Cunningham’s Gap, the route over the Great Dividing Range between Moreton Bay and the Darling Downs, was named after the explorer Allan Cunningham, who discovered it over the course of two attempts in 1827 and 1828. To this day, Cunningham’s Gap is still a verdant rainforest, a place of dark, intense undergrowth.

This painting is an excellent adaptation of the sublime, the eighteenth-century English artistic mode, to nineteenth-century Australia. The sublime was employed by artists to account for the terrors of exploring unknown lands, in particular, to register man’s awareness of the power of nature and his acknowledgment of his insignificance before it.