From Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu (reviewed here)

(Charles) Sturt’s expedition beginning in 1844, was hampered by the rigours of the environment.  It was so hot thermometers burst, screws fell out of boxes and the lead from pencils.

Sturt’s party reached Cooper’s Creek, in what was to become known as Sturt’s Stony Desert, where they were confronted by sand ridges thirty metres high.  They ploughed on enduring terrible hardships.  Sturt climbed one final dune and peered down onto the plain.  His journal records:

on gaining the summit (we) were hailed with a deafening shout by 3 or 400 natives, who had assembled on the flat below. . . I had never before come so suddenly upon so large a party.  The scene was of the most animated description, and was rendered still more striking from the circumference of the native huts, at which there were a number of women and children, occupying the whole crest of a long piece of rising ground t at the opposite side of the flat.

Sturt was looking on the dry floodplain of a river and he couldn’t understand how these people were able to survive.  Sick and weary and with horses stumbling with hunger, thirst and fatigue, strut was alarmed at coming so suddenly on so many Aboriginals:

Has these people been of an unfriendly temper, we could not in any possibility have escaped them, for our horses could not have broken into a canter to save our lives or their own.  we were therefore wholly in their power . . .but, far from exhibiting any unkind feeling, they treated us with genuine hospitality, and we might certainly have commanded whatever they had.  Seveal of them brought us large troughs of water, and when we had taken a little, held them up for our horses to drink; an instance of nerve that is very remarkable, for I am quite sure that no white man (having never seen or heard of a horse before, and with the natural apprehension the first sight of such an animal could create) would deliberately have walked up to what must have appeared to them most formidable brutes, and placing the troughs they carried against their breast, they allowed the horses to drink, with their noses almost touching them.  They likewise offered us some roasted ducks, and some cake.  when we walked over to their camp, they pointed to a large hut, and told us we could sleep there. . . and (later) they brought us a quantity of sticks for us to make a fire, wood being extremely scarce.

Sturt was doing it tough among the savages alright.  New house, roast duck, and cake!