Lasseter’s Reef

The great lost-gold legend of Australia. In 1929 Harold Lasseter claimed he had, years earlier, stumbled on a reef of gold miles long in the trackless desert of central Australia, and led an expedition to refind it. It failed; Lasseter wandered off alone, and died in the desert in 1931, his diary insisting to the end that the reef was real. Prospectors have hunted “Lasseter’s Reef” ever since across some of the most remote and lethal country on Earth, and never found it. Almost certainly a mirage or a lie, but it has cost lives. Told as the folklore it is.