Page:History of New South Wales from the records, Volume 1.djvu/91

 SKETCH, Ixxxi struggled during lus first expedition. Speaking of the place at wMcIl lie camped for six months^ and which he described as hare been permanently supplied," Pavenc says : — ^'^In the ranges where Stnrt spent his summer months of detention, there is now one of the wonderful mining townships of Australia, where men toil as laboriously as in a temperate zone j and the fires of the battery and the smelting furnace bum steadily, day and night, in sight of the spot where Poole [his second in command] lies buried/'* Fifteen years after Sturt met with the disappoint- ment which he felt so bitterly that he said, " I could calmly hare laid my head on that desert never to raise it again,'' the drafts- man of his expedition, McDowall Stuart, camped in the centre of the continent, where he found grass and water in abundance ; and his track on a later expedition, in which he succeeded in making his way to the shores of the Indian Ocean, was after- wards followed in the construction of the great overland line of telegraph connecting Australia with the rest of the civilised world. The prejudice in favour of the vast desert theory seems to have been so confirmed in the minds of Englishmen, that it continued to survive long after the results of later explorations showed its unsoundness. Western Australia, in particular, was regarded as almost unfit for settlement at any distance outside Perth, although Grey in 1837 and Prank Gregory in 1861 had done so much to show that good country is to be found there as well as elsewhere. A singular illustration of the prevalent ideas may be seen in a letter written by Sir William Denison from Sydney in 1857, in which he summarised the results of an expedition sent out under A. C. Gregory, in 1865, for the purpose of discovering traces of Leichhardt, and also exploring the country in the far north. The line of exploration began at the mouth of the Victoria River on the north-west coast, followed it up to its sources^ crossed the watershed, thence back to the dep6t — ^from which a fresh start was made eastward to the Roper; thence / Digitized by Google
 * ' the only spot in that wide-spread desert where our wants could
 * Hifltorf of Australiaa Explorotdon, p. 141.