94 QUEENSLAND AGRICULTURAL JOURNAL. {1 Ava., 1902. 
greatest of Australian maritime explorers, a worthy successor of Cook. The 
adventures of Flinders would suffice to fill a volume with romantic incidents. He 
seemed born to adventures and misadventures, and survived but a few years his 
detention at Mauritius as a prisoner of war by the French governor of that island 
under circumstances scarcely justifiable. But he died in his bed in his own mother 
country, beingin that respect more fortunate than Cook, killed by savages, and still 
more so than his own sometime shipmate, Surgeon Bass (H.M.S. ** Reliance”’), with 
whom and a boy he explored the ocean coast of New South Wales, southerly, in a 
boat 8 feet long! Poor Bass voyaging homeward, and calling in at a South American 
port, was arrested as a foreigner and heretic, and never heard of more. It is believed 
that he thereafter lived and died a slave at the diamond-mines. 
The lesser peak on the continuation of the range from Flinders’ Peak is Mount 
Goolman. A little further to the westward, following the dipping slope of the same 
line of hills, a low knob will be noticed, beyond and exactly over which, at a great 
distance, another knob of almost identical shape will be seen topping a cone with sides 
of genile slope. The distant knob is Wilson’s Peak, the lofty mountain which rises 
at the point of junction of Macpherson’s Range with the main Dividing Range. 
Carrying the observation now along the latter, Cunningham's Gap cannot be 
mistaken, looking in the direction pointed in the dial. When Allen Cunningham, in 
June, 1827, pushing north from New England, discovered the Darling Downs, he 
sought further to find some route by which the coast could be reached; and, making 
for a remarkably excavated part of the Main Range, he discovered this opening, 
whence the Moreton Bay district is overlooked. The high mounts which stand sentry 
on each side of the pass he named Cordeaux and Mitchell. The latter—named after 
Sir Thomas Mitchell, Surveyor-General of New South Wales—looks a sort of rounded 
hummock, as seen from Mount Coot-tha. "When one stands nearer its shadow, however, 
it bears a different aspect. ‘Towards its summit, it presents almost perpendicular walls 
to would-be climbers. In later years, when the pass was considerably used by 
travellers from the Downs to Ipswich and Brisbane, there was a public-house there. 
It was kept by one Jubb, a comical character, being a brawny, stout nan, with a soft, 
low voice and a trick of using much finer language and longer words than he was quite 
at home with. The late N. Bartley, in his gossipy book, ‘‘ Opals and Agates,” has a 
good deal to say about the gap and about Jubb. The merry blades of the fifties 
nicknamed Mount Mitchell ‘‘ Jubb’s bald peak.’”’ It was Jubb who, climbing up that 
mountain alone, as far back as the forties, met a lot of “ Myall” blacks coming down, 
spear and boomerang in hand, and, to divert their attentions from his own carcass, 
made them understand that “ plenty flour and sugar lie down along-a wheelbarrow,” 
indicating the drays which were below, which they scampered down to sack. But the 
drays were well guarded in those days, and Jubb rejoined his companions in safety. 
Not content with having discovered the Darling Downs and a gap opening there- 
from to the lower coast country, Allan Cunningham voyaged up to Brisbane town the 
very next year, and undertook to reach the Gap from below. Captain Logan, the 
commandant, had just before discovered the mouth of the Logan, so he, Cunningham 
and Frazer, another botanist, started off to try and reach the Gap by travelling u 
that river. This brought them to the ravines at the foot of Mounts Barney an 
Lindesay, as already mentioned, and they had to turn back. But they made their way 
out by Limestone, now Ipswich. Cunningham parted from them near Flinders’ Peak, 
struck off afresh with three men and two pack-bullocks in search of his gap, and this 
time found it, climbed up it, pushed through, reached places on the Darling Downs 
where he had been the year before and thence returned to Brisbane. ; 
Many years had elapsed and Cunningham was in his grave in Devonshire-street 
Cemetery, Sydney, before his Gap was revisited by a white man. Captain Logan, 
too, was dead, and Lieutenant Gorman was commandant in his stead. It was in 184] 
that Patrick Leslie, the first squatter to take up country on the Darling Downs, 
following the directions in Cunningham’s journal, made his way to the pass, attended 
by his faithful henchman, Peter Murphy, alias Duff, “a lifer,’ and gazed wistfully on 
the prospect below and before him, straining his eyesight to discover some indication 
of Brisbane town. Murphy, eagerly scanning the distant prospect, asked him whether 
there was a church at the settlement. Leslie had no knowledge of such a building 
existing, but told him there was a windmill, upon which Murphy told him he saw it. 
This was the present Observatory tower, and, as lime was abundant, no doubt it 
shone brilliantly white. Leslie and Murphy clambered down the pass and made for 
Limestone, but after some progress turned back, as Leslic had no permit, without 
which at that time no one was allowed to approach within 50 miles of the penal 
settlement. He has left no record of his impressions when he stood on the brink of 
