As the southern goldfields spread and became thickly-populated, the food supply was an important question, and men’s eyes naturally turned to the well-stocked northern stations, from which many cattle were being sent south by steamer.  Though the distance overland was not prohibitive, the belt of desert country that intervened, upon which Warburton to his sorrow was the first to venture, forbade the passage of stock.  This belt of Sahara extended, roughly speaking, from the eastern border of the colony to the head waters of the western coastal rivers.  North and south it lay between the parallels of 19 degrees and 31 degrees south.  As yet no daring attempt had been made to traverse its barren confines from south to north.  But, to the born explorer, difficulty and danger give an added zest to geographical research; and in the year 1896 two separate expeditions sought to cross this dreadful zone.  Both left civilization within a few days of each other.  The first to start was known as the Calvert Expedition, from its originator.  It was under L.A.  Wells, the South Australian surveyor who had been the energetic second of the former Elder Expedition.  The other was equipped and led by the Honourable David Carnegie.

Wells formed a depot at a spot well provided with camel feed and water, at some distance to the south-west of Forrest’s Lake Augusta, which he found, at that time, dry.  Here he left the main part of his caravan to await his return whilst he made a flying trip to the north.  He was away from the 10th of August to the 8th of September, during which he found at his furthest point, a distance of two hundred miles, a good native well, which he named Midway Well.  On the 14th of September the whole party made a start, and reached Midway Well on the 29th, all well.  At Separation Well, another good well a little farther to the north, the party separated, C.F.  Wells, a cousin of the leader, and G.L.  Jones, intending to travel for about eighty miles in a north-west direction to examine the country, and then to return on a north-east course and rejoin the caravan at Joanna Springs, which had relieved Warburton in his extremity.  About thirty miles south of Joanna Springs, where the leader expected the two men to cut his tracks, Wells found his camels suffering terribly from the extreme heat and their labours among the constantly-recurring sand-ridges, whilst the scanty native wells they found were insufficient to give their camels water.  When at last they reached the latitude of Joanna Springs they had been obliged to abandon three camels and all their equipment except the actual necessaries.

It was also evident that the longitude of the springs given by Warburton was wrong, for all the country around was a sandy desert without the slightest indication of well or spring.  To linger in such a spot was to court destruction, and they had to push on to the Fitzroy as fast as their worn-out camels could take them.  The reader will remember that Warburton had failed to find A.C.  Gregory’s most southerly point on Sturt’s Creek when looking for it, and it was afterwards proved that Joanna Springs had been charted by him about ten miles to the westward of its true position.  On the 7th of November, in the darkness of morning they at last reached the Fitzroy, with the camels just at their last gasp.