Lasseter's Gold: fool's errand or con artistry?

Simon Caterson’s book Hoax Nation: Australian Fakes and Frauds examined different hoaxes planned during the decades of Australian history; he analysed the events, publications and cultural ephemera that were later unveiled as elaborate hoaxes. Clearly, thought Caterson, the history of Australia must have always been marked by falsified accounts. My personal favourites all relied on literary trickiness eg as found in the Ern Malley affair, and the Norma Khouri and Helen Demidenko scandals. So Caterson was the perfect writer to review a book about a grand hoax.

Of all the great Australian hoaxes, none seemed more darkly absurd than the Lasseter’s Reef Legend. And the timing is perfect - the book Lasseter’s Gold was written by Warren Brown and published by Hachette Australia in 2015.

In 1897 a teenage Harold Bell Lasseter (1880-?1950s) staggered out of the desert almost dead, his pockets bulging with gold, claiming to have found a 15 kilometre gold reef. Not long after the find, his horses died; he became lost and would have perished but for the intervention of an Afghan camel rider and surveyor named Harding.

In 1929, Lasseter wrote to Government ministers about “his” fabulously rich reef of gold in Central Australia, but this attempt to gain funding was unsuccessful. Next he asked the Australian Workers’ Union to fund his project. In Depression-blighted Australia, the resulting expedition in 1930 was the best equipped gold-seeking exploration in Australia’s history.

However, it was a failure in all regards. The terrain was unsuitable for trucks, and the airplane he employed crashed; its replacement was unsuitable. There was dissension between Lasseter and the project leader, Fred Blakeley, about Lasseter’s credibility. In fact Lasseter refused to divulge the exact location of the reef, saying merely that it was “somewhere near the MacDonnell Ranges”.

Following the abandonment of the motorised expedition, Lasseter decided to venture out with a dingo trapper, Paul Johns. Again there was dissent, and Lasseter decided to go it alone, perhaps reaching as far west as Lake Christopher in Western Australia. On his return trip the camels bolted, leaving him stranded in the Petermann Ranges where he died, despite nurturing by the local Aboriginal people.

A well equipped expedition, 1930

Team leader Fred Blakeley and the biplane (top photo)

Harold Lasseter on top of the Thornycroft truck (bottom photo)

Caterson believed the author did a brilliant job in piecing together a coherent and convincing narrative from the welter of first-person accounts, some less reliable than others. Brown also drew on the often puzzling documentary record. It seems almost everyone who became involved in the search for Lasseter’s Reef had an agenda, and indeed greed and paranoia flourished under the desert sun.

Given the sheer isolation, the physical difficulty of moving through the mulga country with its soaring temperatures, and Lasseter’s vagueness about the location of the gold (which meant the 1930 expedition had no clear direction to follow), it is a wonder the whole enterprise did not disintegrate much earlier than it did.

Several key people involved in the expedition seemed to have been duplicitous if not downright malevolent in intent. Brown left open the question that Lasseter was lying about the existence of a fab­ulous reef of gold. Furthermore he may have been murdered by Paul Johns, a somewhat sinister German bushman later deported from Australia and interned in Britain during WW2 as a Nazi sympathiser.

At the bitter end, it seems that Lasseter had been left deliberately by Johns to die in a desert cave. He was found by Aboriginal trackers and buried near where he died. The body was later exhumed and interred in the Alice Springs cemetery in June 1958. Or perhaps Lasseter faked his own death and fled overseas. In any case, no official investigation of the ill-fated expedition to find the reef was ever carried out, apparently because it would have revealed the sheer ineptitude and deceptive conduct at the heart of the doomed enterprise.

Newspaper headline, 

the Sydney Mirror, 
April 1931

In Lasseter’s Gold, the author focused on the hardware the searchers used and the conditions they faced. The main vehicle used to traverse the treacherous mulga country and shifting desert sands was a huge six-wheeled truck imp­orted from England called the Thornycroft. It was a state-of-the-art all-terrain vehicle, having a portable radio transmitter that was capable of sending messages from the most remote locat­ion. The expedition also had aerial support in the form of a biplane.

As things turned out, the Thornycroft was a fire hazard as well as being difficult to handle, the radio did not work and the aeroplane tended to crash on landing. So the expedition party made mind-numbingly slow progress.

The journey to find the reef was conducted by the grandly named Central Australia Gold Exploration Company. And it was the largest inland expedition in Australia since Burke and Wills left Melbourne for the north in August 1860. In fact, Brown argued that the project proved to be a folly as big as that of those ill-fated explorers Burke and Wills, though without the heroic element.

With a remarkable set of archival photos, the book gave a compelling account of the weird outback adventure that was the unsuccessful original search to locate the Australian El Dorado. The book provided an excellent companion piece to Luke Walker’s superb recent docum­ent­ary Lasseter’s Bones, which concentrated on the ongoing efforts by Lasseter’s 90-year-old son to find his father’s reef.

It was unfortunate for Lasseter that he was already known as a sailor, prospector, bigamist, fantasy-based story teller, con man and attention-seeker. Lasseter’s Gold has been the gripping story of an outback legend for decades and just “might” have been true. But nowadays most people are certain there was no massive gold reef out there, just waiting to be discovered.

 Lasseter's body was reinterred in Alice Springs cemetery

in June 1958.
But was it really Lasseter's body buried here in 1958?