What hardships did John Oxley go through?

Answer 1

John Oxley's main hardship was that he kept being stopped by flooded rivers. This caused him to develop an incorrect opinion about the nature of interior Australia.

Oxley set off to follow the course of Lachlan River, which had been discovered by George Evans, in 1817. The main obstacle to his progress was the fact that he was frequently stopped by marshes, because it was a flood year. Oxley couldn't continue with horses because there was too much water, nor with boats because the flooding hid snags such as tree branches and roots and other dangerous obstacles lurking just below the surface.

Leavijng the area in disgust, Oxley then headed south-west in search of further rivers. In a strange twist, he was stopped just fifty kilometres short of discovering the Murrumbidgee River because this time, there was not enough water.

He gave up this particular expedition and returned to the upper reaches of the Lachlan River. Again, however, the river channel continued to be lost among the floods and swampland. He faced the same problem when he attempted to follow the Castlereagh.

Oxley decided that the interior of NSW was largely marshland and completely unsuitable for settlement. He declared what is now valuable pastureland around the Lachlan River to be "forever uninhabitable, and useless for the purposes of civilised man".