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Updated: June 29, 2025
I found they had either seen or heard of Captain Sturt's party for, pointing to the sun, they showed me that six revolutions of that source of heat had elapsed since the visit of others like us. Other gestures, such as a reference to covering, and expressions of countenance, made their indications of the lapse of time plain enough.
We had great difficulty in getting through, from the quantity of dead timber, which has torn our saddle-bags and clothes to pieces. There are a number of gum-trees, and the new tree that was found on Captain Sturt's expedition, 1844, but mulga predominates. At fourteen miles we struck a large gum plain, but after a short time again entered the scrub.
The remaining watercourses to the westward cannot be classed in any way, their course is apparently determined by local inequalities of the surface, and although some are very considerable in appearance, their flow is so brief that it is impossible to consider them as at all forming parts of one system; the longest and most important is Sturt's Creek.
See, however, M. Martin's New South Wales, pp. 151-2, and the instance of Gome Boak, in Collins' History of New South Wales, p. 285; and Sturt's Expeditions in Australia, vol. ii. p. 222. Nay, our fellow-countrymen in the Australian colonies, can, by no means, endure a strict trial, even by their own rule of right.
The people and Government of the colony of Victoria determined to despatch an expedition to explore Central Australia, from Sturt's Eyre's Creek to the shores of the Gulf of Carpentaria at the mouth of the Albert River of Stokes's, a distance in a straight line of not more than six hundred miles; and as everything that Victoria undertakes must always be on the grandest scale, so was this.
Finally, the river led them amongst plains gaping with fissures, grassless and waterless, where the only change in the flat character of the country was the sandhill formation, that exactly agreed with Sturt's description.
Sheitan! and fled precipitately, extinguishing all the lights in their fear; so that but for Sturt's torch the whole party must have been lost in the darkness. Shah Pursund Khan at once called a retreat, vowing that it was of no use to attempt to follow the footsteps, as it was well known that the cave extended to Cabul!
All this country seems to have been under water, and is most likely the bed of Lake Torrens, or Captain Sturt's inland sea. In travelling over the plains, one is reminded of going over a rough, gravelly beach; the stones are all rounded and smooth. Distance to-day, thirty miles. Friday, 25th June, Yarraout Gum Creek.
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.
Questions of this nature must have offered themselves to the minds of the daring spirits, who accompanied Captain Sturt; nor can due justice be rendered to their courage without a careful consideration of the dangers which they deliberately braved. See Sturt's Expeditions in Australia, vol. i. Dedication, p. 4.
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