealand will be found in Hooker's Companion to the Botanical Magazine, 1836, and Annals of Natural History, 1838 and 1839.
  Cunningham set out to explore the area to the west of Moreton Bay in 1827, crossing to the west of the Great Dividing Range from the Hunter Region and travelling north. In June 1827, Cunningham climbed to the top of Mount Dumaresq (near what is now Clintonvale close to Maryvale) and after wrote in his diary that this lush area was ideal for settlement. Exploring around Mount Dumaresq, Cunningham found a pass, now known as Cunninghams Gap.
  Cunningham returned to the Moreton Bay penal colony in 1828, setting off from Brisbane with Patrick Logan, Charles Fraser and five men to find Mount Warning and to establish the route to Cunningham's Gap which he did, on 24 July.  The peaks on either side of the gap were also named, Mount Cordeaux and Mount Mitchell. After exploring the McPherson Range area, Cunningham travelled on the south side of the Gap whereas the highway today runs further north, through the gap, from the small township of Aratula. Spicer's Gap which runs parallel to Cunningham's Gap was actually the pass first identified by Cunningham in 1827. After its rediscovery by Henry Alphen in 1847, Spicer's Gap was used as a stagecoach route. In 1829, Cunningham explored the Brisbane River.
caption: Memorial to Allan Cunningham's "discovery" of Cunningham's Gap, Cunningham Highway, QLD
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