Lasseter’s Reef

Australia’s most famous lost-gold legend; men have died hunting it

On 14 October 1929 Lewis Hubert Lasseter, then calling himself Lewis Harold Bell Lasseter, wrote to A. E. Green, the federal member for Kalgoorlie, with what he called an out of the ordinary suggestion. Eighteen years earlier, he said, he had found a vast gold bearing reef in Central Australia, fourteen miles of it assaying three ounces to the ton, near the western edge of the MacDonnell Ranges. Herbert Gepp of the Development and Migration Commission and the geologist L. K. Ward interviewed him, were sceptical, and the government did nothing.

In March 1930, expecting the bailiff, he told John Bailey of the Australian Workers' Union a different story: he had found the reef thirty-three years before, at 17, riding west, and been rescued by a surveyor named Harding, with whom he later relocated it. He had in fact been sentenced to reform school for armed robbery at about that age. The story shifted in each retelling, but the Depression made desert gold attractive, and a company raised the money for an expedition. It left Alice Springs on 21 July 1930 with trucks and an aeroplane, led by Fred Blakeley, with Lasseter paid £10 a week as guide. He proved sullen, vague and suspicious and spent his spare time singing Mormon hymns. At Mount Marjorie he announced they were 150 miles too far north, and Blakeley called him a charlatan and ended the search.

Lasseter went on with the dingo-shooter Paul Johns and his camels toward Kata Tjuṯa, came back one afternoon with hidden rock samples claiming he had found the reef, and would not say where. They fought and parted. Then his two camels bolted. Pitjantjatjara people fed and sheltered him for about sixteen weeks, but he died, weakened and blind, at Shaws Creek in the Petermann Ranges; his death certificate gives 30 January 1931. The bushman Bob Buck found his body, buried in a shallow grave by the Pitjantjatjara, in March, and his diary, which claimed he had rediscovered and pegged the reef. He now lies in the Alice Springs Memorial Cemetery.

The Australian Dictionary of Biography concludes that his ignorance of bushcraft and prospecting shows he had never been in that country before, let alone found a reef. Tales of a cave or reef of gold in the Centre were older than his, and he added Harold Bell to his name after Harold Bell Wright's novel The Mine with the Iron Door. Ion Idriess's Lasseter's Last Ride of 1931 made him a legend anyway, and the reef remains the most famous lost mine in Australia; in 2014 geologists likened the southern part of his search area to South Africa's Bushveld Complex, where gold does occur, and said it has high potential.