Talk:Charles Sturt

About Sturt
Of course Sturt went blind. He was smoked. What you don't see can't hurt you. He was sent to the gulag, (Norfolk Island), and was relieved when his time there was completed. Its claimed Sturt travelled through the Wagga area but he really headed westthere. This trek cut out the bed in the river that encompasses present day Wagga. His boat was the shape of a whale. His journey from Pondebadgery, assisted by Indigenous guides, partly followed the Ancestral course of the river that flowed from Pondebadgery before the ground split and diverted the watercourses. Sturt's story of his 1829-30 journey is very allegorical but as the events he based it on are grounded in the environment, thus fact, the narrative in his Journals is also factual.

Sturt, C. Two expeditions into the interior of southern Australia during the years 1828,1829,1830,1831. Available [online] http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/s/sturt/charles/s93t/

In 1838 Sturt overlanded cattle to SA. he was a skilled soldier and explorer and had a particular interest in surveying. Calculation of latitude had been around for many years. The extract below from Sturt's Journal of his journey west notes the latitude of the Hume River. This river is known today as the Murray River. Its worth checking Sturts coordinates on a map. The latitude given is not a typo as similar numbers are given as he progresses west. This brings into question where the Hume actually was. The right hand bank of any stream is the one on the right, facing downstream.

" ... I accordingly assembled my party at the lowest (highest?) station on the Hume in the month of April 1838 and commenced my journey by moving along its right bank and following it in a westerly direction to a low and depressed interior. In latitude 34 degrees 48 minutes south and in longitude 146 degree three minutes east, we passed the Ovens, a small river coming from the SE, and consequently falling into the Hume on the opposite bank to that along which we were travelling ..."

Sturt, C., Course of the Hume River From the Hilly Districts to the Junction of the Morumbidgee, Journal of the Royal Geographic Society of London, Vol.14 (1844), pp 141-144. these pages where published by Alyssa.Versace

Ref tags
I noted a recent reversion of an edit because the tagging wasn't working. For ref tags (ie ) to work, the footnotes section needs to be set up at the bottom of the article using the following:

Scottish ancestry?
Does anyone know where his parents came from? The name Napier is Scottish, and "Sturt" looks like an adaptation (perhaps post-Jacobite) of "Stuart". --Mais oui! 19:18, 15 October 2006 (UTC)


 * The Australian Dictionary of Biography says "...his Sturt and Napier ancestors were both Dorsetshire families...". Gimboid13 23:28, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

Rewording
I'm considering rewording this sentence: "Several times the party was in danger from the Aborigines but Sturt always succeeded in appeasing them", as the word 'Aborigines' isn't used much, if at all in everyday speech, with some regarding it as offensive. B 897 (talk) 06:30, 18 January 2019 (UTC)