The latter remained the furthest known inland water of Australia for many years after Sturt's return.

Sturt was accompanied, as surveyor and draftsman, by John McDouall Stuart, whom I shall mention in his turn.

So far as my opinion, formed in my wanderings over the greater portions of the country explored by Sturt, goes, his estimate of the regions he visited has scarcely been borne out according to the views of the present day.
Like Oxley, he was fully impressed with the notion that an inland sea did exist, and although he never met such a feature in his travels, he seems to have thought it must be only a little more remote than the parts he had reached.

He was fully prepared to come upon an inland sea, for he carried a boat on a bullock waggon for hundreds of miles, and when he finally abandoned it he writes: "Here we left the boat which I had vainly hoped would have ploughed the waters of an inland sea." Several years afterwards I discovered pieces of this boat, built of New Zealand pine, in the debris of a flood about twenty miles down the watercourse where it had been left.

A great portion, if not all the country, explored by that expedition is now highly-prized pastoral land, and a gold field was discovered almost in sight of a depot formed by Sturt, at a spot where he was imprisoned at a water hole for six months without moving his camp.