He described the whole region as a desert, and he seems to have been haunted by the notion that he had got into and was surrounded by a wilderness the like of which no human being had ever seen or heard of before.

His whole narrative is a tale of suffering and woe, and he says on his map, being at the furthest point he attained in the interior, about forty-five miles from where he had encamped on the watercourse he called Eyre's Creek, now a watering place for stock on a Queensland cattle run: "Halted at sunset in a country such as I verily believe has no parallel upon the earth's surface, and one which was terrible in its aspect." Sturt's views are only to be accounted for by the fact that what we now call excellent sheep and cattle country appeared to him like a desert, because his comparisons were made with the best alluvial lands he had left near the coast.

Explorers as a rule, great ones more particularly, are not without rivals in so honourable a field as that of discovery, although not every one who undertakes the task is fitted either by nature or art to adorn the chosen part.

Sturt was rivalled by no less celebrated an individual than Major, afterwards Sir Thomas, Mitchell, a soldier of the Peninsula War, and some professional jealousy appears to have existed between them.
Major Mitchell was then the Surveyor-General of the Colony, and he entirely traversed and made known the region he appropriately named Australia Felix, now the colony of Victoria.

Mitchell, like Sturt, conducted three expeditions: the first in 1831-1832, when he traced the River Darling previously discovered by Sturt, for several hundred miles, until he found it trend directly to the locality at which Sturt, in his journey down the Murray, had seen and laid down its mouth or junction with the larger river.