User:AYArktos~enwiki/temp/Great South Road

from Hume Highway

History
More than 60 million years ago, Australia and Antarctica were attached as part of Gondwana and a great river appears to have flown from Artarctica to the Sydney basin depositing sand, which eventually consolidated as the Sydney sandstone. The modern Wollondilly River appears to be a small remnant of this river. During later eons, the Wollondilly, Nepean and Shoalhaven Rivers eroded deep gorges into the sandstone, some of it contributing tho the vast amounts of eroded sand which was redeposited to create the fine beaches of Eastern Australia. The isthmus between these gorges created the route now used by the Hume Highway. The coast of New South Wales from the Queensland border almost to the Victorian border is separated from the inland by an escarpment, generally to the east of the Great Dividing Range, which is difficult to cross. The Hume Highway corridor is one of few good natural crossings of the escarpment. Routes out of the Hunter Valley, northwest of Newcastle, north of Sydney, and the little developed route from Nowra to Nerriga and Braidwood, south of Sydney, are comparable, but were difficult to reach from Sydney along the coast, before the development of modern roads.

Early exploration
In the early years of European settlement at Sydney (established 1788), exploration southwest of Sydney was slow. The route used by the Hume Highway is situated between two parallel river gorge systems (the Wollondilly and Shoalhaven Rivers) and requires the crossing of some reasonable rough country from Sydney to reach it. The climb from the western side of the Nepean River at Camden or Menangle to Mittagong is also fairly sustained, a fact that is hard to appreciate at high speed on the modern freeway. In addition, at the time, the area was heavily wooded, especially the "Bargo brush", which was regarded as almost impenetrable. In 1798 explorers (Wilson, Price, Hacking, and Collins) reached the Moss Vale and Marulan districts, but this was not followed up. Any settlement would have had to await the construction of an adequate access track, which would have been beyond the colony's resources at the time and would have served little purpose as a source of supplies for Sydney, without an access track.

In 1804, Charles Throsby penetrated through the Bargo brush to the country near Moss Vale and Sutton Forest. In 1818, he discovered Lake Bathurst and the "the Goulburn plains" for the first time. Many of the early explorers would most likely have used aboriginal guides, but they do not appear to have given them public credit.

Early road construction
Governor Lachlan Macquarie ordered the construction of a road, which became known as the Great South Road (the basis of the northern end of the Hume Highway) in 1819 from Picton to the Goulburn Plains and he travelled Goulburn in 1820, but it is unlikely that even a primitive road was finished at that time.

The Great South Road was rebuilt and completely re-routed by Thomas Mitchell in the 1830s between Yanderra and Goulburn. This route, except for the bypasses at Mittagong, Berima and Marulan, built in the 1980s, is still almost precisely the route of the modern highway. He intended to straighten the route north of Yandera, but was not granted funding, although his proposed route through Pheasants Nest has similarities to the freeway route built in the late 1970s. Mitchell's work is best preserved at Towrang.

The Hume Highway travels through the states of New South Wales and Victoria and got its name in the 1920s during a nationwide highway naming scheme. Before this, the road was known as the "Great South Road" in New South Wales and "Sydney Road" in Victoria. In 1914 the highway was declared a main road. The road was named in 1929 after Hamilton Hume, a famous explorer in the early 19th century who in conjunction with William Hovell first traversed an overland route between Sydney and Port Phillip, in what later became Victoria.