In 1827 Sturt made one of the greatest discoveries of this century—­or at least one of the most useful for his countrymen—­that of the River Darling, the great western artery of the river system of New South Wales, and what is now South-western Queensland.  In another expedition, in 1832, Sturt traced the Murrumbidgee River, discovered by Oxley, in boats into what he called the Murray.  This river is the same found by Hovell and Hume, Sturt’s name for it having been adopted.  He entered the new stream, which was lined on either bank by troops of hostile natives, from whom he 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