Lasseter's Reef

Lasseter's Reef refers to the purported discovery, announced by Harold Bell Lasseter in 1929 and 1930, of a fabulously rich gold deposit in a remote and desolate corner of central Australia. Lasseter's accounts of the find are conflicting and its precise location remains a mystery—if it exists.

In 1929 and again in 1930 Harold Bell Lasseter (1880–1931) made different (and possibly conflicting) claims that either in 1911 or in 1897, he had discovered a rich gold deposit. On 14 October 1929 he wrote a letter to Kalgoorlie federal member, Albert Green, claiming to have discovered "a vast gold bearing reef in Central Australia" 18 years earlier and that it was located at the western edge of the MacDonnell Ranges. He made a similar claim to other officials and was interviewed by a commissioner and a geologist, the government took no action to investigate the claim. It was revealed that from 1908 to 1913 Lasseter lived on a lease-hold farm near Tabulam.

In March 1930 he provided a different story to John Bailey of the Australian Workers' Union. In this claim Lasseter details that as a young man of the age of 17, he rode on horse from Queensland to the West Australian gold fields, during which he stumbled across a huge gold reef somewhere near the border between the Northern Territory and Western Australia. However Lasseter had been sentenced to reform school at that time. According to the story told to Bailey, Lasseter was about 700 miles (1,100 km) west of Alice Springs in a line towards Kalgoorlie. He claimed that subsequent to this discovery he got into difficulties and was fortuitously rescued by a passing Afghan camel driver who took him to the camp of a surveyor, Joseph Harding. Harding and Lasseter were said to have later returned to the reef in the attempt to fix its location, but failed because their watches were inaccurate. As the expedition with Harding dated in the years before World War I, the two different versions about the finding of the reef could not been conflicting; simply it is possible that Lasseter did refer sometimes to his first finding in 1897 and sometimes to the first expedition with Harding.

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