In the following year he commenced his most arduous and best-known journey, a journey that has made the names of Sturt's Stony Desert and the Depot Glen known all over the world, and that has, unhappily for Australia, done much to create the popular fallacy that the soil and climate of the interior are such as preclude comfortable settlement by whites.

Sturt's graphic account is at times somewhat misleading, and the lapse of years has proved his denunciatory judgment of the fitness of the interior for human habitation to have been hasty.
But if we examine the circumstances in which he received the impressions he has recorded, we must grant that he had considerable justification for his statements.
He was a broken and disappointed man, worn out by disease and frustrated hopes, and nearly blind.

During six months of his long absence, he had been shut up in his weary depot prison, debarred from attempting the completion of his work, and compelled to watch his friend and companion die a lingering death from scurvy.

And when the kindly rains released him, he was doomed to be repulsed by the ever-present desert wastes.

No wonder that he despaired of the country, and viewed all its prospects through the heated, treacherous haze of the desert plains.