Lasseter's Reef
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Lasseter's Reef is a fabulously rich gold deposit said to have been discovered - and then subsequently lost - by bushman Harold Bell Lasseter in a remote and desolate corner of central Australia towards the end of the 19th Century.
Lasseter claimed that in 1897, as a young man, he attempted to walk from Alice Springs to the West Australian goldfields. His story was that somewhere to the west of Alice, he stumbled across a huge gold reef in the desert, and that subsequent to this discovery, he was rescued in a parlous condition by an Afghan camel driver and taken to the camp of a surveyor, Harding. He further claimed that he and Harding later returned to the reef and fixed its location.
Lasseter's story was that he then spent the next three decades trying to raise sufficient interest in the find to conduct an expedition into the interior; at the time Kalgoorlie, Western Australia was the site of a gold rush, and few were prepared to risk trekking into the uncharted desert wilderness of central Australia, even if the deposit at Lasseter's Reef were likely to be as rich as he claimed.
By 1930, when Australia was in the grip of the Great Depression, the attractions of Lasseter's desert gold were much greater, and he succeeded in securing £50,000 of funding in order to launch a large, sophisticated search for the Reef. Unusually for the time this included motorised vehicular transport and an aircraft. Accompanying Lasseter were experienced bushmen Fred Blakeley and Fred Colson, as well as a prospector, an engineer, an explorer and a pilot.
The group endured great logistical difficulties and physical hardships, and on reaching Mount Marjorie (now Mount Leisler), Lasseter declared that they were, in fact, 150 miles too far north. Exasperated, Blakely declared Lasseter a charlatan, and decided to end the expedition. The expedition parted with Lasseter at Ilbilba, however he insisted on continuing onwards. Accompanied by a dingo-shooter named Paul Johns, Lasseter, whose behaviour was later reported as being increasingly erratic, set off towards The Olgas. One afternoon Lasseter returned to camp and announced that he had relocated the gold reef, however he refused to reveal its location. Johns, who by now doubted Lasseter's sanity, accused him of being a liar, a fight ensued, and Johns left Lasseter to his own devices. Lasseter himself vanished into the desert sands.
A search for Lasseter was conducted by a bushman named Bob Buck, and he succeeded in finding Lasseter's body and, nearby, personal effects in a cave at Shaw's Creek; it later emerged (from a "diary" found in the cave) that after Johns left, Lasseter's camels had bolted, leaving him alone in the desert without any means of sustaining himself or returning to civilization. He had then encountered a group of nomadic Aborigines, who had rendered what assistance they could, but a weakened and blinded Lasseter eventually succumbed to malnutrition and exhaustion.
No maps showing the location of the fabled gold reef were ever found, and over subsequent decades the tale of the Reef and its discoverer has assumed mythic proportions; it is perhaps the most famous lost mine legend in Australia, and remains a holy grail among Australian prospectors.
