has,
unhappily for Australia, done much to create the popular fallacy that the
soil and climate of the interior are such as preclude comfortable
settlement by whites. Sturt's graphic account is at times somewhat
misleading, and the lapse of years has proved his denunciatory judgment
of the fitness of the interior for human habitation to have been hasty.
But if we examine the circumstances in which he received the impressions
he has recorded, we must grant that he had considerable justification for
his statements.

He was a broken and disappointed man, worn out by disease and frustrated
hopes, and nearly blind. During six months of his long absence, he had
been shut up in his weary depot prison, debarred from attempting the
completion of his work, and compelled to watch his friend and companion
die a lingering death from scurvy. And when the kindly rains released
him, he was doomed to be repulsed by the ever-present desert wastes. No
wonder that he despaired of the country, and viewed all its prospects
through the heated, treacherous haze of the desert plains. Yet now, close
to the ranges where Sturt spent the burning summer months of his
detention, there has sprung up one of the inland townships of New South
Wales, where men toil just as laboriously as in a more temperate zone.

[Map. Sturt's Route 1844, 1845 and 1846.]

But, though baffled and unable to win the goal he strove for, never did
man better deserve success. The instructions that he received from the
Home Office were, to reach the centre of the continent, to discover
whether mountains or sea existed there, and, if the former, to note the
flow and direction of the northern waters, but on no account to follow
them down to the north coast. Sturt was instructed to proceed by Mount
Arden, a route already tried, condemned, and abandoned by Eyre; and he
elected to proceed by way of the Darling. His plan was to follow that
river up as far as the Williora, a small western tributary of the
Darling, opposite the place whence Mitchell turned back in 1835, after
his conflict with the natives, an episode which Sturt found that they
bitterly remembered. Poole, Sturt's second in command, resembling
Mitchell in figure and appearance, the Darling blacks addressed him as
Major, and evinced marked hostility towards him. From Williora, or
Laidley's Ponds, Sturt intended to strike north-west, hoping thus to
avoid the gloomy environs of Lake Torrens, and the treacherous surface