There was room for snowy mountains, an inland sea, ancient river, and palmy plain, for races of new kinds of men inhabiting a new and odorous land, for fields of gold and golcondas of gems, for a new flora and a new fauna, and, above all the rest combined, there was room for me!  Many well-meaning friends tried to dissuade me altogether, and endeavoured to instil into my mind that what I so ardently wished to attempt was simply deliberate suicide, and to persuade me of the truth of the poetic line, that the sad eye of experience sees beneath youth’s radiant glow, so that, like Falstaff, I was only partly consoled by the remark that they hate us youth.  But in spite of their experience, and probably on account of youth’s radiant glow, I was not to be deterred, however, and at last I met with Baron von Mueller, who, himself an explorer with the two Gregorys, has always had the cause of Australian exploration at heart, and he assisting, I was at length enabled to take the field.  Baron Mueller and I had consulted, and it was deemed advisable that I should make a peculiar feature near the Finke river, called Chambers’ Pillar, my point of departure for the west.  This Pillar is situated in latitude 24 degrees 55’ and longitude 133 degrees 50’, being 1200 miles from Melbourne in a straight line, over which distance Mr. Carmichael, a black boy, and I travelled.  In the course of our travels from Melbourne to the starting point, we reached Port Augusta, a seaport though an inland town, at the head of Spencer’s Gulf in South Australia, first visited by the Investigator in 1803, and where, a few miles to the eastwards, a fine bold range of mountains runs along for scores of miles and bears the gallant navigator’s name.  A railway line of 250 miles now connects Port Augusta with Adelaide.  To this town was the first section of the Transcontinental telegraph line carried; and it was in those days the last place where I could get stores for my expedition.  Various telegraph stations are erected along the line, the average distance between each being from 150 to 200 miles.  There were eleven stations between Port Augusta and Port Darwin.  A railway is now completed as far as the Peake Telegraph Station, about 450 miles north-westwards from Port Augusta along the telegraph line towards Port Darwin, to which it will no doubt be carried before many years elapse.

From Port Augusta the Flinders range runs almost northerly for nearly 200 miles, throwing out numerous creeks (I must here remark that throughout this work the word creek will often occur.  This is not to be considered in its English acceptation of an inlet from the sea, but, no matter how far inland, it means, in Australia a watercourse.), through rocky pine-clad glens and gorges, these all emptying, in times of flood, into the salt lake Torrens, that peculiar depression which baffled Eyre in 1840-1.  Captain Frome, the Surveyor-General of the Colony, dispelled the old horse-shoe-shaped illusion of this feature, and