I understand that John McDouall Stuart, who accompanied Sturt as a draughtperson, made sketches of the landscape of their base camp at Evelyn Creek in NSW. From here they made various  exploratory trips west and north. I am not not sure if Stuart made other sketches on the 1844 expedition. If so, I cannot find any on the internet.

Sturt was 120 million years too late. Then, during the Cretaceous — a geological period that began 145 million years ago and ended 66 million years ago — Australia was slowly drifting away from Antartica and global sea levels were beginning to rise. The ocean started making its way into the interior pushing inland from the Carpentarian Basin (near today’s Gulf of Carpentaria) and from the east in Queensland into the Eromanga Basin.

The Eromanga Sea was a shallow cool, muddy and stagnant sea that covered what is now arid inland Australia during the early Cretaceous (120 million years ago). It vanished about 95 million years ago leaving behind an uplifted landscape of wetlands and deltas that would eventually dry out and become scrubland. Opals are one of the Eromanga sea’s legacies.

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