In speaking of this skirmish, Mitchell, seemingly worked up to a sentimental pitch by hearing some gins crying out across the river in the night time, says:—
"It was then that I regretted most bitterly the inconsiderate conduct of some of the men. I was indeed liable to pay dear for geographical discovery, when my honour and character were delivered over to convicts, on whom, although I might confide as to courage, I could not always rely for humanity."
By his own account, as given above, the affray was provoked by the blacks, who compelled the men to use their weapons to save their own lives; the reflections then, on their humanity, and the danger in which his character stood in consequence, are slightly out of place.
The travellers now retraced their steps, and beyond the delays caused by some of the bullocks knocking up, their return journey to Fort Bourke was unmarked by anything of interest. From Fort Bourke they returned, partly along their outward track, to the head of the Bogan, and reached a newly-formed cattle station belonging to Mr. Lee, of Bathurst, on the 9th of September.
The great fact added to the geographical knowledge of Australia by the successful termination of this trip, was the identity of the Darling with the KARAULA on the north, and with Sturt's Murray junction on the south. It was now satisfactorily settled that this river was the channel that received all the tributary streams flowing westward—so far north, at any rate, as Cunningham's researches had extended, and that therefore their final outlet was in Lake Alexandrina, and the idea of a river winding through the interior to the north-west coast had to be finally relinquished.
This journey of Mitchell's was also instrumental in somewhat palliating the view held of the uninhabitable nature of the far interior; although the true character of the country had yet to be learnt and appreciated. His stay on the banks of the Darling at least lifted from those plains the stigma of a grassless, naked waste, intersected by a river of brine.
Mitchell, too, was a keen observer of the habits and customs of the blacks, he was remarkably quick at detecting tribal differences and distinctions, and his record of his intercourse with them, which occupies so large a portion of his journals, was interesting then, when so little had been written on the subject, and is interesting now as the account of the white man's first incursions into the hunting ground of a fast vanishing race.
Mitchell's next expedition took place in 1836, in the month of March. As before, it was to be more of a connecting survey, confirming and verifying previous discoveries, than a fresh departure into an utterly new region; but it turned out to be productive of the most important results.
The Surveyor-General was informed that the survey of the Darling was to be completed with the least possible delay, that having returned to the point where his last journey terminated, he was to trace the Darling into the Murray, and crossing his party over that river by means of his boats, follow it up, and regain the colony somewhere at Yass Plains. This programme was, however, departed from in many ways.
The new ground broken by Mitchell would thus be the Murray River above the junction with the Morumbidgee or Murrumbidgee, as it was now called, and it was supposed that he would be able to identify it with the Hume River of the explorer of that name.