John McDouall Stuart, a Scottish-born draftsman and a member of Charles Sturt’s unsuccessful 1844 expedition to central Australia, begins the first of six expeditions to the interior in 1858.

His aim is to find minerals or new agricultural lands in the northwest of South Australia. (An area at this time unexplored, but now known to be so lacking in water and soil fertility that it remains unsettled to this day.)

Stuart takes two companions (another white man named Forster and a young Aboriginal man), a pocket compass, a watch, half a dozen horses, and rations for six weeks.

From the Flinders Ranges, Stuart travels west, ...