LASSETER, THE MYSTERY MAN
“ … a magnificent reef of quartz rock ‘bulging with gold … thick as plums in a pudding …’”
- In a land that has bred many strange tales, perhaps one of the more intriguing would be the legendary “Lasseter’s Lost Reef” epic, the tale of a fruitless quest for a magnificent reef of quartz rock “bulging with gold … thick as plums in a pudding.”*
The discoverer of the alleged inland Eldorado was Hubert (sometimes known as Harold) Lasseter, today a folk hero.
Australia, in the 1930s, was an often hungry place with a depressed economy and widespread unemployment. Strolling casually into this scenario came a 30-year-old gold prospector – a short, solid character with deep-set eyes who told Mr John Bailey, president of the Australian Workers’ Union, in Sydney, that, as a 17-year-old fossicker, in 1897, en route from Townsville (Qld.) to Kalgoorlie (W.A.), in search of rubies, he came upon a rich gold-bearing outcrop that was seven miles in length, four to seven feet in height, and twelve feet wide.
His saddle horse was by this time dead, he claimed, and his pack-horse was dying. His tuckerbag was all but empty, with not even enough flour left for a damper.
In an empty oatmeal bag, the young prospector collected samples of the rich gold-bearing ore: hard evidence of his fabulous reef.
With his last vestiges of strength, Lasseter headed west towards the Indian Ocean, anxious in his desperation to find other human beings.
After two days of fighting a lonely path through the scrub, the heat and his thirst overcame him and, his brain swirling deliriously, he fell to the ground, his body dehydrated, all hope seemingly gone.
Death comes swiftly to men lost in the Australian inland, and especially to men without water or hope …
Lewis Hubert Bell Lasseter was born at Meredith, in Victoria, on September 27, 1880.
At the age of 15 he is believed to have joined the Australian Navy and gone to sea as a gunner on board the HMAS Powerful. Two years later he was supposedly prospecting in Central Australia and West Australia when he found his reef of gold and almost died soon afterwards.
Shortly after this almost fatal mishap, the young Australian sailed to the USA. In 1903 he married Florence Scott, in New York, and, over the next five years, fathered two children, one of which died prematurely.
Lewis (Harold) Lasseter became a naturalised American citizen. About the same time he also joined the Mormon church, or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, as it is more commonly known. This is an interesting point, as a branch of that church to this day still practises polygamy, and Lasseter, later in life, added two more wives to his collection without ever divorcing himself from his original spouse.
About 1910 Lasseter returned to Australia with his American family. Later, after separating from his legal wife, Florence, he entered into an illegal marriage with a nurse he met at the Caulfield Repatriation Hospital (Melbourne) in 1921. In 1924 Lasseter bigamously married a Irene Lillywhite, with whom he produced a son and two daughters.
Lasseter’s eldest daughter of this union, Lillian, stated in 1960: … “My mother was continually hearing of his numerous infidelities, which he took little trouble to hide. For some reason women who had been quite respectable became fascinated by him. I could name several who had children by him. An artist’s model, and quite prominent, was so enamoured of him that she followed him from camp to camp in several States and my mother received a letter from her brother threatening to shoot him if he went near his sister again. She eventually married … before her son, Lewis, was born …”
A determined and resourceful man, Lasseter claimed in 1913 to have conceived the original plan for the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and to have invented a “torpedo-proof battleship,” as well as being adept at devising schemes to improve existing processes and to enhance prevailing technologies.
“He could talk just about anybody into anything,” a friend observed at the time.
“The (Sydney) Bulletin,” known far and wide as “The Bushman’s Bible,” commented in 1936: “From time to time (we are) taken to task for sins of commission and omission … but on one subject (our) conscience is clear: we have never ministered to the credulity of people who have believed in the existence of Lasseter’s lost reef …”
As the young Lasseter lay sprawled on the desert, waterless and hopeless, he might well have left his bones in the wilderness had he not been found by a passing Afghan sandalwood cutter.
The Afghan carried the stricken youth to a surveyor’s camp working in the vicinity. Among the crew a government surveyor by the name of Harding carefully restored the young prospector back to life, allowing him measured quantities of water until his shrivelled body could cope with it.
It was the surveyor, Harding, who brought Lasseter to Carnarvon, on the West Australian coast, to regain his strength with plenty of rest, fresh food and sea air.
While recuperating in Carnarvon in 1897, Lasseter confided to Harding of his extraordinary discovery of a magnificent gold reef in the outback country. Impressed with the story, Harding decided to join Lasseter and to finance a two-man expedition into the desert in a bid to locate the elusive reef of gold.
But times were hard. Money was short. Lasseter had nothing – nothing, that is, apart from a tattered oatmeal bag full of gold-bearing ore. When assessed, Lasseter’s rocks contained three ounces per ton, and it was of the highest grade.
Harding was not an ignorant man. He knew something of minerals and the evidence in the oatmeal bag excited his interest. He told his mates that Lasseter’s discovery must be one of the richest ever documented.
Gradually, over a period of two years, the friends gathered together the essential equipment for their proposed expedition into the interior of the continent. They purchased camels and supplies, trying as much as possible to keep their plan a secret.
When ready, Lasseter and Harding quietly rode away from Carnarvon on camels, trekking east towards Gascoyne Junction and beyond, straight into Australia’s fiery heart.
On that vast landscape their only navigational guides were remembered landmarks. Over a four month period the two men struggled across the desert and at last succeeded in re-locating Lasseter’s lost reef of gold.
Using their wristwatches and the sun, they marked their bearings before limping back across the barren landscape to Carnarvon, bearing with them in their pack-saddles more samples with which they hoped to attract financial investments on a grand scale.
Australia – indeed, the world was in the throes of severe depression. Almost desperately, Harding journeyed to South Australia, Victoria, then over to London, trying to raise capital for a full-scale expedition.
It was to no avail. Some had the money, but lacked interest; others had all the interest in the world, but no cash. Dejected, Harding sailed back to Australia and died soon afterwards, it is claimed.
At this point, Lasseter headed for the United States …
In October, 1929, L.H.B. Lasseter, writing from Kogarah, NSW, drafted a proposal to the Minister for Mines, in Perth, saying: “… For the past 18 years I have known of a vast gold-bearing reef in Central Australia, but it is absolutely useless without water … My suggestion is … that a flying survey be run from the Gascoyne River across W.A. with the object of finding a practical line for piping water. I believe that a dam could be built in the headwaters of the Gascoyne, of sufficient elevation to permit the water gravitating inland. I am a competent surveyor and prospector and would run the survey for ($4,000) …”
In January, 1930, Lasseter wrote again: “The reef to which I refer has never been surveyed and therefore I am unable to give you its exact location, but to the best of my knowledge and belief the Warburton Range is the nearest to its location. I found it 33 years ago … Three years later I relocated it in company of a man named Harding (a surveyor) who was, or had been, in your government employment … I am really not sure as to whether this reef is in W.A. or Central Australia. If you decide to send out a party I would expect to have the reward claim guaranteed to me …”
Four month’s later the Under Secretary to the Minister mentioned in other correspondence: “I have been unable to locate any evidence of surveyor Harding’s operations … He was apparently not a surveyor attached to the Lands Department but may have been doing private work …”
So it came to be, in March, 1930, that Lasseter approached the AWU (Australian Workers’ Union) and a journalist, Errol Coote, of the “Daily Pictorial,” intending to revive the legend of his lost reef of gold out in the vast, inhospitable wastes of the Australian inland.
In Sydney, while trying to rouse financial support for his gold exploration venture, Lasseter was questioned at a public meeting by Flight Lieutenant Charles Ulm, a former associate of Sir Charles Kingsford Smith.
Lasseter claimed that after Harding and himself had returned from the desert to Carnarvon, their synchronised watches had somehow lost time.
Ulm asked: “How much did you say your watch was out, when you reached the coast again?”
Lasseter replied: “About an hour.”
“Well,” Ulm reasoned, “as the earth makes a complete revolution in 24 hours, it means that from a longitudinal point of view, you were one-twenty-fourth of the earth’s circumference out of place in your bearings. That in turn means that on your bearings the reef must be somewhere in the Indian Ocean.”
“If you take it that way, yes,” Lasseter smartly responded. “But it is practically certain that our watches were not that much out when the bearings were taken …”
Several months later an expedition was mounted that ended in frustration and bitterness. Lasseter then teamed up with an allegedly German-born dingo scalper, Paul Johns, using his camels to traverse the great deserts. They, too, came to quarrel and, taking two camels, Lasseter went off on his own, determined not to be frustrated.
Paul Johns came to express the opinion: “Lasseter did not impress me as a man who knew the country, but rather as one who had read about it.”
Sheltering in a cave from the terrible sun, Lasseter scribbled down in a note book his feverish thoughts: “The blacks tried to kill me today … Three spears were thrown, but two shots drove them off … Have shrunk still further and flies and ants have nearly eaten my face away … Beaten by sandy blight. What an epitaph … agony of starvation may drive me to shoot myself … What good (is) a reef worth millions. I would give it all for a loaf of bread … Goodbye, Rene, darling, wife of mine, and don’t grieve. Remember, you must live for the children now, dear …”
An Aboriginal of the area later remembered: “He very sick. His eye (properly sore). His belly properly sore. He (had dysentery) all day.”
Some Aborigines claim they buried a white man. Another contender, Bob Buck, a camel man from Central Australia, allegedly found Lasseter’s body, covered with branches, and buried it somewhere in the Petermann Ranges on March 29, returning to Alice Springs with the deceased’s diary, a set of dentures, letters, blankets and a broken camera. These items, he said, were found in the cave where the prospector passed away.
Explorer, Michael Terry, wrote in the 1930s: “Impartial analysis … impresses one that, having told the yarn so long, he at length convinced even himself … No hero of Empire lies there. Only a poor misguided man whose lack of balance and excessive imagination demanded of him that price the unwary must pay to the scrub.”
Lasseter is said to have perished on February 1, 1931, when aged 50 years. How he perished and where his body was originally buried is still a matter of uncertainty. However, in 1957, a television company illegally exhumed the alleged Lasseter remains and brought them to Alice Springs where, when the legalities of desecration were settled, they were put to rest in the town cemetery, a sculpted sandstone monument above.
When Bob Buck was asked by a bank manager to sign a statutory declaration stating that Lasseter was dead, the camel man declined, saying he could not swear whether the skeleton was that of a white or black man.
Over the years in between there have been numerous sightings of Lewis Bell Lasseter.
A Mullewa (WA) woman said a magazine photograph of Lasseter re-published in 1956 was the image of a man she had met at Wiluna, calling himself “Duncan.”
The woman, Nellie Edwards, claimed the man, Duncan, had shown her rich gold specimens that had been taken from the body of Lasseter. Duncan also revealed a photograph of a woman and two children. When asked about their identities he became visibly sad with “tears in his eyes.”
In the hand-written diary allegedly found by Bob Buck in “Lasseter’s Cave,” the last paragraph, intended for his wife’s eyes, read: “I loved you always as I love you now, with all my heart and soul. God be good to me, a sinner. Amen.”
Footnote: Contemporary Lasseter researcher, Murray Hubbard, has emphatically stated in a modern publication, “The Search for Harold Lasseter (1993) that it was impossible for Lasseter to have first discovered his reef of gold in 1897 as it is clearly documented that he was an inmate in that year at the Pakenham (Victoria) Salvation Army Home for Protestant Boys, precipitated by a charge of burglary at Colac in August, 1896.
