Australia Twice Traversed | Page 6

had many narrow escapes, and
found it trended for several hundreds of miles in a west-north-west
direction, confirming him in his idea of an inland sea; but at a certain
point, which he called the great north-west bend, it suddenly turned
south and forced its way to the sea at Encounter Bay, where Flinders
met Baudin in 1803. Neither of these explorers appear to have
discovered the river's mouth. On this occasion Sturt discovered the
province or colony of South Australia, which in 1837 was proclaimed
by the British Government, and in that colony Sturt afterwards made
his home.
Sturt's third and final expedition was from the colony of South
Australia into Central Australia, in 1843-1845. This was the first truly
Central Australian expedition that had yet been despatched, although in
1841 Edward Eyre had attempted the same arduous enterprise. Of this I
shall write anon. On his third expedition Sturt discovered the Barrier,
the Grey, and the Stokes ranges, and among numerous smaller
watercourses he found and named Strezletki's, Cooper's, and Eyre's
Creeks. The latter remained the furthest known inland water of
Australia for many years after Sturt's return. Sturt was accompanied, as
surveyor and draftsman, by John McDouall Stuart, whom I shall
mention in his turn. So far as my opinion, formed in my wanderings
over the greater portions of the country explored by Sturt, goes, his
estimate of the regions he visited has scarcely been borne out according
to the views of the present day.
Like Oxley, he was fully impressed with the notion that an inland sea
did exist, and although he never met such a feature in his travels, he
seems to have thought it must be only a little more remote than the
parts he had reached. He was fully prepared to come upon an inland sea,
for he carried a boat on a bullock waggon for hundreds of miles, and

when he finally abandoned it he writes: "Here we left the boat which I
had vainly hoped would have ploughed the waters of an inland sea."
Several years afterwards I discovered pieces of this boat, built of New
Zealand pine, in the debris of a flood about twenty miles down the
watercourse where it had been left. A great portion, if not all the
country, explored by that expedition is now highly-prized pastoral land,
and a gold field was discovered almost in sight of a depot formed by
Sturt, at a spot where he was imprisoned at a water hole for six months
without moving his camp. He described the whole region as a desert,
and he seems to have been haunted by the notion that he had got into
and was surrounded by a wilderness the like of which no human being
had ever seen or heard of before. His whole narrative is a tale of
suffering and woe, and he says on his map, being at the furthest point
he attained in the interior, about forty-five miles from where he had
encamped on the watercourse he called Eyre's Creek, now a watering
place for stock on a Queensland cattle run: "Halted at sunset in a
country such as I verily believe has no parallel upon the earth's surface,
and one which was terrible in its aspect." Sturt's views are only to be
accounted for by the fact that what we now call excellent sheep and
cattle country appeared to him like a desert, because his comparisons
were made with the best alluvial lands he had left near the coast.
Explorers as a rule, great ones more particularly, are not without rivals
in so honourable a field as that of discovery, although not every one
who undertakes the task is fitted either by nature or art to adorn the
chosen part. Sturt was rivalled by no less celebrated an individual than
Major, afterwards Sir Thomas, Mitchell, a soldier of the Peninsula War,
and some professional jealousy appears to have existed between them.
Major Mitchell was then the Surveyor-General of the Colony, and he
entirely traversed and made known the region he appropriately named
Australia Felix, now the colony of Victoria. Mitchell, like Sturt,
conducted three expeditions: the first in 1831-1832, when he traced the
River Darling previously discovered by Sturt, for several hundred miles,
until he found it trend directly to the locality at which Sturt, in his
journey down the Murray, had seen and laid down its mouth or junction
with the larger river. Far up the Darling, in latitude 30 degrees 5',
Mitchell built a stockade and formed a depot, which he called Fort
Bourke; near this spot the present town of Bourke is situated and now

connected by rail with Sydney, the distance being about 560 miles.
Mitchell's second journey, when he visited Australia Felix, was made in
1835, and his