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 educated at Greenwich under [q. v.] Returning to Sydney, Wentworth in his twentieth year joined Gregory Blaxland and Lieutenant Lawson in their famous exploration journey across the Blue Mountains. The party started on 11 May 1813 from Blaxland's farm, South Creek, Penrith. After crossing the Nepean they lit on a spur from the dividing range, crossed the slopes of Mount York into a fertile valley, and thus opened up the vast pasture lands of the west. After the greatest hardships they reached home (6 June), and Macquarie, on behalf of the crown, presented each of the three with a grant of a thousand acres in this newly discovered country. But before this (according to ) Macquarie ‘had noticed the capacity of young Wentworth.’ In 1811, when but a lad of eighteen, the governor actually made him deputy-provost marshal, ‘and as the provost marshal was in England, the duties of the office devolved entirely upon the deputy.’

In 1816 Wentworth returned to England, matriculated from Peterhouse, Cambridge, and spent several years at the university and in London, where he entered himself at the Middle Temple. The year after his arrival, on 22 April 1817, in England his restless mind impelled him to indite an appeal to Earl Bathurst (colonial secretary), which is preserved in the Record Office, begging to be sent back to Australia to explore ‘this fifth continent from its eastern extremity to its western.’ He tried to stimulate the colonial minister by a reminder that ‘a French squadron either has sailed or is on the point of sailing for the purpose of surveying the western coast of New Holland,’ darkly hinting that its true aim is to establish a rival settlement to Port Jackson. In due course the earl, through a subordinate, informed Wentworth that his services were not required.

Not being permitted to explore these vast, untrodden wastes, Wentworth set himself the task of writing a full account of the existing Australian dependencies. In 1819 he published at London in two volumes, ‘A Statistical Account of the British Settlements in Australasia, including the Colonies of New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land.’ It quickly ran into a third edition (1824) ‘respectfully inscribed’ to Sir [q. v.], to which were appended diatribes against [q. v.] and Commissioner Bigge, simply because they were opposed to Macquarie's ‘emancipist’ policy. The pages are full of well-arranged facts and striking passages of narrative, while not seldom Wentworth's true imperial patriotism moved him to genuine eloquence.

At the annual commencement at Cambridge in 1823 Wentworth, doubtless attracted by the subject, competed for the chancellor's medal for the prize poem on ‘Australasia.’ The award went to [q. v.], Wentworth being placed second out of twenty-five competitors; but Wentworth's is much the finer effort, and many of its virile lines are to this day the stock phrases of colonial orators and journalists. Nearly thirty years after it was written, Wentworth, repelling the charge of having renounced his early popular principles, declaimed in the legislative council (2 Sept. 1853), ‘amidst a storm of applause which spread from floor to gallery,’ the concluding lines of his early poem.

Called to the English bar in 1822, Wentworth returned to Sydney in company with Dr. Wardell, an English barrister. The condition of the colony was unsettled; bitter feuds and disputes were of daily occurrence and litigation prospered; so that after a few years the two young men, who were at first the only barristers, divided between them a most lucrative practice, and laid the foundations of a fortune. They took out with them from England a complete newspaper plant and machinery, and on 4 Oct. 1824 established the ‘Australian,’ of which they were the co-proprietors and joint editors. From the outset they determined to make their journal the scourge of officialism. The colony was then divided into two hostile camps, the aristocrats or ‘Exclusivists,’ composed of civil and military officials and a number of gentlemen squatters and settlers, who were called in derision ‘Pure Merinos;’ and the ‘Emancipists,’ a numerous and increasing class who, having served their term of imprisonment, or enforced servitude, had become free and in some cases wealthy. Governor Macquarie's theory was that the colony was intended primarily for the ‘emancipists,’ that New South Wales was in fact a penitentiary, and that the free emigrants were interlopers. Subsequent governors, notably Sir [q. v.], who took office on 20 April 1825, treated the ‘emancipists’ as a kind of serf class who should never aspire to social recognition or political power. As these early governors were autocratic, such violent changes of policy only made the social confusion more deplorable. Wentworth constituted himself leader of the ‘emancipists,’ and exerted all his energies for the overthrow of Governor Darling (1825–1831). In the columns of the ‘Australian’ and on the public platform Wentworth claimed for this strange, mixed, chaotic community freedom of the press, trial by jury,