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 moving his camp. He described the whole region as a desert, and he seems to have been haunted by the notion that he had got into and was surrounded by a wilderness the like of which no human being had ever seen or heard of before. His whole narrative is a tale of suffering and woe, and he says on his map, being at the furthest point he attained in the interior, about forty-five miles from where he had encamped on the watercourse he called Eyre's Creek, now a watering place for stock on a Queensland cattle run:

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