The first efficient exploring expedition into the interior of
New South Wales was conducted by John Oxley, the Surveyor-General of
the colony, in 1817. His principal discovery was that some of the
Australian streams ran inland, towards the interior, and he traced
both the Macquarie and the Lachlan, named by him after Governor
Lachlan Macquarie, until he supposed they ended in vast swamps or
marshes, and thereby founded the theory that in the centre of
Australia there existed a great inland sea. After Oxley came two
explorers named respectively Hovell and Hume, who penetrated, in 1824,
from the New South Wales settlements into what is now the colony of
Victoria. They discovered the upper portions of the River Murray,
which they crossed somewhere in the neighbourhood of the present town
of Albury. The river was then called the Hume, but it was subsequently
called the Murray by Captain Charles Sturt, who heads the list of
Australia's heroes with the title of The Father of Australian
Exploration.
In 1827 Sturt made one of the greatest discoveries of this century--or
at least one of the most useful for his countrymen--that of the River
Darling, the great western artery of the river system of New South
Wales, and what is now South-western Queensland.
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