Penrith, Sydney: Travel guide and things to do

Penrith is located 53 km from Sydney and 30 metres above sea level, on the edge of the Blue Mountains. It is famous as the home of the huge entertainment complex - the Penrith Panthers - as an idyllic setting beside the Nepean River and as the home of the Museum of Fire.

It was near modern-day Penrith, in 1819, that Governor Lachlan Macquarie established a farm and it was the setting for one of Sydney's most infamous penal stations.

It would seem that the first European to site the modern location was Watkin Tench, a Marine Captain, who explored and discovered the Nepean River in June 1789. It was on the basis of this expedition that convicts were sent to the area.

This area was the last place on the Sydney basin before Blaxland, Wentworth and Lawson crossed the Nepean River to climb and cross the Blue Mountains.

In Blood on the Wattle I described the early attempts to cross the Blue Mountains in the following terms: 'For a quarter of a century the whites had been battering their heads against sheer walls. Everybody in the Sydney colony, from the lowliest convict who longed to put as much distance as possible between himself and the overseer's lash to the quixotic adventurers who had drifted into the tiny outpost of European civilisation, looked west.

'On a clear winter's day it was easy to see the mountains touched with that distinctive smoky blue which rises, shimmering, from the dense monotony of the eucalypts. They called them the Blue Mountains although they were really a monocline and a series of box canyons. They thought the old exploration techniques would work. Follow a river to its source, climb the valley, cross over the mountains. Each time they followed a river upstream they came not to an ever-steepening valley or gorge but to a waterfall which fell hundreds of metres over a sheer, unclimbable cliff. They'd clamber up the scree slopes, gaze hopelessly at the wall above them, and mooch on back to Parramatta and Sydney Town chastened by the folly of their expedition and cursing nature's indifference to their ambitions.

'It wasn't until 1813 that Blaxland, Wentworth and Lawson, with help from the local Aborigines who'd been wandering backwards and forwards across the mountains for thousands of years, finally managed to traverse a ridge and gaze across the rich, undulating slopes which tumbled away to the west. They liked what they saw - good rivers, rich soils, quality grazing land.'

On 11 May 1813 Gregory Blaxland recorded that the expedition trying to cross the Blue Mountains had 'crossed the Nepean River at the ford on to Emu Island at four o'clock in the afternoon and proceeded by their calculations two miles through forest land and good grass'. Over the years floods have washed away Emu Island although you can get a fair idea of where the crossing was. It was just to the the northern side of the bridge across the Nepean.

A few months later, on 17 July 1814 William Cox with a gang of thirty convicts started to build the road across the Blue Mountains. The crossing over the river was completed on 25 July. As the road officially started at Emu Plains it is hardly surprising that a town developed very quickly. It is sad that the remnants of the old road can now no longer be seen.