Charles Sturt
British explorer of Australia
1795 CE to 1869 CE
Captain Charles Napier Sturt (28 April 1795 – 16 June 1869) is a British explorer of Australia, and part of the European exploration of Australia.
He leads several expeditions into the interior of the continent, starting from both Sydney and later from Adelaide.
His expeditions trace several of the westward-flowing rivers, establishing that they all merge into the Murray River.
He is searching to determine if there was an "inland sea".
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Southern Oceania
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Over sixteen weeks in 1824–25, Hume and Hovell journey to Port Phillip and back.
They make many important discoveries including the Murray River (which they name the Hume), many of its tributaries, and good agricultural and grazing lands between Gunning, New South Wales and Corio Bay, Port Phillip.
A theory had developed that the inland rivers of New South Wales were draining into an inland sea.
Leading a second expedition in 1829, Sturt follows the Murrumbidgee River into a 'broad and noble river', the Murray River, which he names after Sir George Murray, secretary of state for the colonies.
His party then followsthis river to its junction with the Darling River, facing two threatening encounters with local Aboriginal people along the way.
Sturt continues down river on to Lake Alexandrina, where the Murray meets the sea in South Australia.
Suffering greatly, the party has to row hundreds of kilometers back upstream for the return journey.
Surveyor General Sir Thomas Mitchell conducts a series of expeditions from the 1830s to 'fill in the gaps' left by previous expeditions.
He is meticulous in seeking to record the original Aboriginal place names around the colony, for which reason the majority of place names to this day retain their Aboriginal titles.
The Polish scientist/explorer Count Paul Edmund Strzelecki conducts surveying work in the Australian Alps in 1839 and becomes the first European to ascend Australia's highest peak, which he names Mount Kosciuszko in honor of the Polish patriot Tadeusz Kościuszko.
British army officer Charles Sturt, born in British India, had joined the British Army in 1813, seen action with the Duke of Wellington in Spain and at Waterloo, and risen to the rank of Captain.
With his regiment, he had escorted convicts to New South Wales and arrived in 1827, keen to explore the Australian interior, especially its rivers.
In 1828, the Governor of New South Wales, Ralph Darling, sends Sturt and Hamilton Hume to explore the area of the Macquarie River in western New South Wales.
They discover and name the Darling River, but are unable to proceed further.
This expedition, while proving that northern New South Wales is not an inland sea, only deepens the mystery of the fate of the western-flowing rivers of New South Wales.
With access to a well-watered tableland beyond the mountains, the Australian colonists begin to appreciate the possibilities of expanding into the continent’s vast interior.
Charles Sturt charts the course of the Murray River in an 1829 expedition that nearly blinds him and forces him to retire from the army.
Charles Sturt leads an expedition from Adelaide in 1844-45 in an unsuccessful bid to reach central Australia in search of a postulated inland sea, penetrating more than a thousand miles northward before heat and drought forces the party’s return.
Sturt enters the Simpson Desert in central Australia on July 20, 1845.
A large area of dry, red sandy plain and dunes, it is the fourth largest Australian desert, with an area of 176,500 square kilometers (sixty-eight thousand one hundred square miles) and is the world's largest sand dune desert.
The desert is underlain by the Great Artesian Basin, one of the largest inland drainage areas in the world.
It is also part of the Lake Eyre basin.
John McDouall Stuart, a Scottish-born draftsman and a member of Charles Sturt’s unsuccessful 1844 expedition to central Australia, begins the first of six expeditions to the interior in 1858.
His aim is to find minerals or new agricultural lands in the northwest of South Australia. (An area at this time unexplored, but now known to be so lacking in water and soil fertility that it remains unsettled to this day.)
Stuart takes two companions (another white man named Forster and a young Aboriginal man), a pocket compass, a watch, half a dozen horses, and rations for six weeks.
From the Flinders Ranges, Stuart travels west, ...
...passing to the south of Lake Torrens, then north along the western edge of Lake Torrens.
He finds an isolated chain of semi-permanent waterholes which he named Chamber's Creek (now called Stuart Creek, it will later become crucially important as a staging post for expeditions to the arid center of the continent.)
Continuing to the northwest, ...
Stuart reaches the vicinity of Coober Pedy (not realizing that there is a fantastically rich opal field underfoot) before shortage of provisions and lack of feed for the horses forces him to turn towards the sea five hundred kilometers to the south.
A difficult journey along the edge of the Great Victoria Desert brings Stuart to ...
...Miller's Water (near present-day Ceduna) and from here ...