In the ranges where Sturt 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, and the
fires of the battery and the smelting furnace burn steadily day and
night, in sight of the spot where Poole lies buried. And at the lower
levels of the shafts trickle the waters of subterranean streams that
Sturt never dreamt of. But though baffled, and unable to gain the goal he
strove for, never did man better deserve success. His instructions were
to reach the centre of the continent, to discover whether range or sea
existed there; and if the former, to note the flow of the northern
waters, but on no account to follow them down to the northern sea. As
usual, the Home Office, in their official wisdom, knew more than did the
colonists, and instructed him to proceed by way of Mount Arden; the
route already tried and abandoned by Eyre.
Sturt chose to proceed by the Darling. His plan was to follow that river
up as far as the Williorara or Laidley's Ponds, a small western tributary
of the Darling, opposite the point were Mitchell turned back, in 1835,
after his conflict with the natives.
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