In August 1844, with sixteen men, eleven horses, thirty bullocks and two hundred sheep (to be eaten along the way), Captain Charles Sturt departed Adelaide on what was to be the first Central Australian expedition. The captain obviously had a penchant for boats, for he hauled one along on a bullock dray, together with a company of marines who would sail it on the fabled inland sea. Sturt had no idea he was marching northward into one of the most horrendous summers on record. The mercury burst their thermometers, but not before registering temperatures of 69°C (156°F). Surrounded by an endless shimmering desert, Sturt took refuge at a waterhole on the otherwise dry Preservation Creek, which he named Depot Glen, and found himself marooned in a furnace for six long months. The best description of this is Sturt’s own:
'Under [the heat’s] effects every screw in our boxes had been drawn, and the horn handles of our instruments, as well as our combs, were split into fine laminae. The lead dropped out of our pencils, our signal rockets were entirely spoiled; our hair, as well as the wool on the sheep, ceased to grow, and our nails had become as brittle as glass. The flour lost more than eight per cent of its original weight, and the other provisions in an even greater proportion ... and we found it difficult to write or draw, so rapidly did the fluid dry out in our pens and brushes.'
In early July 1845 the drought broke, but scurvy set in. It killed James Poole, the second in command. Before he died his skin turned black and large pieces of flesh fell from his mouth. Nine of the party were dispatched to Adelaide, but the captain pushed on with four others. ‘To the very death Sturt is determined to go’, wrote expedition member Daniel Brock in his diary. With incomprehensible determination Sturt struck north, encountering a vast red stony desert devoid of vegetation, where the sharp stones cut the horses’ feet to shreds. These stones regularly reach temperatures of 75°C (167ºF) in the summer sun, and one can only imagine what Sturt must have thought of his surrounds. And yet on he marched to the edge his endurance, across what is nowadays known as Sturt’s Stony Desert, the most inhospitable terrain in Australia.
Sturt eventually made it to latitude 25, longitude 139, where he encountered a braided watercourse he named Eyre Creek. On the other side of the creek were the vast longitudinal sand dunes of the Simpson Desert. This great ribbed sand desert was more than even the captain could face; just 250 kilometres from the centre of the continent, he commenced his retreat. Arriving back at his base camp, Fort Grey, some 12 kilometres west of Depot Glen, his men remarked that he and his horse looked like skeletons. They had ridden 1500 kilometres over unexplored desert in three months. The captain rested briefly, then struck out again, exploring a vast wetland and river system to the east he named Cooper’s Creek but it was now November, and the dreaded outback summer was almost upon them. Fifteen months had passed since they had had any contact with Adelaide, and Sturt’s health was deteriorating rapidly. His muscles had become rigid with scurvy, he was almost blind, and he had to lie on a dray for most of the homeward journey. When his wife Charlotte read of his travails, her hair is said to have instantly turned white. Finally, at midnight in the middle of January 1846, seventeen months after his departure, Sturt knocked on the door of ‘Grange’, his Adelaide home. Charlotte Sturt opened the door and promptly fainted.
In 1860 the explorers Burke and Wills crossed Sturt Stony Desert twice, once on their outbound journey from Cooper’s Creek and again on their return from the Gulf of Carpentaria. On encountering Sturt Stony Desert, Wills recorded in his journal ,’I was rather disappointed, but not altogether surprised, to find the latter nothing more nor less than the stony rises that we had before met with, only on a larger scale and not quite as undulating. We found the ground not nearly as bad for travelling on as that between Bulloo and Cooper's Creek. In fact I do not know whether it arose from our exaggerated anticipation of horrors or not, but we thought it far from bad travelling ground, and as to pasture it is only the actually stony ground that is bare, and many a sheep run is in fact worse grazing ground than that.’
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