Lasseter's Reef

The account

Harold Lasseter told a story that the Great Depression desperately wanted to believe. Years before, he said, while crossing the dead heart of central Australia, he had stumbled onto a reef of gold-bearing quartz seven miles long, a vein so rich it could lift a man, or a nation, out of poverty. He had been half dead at the time, his watch wrong, his bearings off, and he had never been able to find it again. But he knew it was out there.

In 1930, with a third of the country out of work, that was a story worth fifty thousand pounds, and Lasseter got it: trucks, an aircraft, camels, a full expedition out of Alice Springs to relocate the reef. It went wrong almost at once. The directions he gave did not match each other. The vehicles bogged and broke. One by one the others turned back, until Lasseter pushed on into the desert alone with two camels and a mind that those who saw him said was coming apart. The camels bolted with his supplies. He died out there, near the border country, sometime around the start of 1931, and a bushman named Bob Buck found his body and his diary months later.

The diary insisted, to the last page, that the reef was real.

Seventy-five years and countless expeditions later, not one grain of Lasseter's gold has been found where he said it was. And that is the trap of it. A dying man's diary swearing he had seen seven miles of gold, a desert vast enough to hide anything, and directions that contradict themselves just enough to be either the ravings of a fraud or the honest confusion of a man who really was lost when he found the greatest reef on earth. People still drive out into that country to settle it, because the one thing nobody has been able to do is prove him wrong.

Known intelligence

• Harold Lasseter claimed to have found a fabulously rich gold reef in the central Australian desert, which he could never relocate.
• In 1930, during the Depression, he raised about 50,000 pounds for a well-equipped expedition to find it again.
• The expedition failed; Lasseter pressed on with camels, behaved erratically, and died alone in the desert in early 1931.
• His body and a diary were found by bushman Bob Buck; in over 75 years of searching, no gold reef has ever been found there.

Theories of the hunt

• A real, undiscovered gold reef lies somewhere in the remote desert near the borders of three territories.
• Lasseter invented or imagined the reef, and his conflicting directions led nowhere.

Leads, where the trail points now

• The search zone is the remote desert near where the Northern Territory, South Australia, and Western Australia meet, around the Petermann and Rawlinson Ranges; Lasseter's conflicting bearings keep it vague.
• His diary, recovered with his body in 1931, and the records of the 1930 Central Australian Gold Exploration Company expedition are the primary documents.
• Tracing his real route through the account of the relief camel-driver Paul Johns is the best reconstruction of where he actually went.
• Geologists doubt a major reef exists in that country, and 75 years of searching has found nothing, so the lead is as much Lasseter's state of mind as the desert.

The trail, in order

• 1897/1911: Lasseter claims to first stumble on the reef.
• 1930: he raises funds and leads an expedition from Alice Springs.
• early 1931: Lasseter dies alone in the desert; his diary is recovered.
• since: repeated searches find no trace of the reef.

Sources and the record

• Lasseter's Reef (Wikipedia)
• Lasseter's Reef and the Lost Gold of Australia (Historic Mysteries)