LASSETER’S LAST RIDE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 5 December 1939, Page 6

LASSETER’S LAST RIDE

LOST GOLD REEF A MYTH. Lasseter’s famous “lost gold reef” which has intrigued explorers, prospectors. and writers for a number of years, does not exist —and never has existed except in the imagination of Lasseter himself! This is the final considered opinion of one of the best-known identities of “the centre” —Mr Bob Buck, who took Lasseter’s body to its last resting place in the sandhills of Central Australia. He arrived at Melbourne from his station 150 miles from Alice Springs to attend the Central Australian Exhibition. which is a feature of the Royal Show. “Lasseter never found a reef of gold in Central Australia," said Mr Buck. “As a mailer of fact, Lasseter never visited the sandhill country—now known as ‘the Lasseter country’ until I took his body there for burial. The story of Lasseter's Reef is only a myth. Lasseter imagined the existence of a reef in Central Australia after he had read a copy of a novel, printed in 1912. The novel described a tribe of aborigines who carried spears with heads of solid gold. I have been all over the so-called Lasseter country and there isn’t a trace of gold there.” Mr Buck —short, grey-haired, with keen brown eyes and a sweeping grey moustache —owns a cattle station at The Ponds, which covers an area of 500 square mlies. He has worked on stations covering thousands of square miles, and regards his property as “a small allotment."