78 MR. MACDOUGALL STUART'S EXPLORING EXPEDITION. [Mar. 12, 1860. 



Colonel Gawler, whom he was glad to see present, had always maintained that 

 a line of communication might be found, through a well-watered and fertile 

 country, from South Australia to Western Australia. The present discoveries 

 tended in that direction, and seemed, to a certain extent, a confirmation of the 

 views of Colonel Gawler. Sir Richard Macdormell talked, indeed, of an expe- 

 dition across the whole continent from Adelaide in a northerly direction ; this, 

 he confessed, rather startled him, for the most successful explorer of the 

 interior, Captain Sturt, never arrived beyond a few degrees north, where he was 

 completely beset in a saline and impassable desert. The present exploration, 

 however, tended to the north-west, not towards the great saline interior, and 

 so far it had been very successful. 



Colonel Gawler, f.r.g.s., said that he could easily conceive that men of 

 the highest science should be led to the conclusion that the whole interior of 

 Australia Avas a waterless and impassable desert. He had had opportunities 

 of forming an opinion from local observations, and he was gratified to find that 

 they were being borne out by the present discoveries from the head of Spencer 

 Gulf in the direction of the north-west coast. He quite agreed with the Presi- 

 dent as to the character of the country in a more northerly direction. Much 

 consideration had led him to think that the surface-formation of Australia was 

 something like a great crater ; that the high lands all round the coast threw off 

 but short watercourses to the sea, and had a drainage into the interior, forming 

 a great inland sea, of which the wastepipe was, at some previous period. Lake 

 Torrens and Spencer Gulf, by which the whole of the waters, or the greater 

 part, found their way into the ocean. This opening formed the gate, he con- 

 ceived, by which we must hope to penetrate into the interior, and by which 

 the produce of the country must come down. It was satisfactory to know 

 that in Spencer Gulf there were three good harbours : First, there was Port 

 Augusta at the head of the Gulf ; it could hardly be called a harbour, for it 

 was really the head of the Gulf, but there was deep water close up to natural 

 walls of rock, forming a very commodious haven for small vessels. Then, 

 half-way down the western coast, there was what Flinders called " the lagoon 

 seen from the masthead." It was a lake united to the sea by a beautiful little 

 harbour, and when this last discovery was made he (Colonel Gawler) called the 

 lake Lake Flinders, and the harbour Franklin Harbour, after the lamented Sir 

 John Franklin, who was a midshipman at the time on board the ship from 

 which the lagoon was seen. Then, below this, came that magnificent harbour 

 Port Lincoln, in which the whole of the British navy might ride in deep 

 water. 



The account sent home by Mr. Stuart of the nature of the country, and of 

 the probability of there being more good country, verified his own conclusions 

 derived from the observation of atmospheric phenomena. His old hut at 

 Adelaide, in which he lived for eighteen months, had a northerly aspect, and 

 he observed, as an invariable effect, that when the wind ranged from north 

 to west the sky was cloudy and the air moist and cool. Again, it was an 

 invariable effect that when the wind ranged from north to east the sky became 

 cloudless, the atmosphere lurid, parched, and dry. So much was he struck by 

 these facts that long before Sturt penetrated into the desert to the east of Lake 

 Torrens, he had marked the spot on the map as the centre of a burning sandy 

 desert. Sturt found it so ; his thermometers blew up with the heat, and his 

 pork melted in the bran in which it Avas packed. This verification of his 

 opinion as to the nature of the country eastward gave him increased confidence 

 in his opinion of the country westward. And here again he was borne out by 

 the report of the Port Lincoln settlers, that they never knew of a hot wind 

 from the northward ; and by the testimony of Mr. Eyre, in the very wonderful 

 journey which he made from Spencer Gulf to Western Australia, that there 

 was invariably a cool air and cloudy sky with winds from the north. All 

 these concurrent reports necessarily led to the belief that ^there was in the 



