(Later, he would serve as governor of Jamaica for one year in 1864-65.)
Eyre's main interests were sheep and cattle, and he spent much of his life not only building his flocks and herds of livestock but trying to find new ways of transporting them to the marketswhere his wool and surplus stocks could be sold. His primary interest was sheep, since they could survive more easily in sparse vegetation zones.
Eyre pioneered the government's efforts to open up South Australia for both settlement and agrarian development. Not content with limiting his business interests to the coastline, Eyre was determined to explore the possibilities of routes to the central part of the continent, where sheepstations would encourage depots or townships where settlers could migrate.
Accordingly, in 1839 he organized a group on his own to reach the center of the continent. When he encountered what he thought would be a likely refuge—Lake Torrens—he discovered that it was entirely covered with salty mud. Finding saline swamps on one side and insurmountable sandhills on the other, he took the only other route open to him: the Flinders Ranges, which lay approximately 250 mi.
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