even from the gentle Sturt a richly-deserved and unanswerable retort.  On his second expedition, which was supposed to establish the identity of the Darling with the junction seen by Sturt, Mitchell excused himself from further exploration of the lower Darling as he expressed himself satisfied that Sturt’s supposition was justified.  But later, when on his expedition to what is now the State of Victoria, he again fell into a doubting mood, and he was not finally convinced until he had re-visited the junction.  This constant doubting at last roused Sturt, who speaking in 1848 of Mitchell’s work, said:  “In due time he came to the disputed junction which he tells us he recognised from its resemblance to a drawing of it in my first work.  As I have since been on the spot, I am sorry to say that it is not at all like the place, because it obliges me to reject the only praise Sir Thomas Mitchell ever gave me.”

Sturt’s original sketch of the junction had been lost, and Sturt, who was nearly blind at the time of publication, obtained the assistance of a friend, who drew it from his verbal description.

7.2.  The upper Darling.

Rumours of a mysterious river called the Kindur, which was said, on no better authority than a runaway convict’s, to pursue a north-west course through Australia, now began to be noised about.  This convict, whose name was Clarke, but who was generally known as the Barber, said that he had taken to the bush in the neighbourhood of the Liverpool Plains, and had followed down a river which the natives called the Gnamoi.  He crossed it and came next to the Kindur.  This he followed down for four hundred miles before he came upon the junction of the two.  The union of the two formed a broad navigable river, which he still followed, although he had lost his reckoning, and did not know whether he had travelled five hundred or five thousand miles.  One thing, however, he was convinced of, and that was that he had never travelled south of west.  He asserted that he had a good view of the sea, from the mouth of this most desirable river, and had seen a large island from which, so the natives reported, there came copper-coloured men in large canoes to take away scented wood.  The Kindur ran through immense plains, and past a burning mountain.  As no one had invited him to stay in this delectable country, he had returned.

The story, which bore every evidence of having been invented to save his back, received a certain amount of credence, and Sir Patrick Lindesay, then Acting-Governor, gave the Surveyor-General instructions to investigate the truth of it.  It was in this way that Mitchell’s first expedition originated.