The Mermaid was now overhauled and condemned, and in her place H.M.  Storeship Dromedary, re-christened the Bathurst, was placed under the command of Lieutenant King.  This was Cunningham’s fifth voyage as collector with the same commander —­ a very clear proof of their compatibility of tastes and temperament.  As before, the Bathurst ran round the east coast and resumed her work on the north-west of Australia.  While thus engaged she was found to be in a dangerous condition, and went to Port Louis to refit.  They sailed from Mauritius on the 15th of November, and reached King George’s Sound on the 24th of December.  Here Cunningham found that the garden he had been at great pains to form during his visit in 1818 had disappeared altogether.  The Bathurst stayed some weeks on the south-west coast, and then shaped a course to Port Jackson, where they arrived on the 25th of April, 1822.  Of the botany of these coastal surveys Cunningham published a sketch entitled A Few General Remarks on the Vegetation of Certain Coasts of Terra Australis, and more especially of its North-Western Shore.

5.2.  Pandora’s pass.

Let us now turn to his record as an inland explorer of Australia.

On the 31st of March, 1823, Allan Cunningham left Bathurst with two objects in view.  One was his favourite pursuit of botany; and the other the discovery of an available route to Oxley’s Liverpool Plains, through the range that bounded it on the south; a route which Lawson and Scott had vainly sought for the preceding year.  On reaching the vicinity of the range, he searched in vain to the eastward for any opening that would enable him to pierce the barrier.  He then retraced his steps, and, exploring more to the eastward, he came upon a pass through a low part of the mountain belt which he considered practicable and easy.  The valley leading to the pass he named Hawkesbury Vale, and the pass itself Pandora’s Pass, inasmuch as, in spite of the hardships the party had been put to, they had still hoped to find it.  Here Cunningham left a parchment document, stating that the information thereon contained was for the first farmer “who may venture to advance as far to the northward as this vale.”  The finding of the bottle which contained this scroll has never been recorded.  Bathurst was reached on their return journey, on June 27th.

In March, 1824, he botanised about the heads of the Murrumbidgee and the Monaro and Shoalhaven Gullies, and in September of the same year, went north by sea with Oxley to Moreton Bay, to investigate that locality and pronounce on its suitability as a settlement site.  In March, 1825, he left Parramatta, threaded the Pandora Pass once more, and ascended to Liverpool Plains, returning to Parramatta on the 17th of June.  In 1826 and the beginning of the following year, he visited New Zealand.

5.3.  The Darling downs.