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Leaving Melbourne by overnight train, the 300 BAAS delegates reached Sydney on Thursday morning (20 August). The next day at Sydney University, Ashby read his paper 'The Roman Advance into Southern Italy' for the Anthropology Section, which described his reseach on the region's ancient military roads. That weekend, he left the city and headed west to Jenolan Caves in the Blue Mountains.

At Mt. Victoria on Saturday afternoon, he took this photograph of Berghofer's Pass, with its narrow road carved around a bluff of white chert rock. Shortly after, he was motoring around its hairpin bend in an open top eight-seater charabanc. The Pass opened in 1912. It had been built with a gentle incline because the engines in earlier motor cars lacked the power to scale the steeper incline of Victoria Pass (ca. 1838), an early colonial road that had been the usual route to the Caves.

When Ashby took this photograph, the road was at the centre of a political storm. Johannes Berghofer, a naturalised Australian of German origin who was a respected elder and pillar of the community, had championed this road building project. On 6 August 1914, local sentiment changed on a dime. Now a designated enemy alien, he was the subject of suspicion and required to report to the local police station with all other Germans.

Photograph by Thomas Ashby, BSR, Thomas Ashby Collection 
Berghofer's Pass, New South Wales, Australia, 1914, TA-XLVI.084
Article: 'The Blue Mountains: An Engineering Exploit, The Berghofer Pass, Mount Victoria', Evening News (30 December 1911). 3.