Around what he thought was 27 April, after seven days in the bush, Giles was near death.
I felt quite light-headed. After sitting down, on every occasion when I tried to get up again, my head would swim round, and I would fall down oblivious for some time. Being in a chronic state of burning thirst, my general plight was dreadful in the extreme. A bare and level sandy waste would have been Paradise to walk over compared to this. My arms, legs, thighs, both before and behind, were so punctured with spines, it was agony only to exist; the slightest movement and in went more spines, where they broke off in the clothes and flesh, causing the whole of the body that was punctured to gather into minute pustules, which were continually growing and bursting. My clothes, especially inside my trousers, were a perfect mass of prickly points.
He hoped for a relief party. And where was Gibson?
Giles managed to reach The Circus two days later, just as the last of his water ran out.
Oh, how I drank! how I reeled! how hungry I was! how thankful I was that I had so far at least escaped from the jaws of that howling wilderness, for I was once more upon the range, though still twenty miles from home.
After satisfying his deep thirst, Giles looked for food.
Just as I got clear of the bank of the creek, I heard a faint squeak, and looking about I saw, and immediately caught, a small dying wallaby, whose marsupial mother had evidently thrown it from her pouch. It only weighed about two ounces, and was scarcely furnished yet with fur. The instant I saw it, like an eagle I pounced upon it and ate it, living, raw, dying—fur, skin, bones, skull, and all. The delicious taste of that creature I shall never forget. I only wished I had its mother and father to serve in the same way.
Giles staggered back the last twenty miles or so to the remaining two men of his expedition, who were now camped at Fort Mueller beneath the ominously named Mount Destruction. None of the horses had returned. When the fortunate explorer had recovered, he and the rest of the party went looking for Gibson. Five days out, and with the water gone yet again, they gave up. Gibson had ridden into the desert on Giles’s fine mount. The horse must have refused to give up, carrying its rider further and further into the emptiness. Giles named this terrible region Gibson’s Desert ‘after this first white victim to its horrors’.
Earnest Giles would later be noted for twice crossing the western half of the continent. He received acclaim, honours and land grants, although his alleged gambling and drinking habits robbed him of an official appointment in South Australia. He died in 1897 and is considered one of the finest bushman of the inland exploration era.
LASSETER’S FIRST FIND
The tale of Lasseter’s lost reef of gold is one of Australia’s best-known and oft-told yarns. Lasseter’s own story ended in tragedy, with him dying alone in the desert, leaving behind a notebook and map as contradictory and subsequently controversial as his life had been. Much less known is the story of the journey Lasseter originally made—or said he did—during which he first located his fabulous reef.
Born in rural Victoria in 1880, Lewis Hubert Lasseter claimed to have served a few years in the English Royal Navy before travelling to the United States where he was married in 1903. He was soon back in Australia, leasing a farm at Tabulum (NSW) around 1908 and spending the next few years developing inventions and designs, including a design submitted for the Sydney Harbour Bridge. He enlisted twice during World War I but was discharged on both occasions. He married again, probably bigamously, in 1924 and worked in Sydney and Canberra as a carpenter, continuing to devise such things as a method for pre-cast concrete.
A short, peppery man of strong opinions and high self-esteem, Lasseter was seen by many as a crank. By 1929, he was publically claiming to be the original designer of the Harbour Bridge and sought back payment for what he said was six months’ work on the plans. His assertion was not accepted. Perhaps motivated by this, and by the onset of the Depression, Lasseter began contacting people in government and trade unions about a lode of gold he had found in the desert many years before. He wanted funding for an expedition to relocate the reef to the enrichment of all involved. And he told them all the story of its discovery to back up his claim.
Lasseter gave several versions of this find. In one, he claimed to have discovered the reef in 1897 near the Warburton Ranges. In another, he said it was in 1911, and somewhere near Lake Amadeus. Even those keen to believe Lasseter had difficulty believing the earlier date of discovery plausible as he would only have been seventeen at the time. It was not impossible that he had found the mysterious riches at that age, of course, just highly unlikely. He had already claimed to be in the Royal Navy in his youth, which operated quite a long way away from the central Australian desert. One thing that Lasseter was fairly consistent about, though, was the richness of the find: 3 ounces or more to the ton.
Lasseter usually said he had been on his way to Western Australia after seeking his fortune mining for rubies in the East MacDonnell Ranges. The rush failed when the precious stones turned out to be mere garnets but as he was already in South Australia he decided to keep riding across some of the world’s harshest country. Not surprisingly his horse soon perished west of the MacDonnell Ranges but not before he had seen the 16-kilometre reef—sometimes it was even larger in the telling. It was ‘four to twelve feet wide, and at places . . . four feet above the surface’. At the point of death he was miraculously rescued by an Afghan camel driver and nursed back to health by a surveyor named Harding.
Three years later, with Harding and accompanied by camels, Lasseter said he returned to the area of his original find, relocated the reef and recorded its exact coordinates. (They later discovered their watches were wrong. The bearings would have placed the reef in the Indian Ocean, according to one sceptical commentator). They took samples and seem to have had them assessed at a number of assay offices although, oddly, did not peg a claim. Harding sought funds to exploit the reef without success and died shortly afterwards. Lasseter went to America and no more was heard of the reef until he began seeking backers in 1929. The next journey he made in search of the supposed treasure was his last.
But it was only the beginning of ongoing attempts to solve the mystery of Lasseter’s reef and to locate it again. Many have tried and failed, suggesting that Lasseter was a fantasist. Certainly there are many signs of folklore in the tale. The false ruby strike took place in 1887, when Lasseter would have been six or seven years old. The ‘surveyor’ was the stock rustler Joe Harding. Lasseter changed his name to Lewis Harold Bell Lasseter, rather suspiciously echoing the name of the author of a popular American book about a lost reef of gold. This book, The Mine With the Iron Door, was published in 1923 and was one of a number of popular fictions on the same theme tracking back into the nineteenth century. Like the most famous such fiction of all, Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, these works draw on the ancient El Dorado legends of fabulous wealth hidden in impenetrable locations and usually guarded by fierce tribes.
There is even an intriguing Australian precedent for Lasseter’s alleged reef. It was said that a South Australian prospector named Earle stumbled across a vast ‘cave of gold’ somewhere in the Tomkinson Ranges during 1895. A vast mythology quickly evolved around this story. An investigation in 1900 was thought to be in possession of Earle’s map of his find. The expedition was attacked by Aboriginal people. One man was killed and another wounded. The survivors returned to Oodnadatta with no news of the fabled cave of copper and gold. Like Lasseter’s reef, it is still lost.
In the end, Lasseter paid the ultimate price for his fantasies. After quarrelling with a member of his 1930–31 expedition, he went into the desert alone. When the celebrated bushman Bob Buck finally found Lasseter’s remains in March 1931 there was not much left. The man who had prophesised fabulous wealth from his lost reef probably survived for up to four months with occasional help from Aborigines. He died a lonely and lingering death, leaving only his notebook buried beneath the ashes of his fire, a
few letters and a legend that will not go away.
THE WARATAH MYSTERY
On 1 July 1909, the luxury steamer SS Waratah left Melbourne for South Africa. With over 700 passengers aboard she was well loaded. One passenger, an engineer named Claude Sawyer, feared the ship was carrying too much. At Durban he left the Waratah, cabling his wife that he thought the ship was ‘top-heavy’. Sawyer forfeited his 8 guinea fare to Cape Town and later testified:
I first noticed something peculiar at Melbourne, and that was when we left the port; she had a big list to port. I formed the opinion that the list was considerable when I walked in my cabin. It was very uncomfortable to walk towards the port. I suppose the floor of the cabin was inclined slightly to port. Then going through the disturbed water just before you get out to the Heads, she wobbled about a good deal and then took a list to starboard and remained there for a very long time. She went right over so that the water was right underneath me. I was standing on the promenade deck.
She remained so long there that I did not like it.
Then, by degrees, she went over the other way, and remained with a list to port so that it was very uncomfortable walking in my cabin, because my cabin was on the port side.
When the SS Waratah left Durban for Cape Town on 26 July she was carrying just over 200 passengers and crew. Waratah briefly signalled a passing ship that night but worsening weather conditions made lengthy communication impossible. Ships did not carry radio at that time. There was another possible sighting later in the night but the Waratah has never been seen since. Her disappearance has led to her being called Australia’s Titanic and her disappearance is considered one of the most baffling mysteries of world shipping.
Searches for the missing ship began straightaway. Royal Navy ships assumed that she would be found drifting at sea, but found nothing. The shipowners financed a search vessel and in 1910 the relatives of the passengers commissioned another fruitless investigation.
An official Board of Trade inquiry into the incident interviewed many experts and other interested parties. There was disagreement on the seaworthiness of the ship, her design and the cargo stowage. The lucky passenger who left her at Durban said that his decision had been influenced by bad dreams. Details of the dreams were not given in the report but it was later stated that Sawyer had seen an oddly dressed man carrying a blood-drenched sword in his right hand.
The inquiry concluded that ‘the ship was lost in the gale of the 28th of July, 1909, which was of exceptional violence for those waters and was the first great storm she had encountered’. Given the meagre evidence available, the court continued:
In the total absence of direct evidence, and with only conflicting evidence of an indirect character, the Court cannot say what particular form was taken by the catastrophe, but the fact that no wreckage has been found in spite of the most careful and exhaustive search which was carried out, indicates that it must have been sudden. The Court, on the whole, inclines to the opinion that she capsized, but what particular chain of circumstances brought about this result must remain undetermined.
The air of mystery surrounding the SS Waratah’s fate deepened over time. Reports of clothed bodies being sighted cropped up, though none of these was ever substantiated, or even apparently investigated. A deckchair from the missing ship washed up along the coast. In 1915, an Irish soldier on the Western Front claimed to be the sole survivor of the disaster. During the 1930s, lumps of timber and cork thought to belong to the SS Waratah were found near East London, South Africa.
Supposed sightings of the wreck were made in 1925 and 1977. Searches were again carried out in the 1990s and since. Some of these have claimed success, though to date there is no verification. One wreck hunter spent over twenty years in a vain search, giving up only in 2004.
What happened and where do the Waratah and her dead lie? Did she suffer some mysterious catastrophe that left her abandoned and drifting into the Antarctic? Did she explode? A couple of bright flashes were seen in the blackness of the night she disappeared, possibly caused by combustion of coal dust from the large supply of coal she carried. Other theories involve the ship being sucked beneath the waves in a whirlpool. Most think the unusually slow roll of the Waratah, as described by Sawyer, made her vulnerable to a freak wave hitting at the wrong moment. If so, the ship would simply have capsized and gone to the bottom with little chance of anyone escaping.
The even more catastrophic loss of the Titanic three years later has dampened the memory of the Waratah’s fate, even though many similar structural and technical issues might have been involved in the loss of both vessels. We know what happened to the Titanic but the mystery of SS Waratah remains unsolved.
THE DIAMOND FLIGHT
It was March 1942. Japanese forces were three days away from taking Bandung on the island of Java. The predominantly Dutch European population was being evacuated to mainland Australia as quickly as possible. Early in the afternoon of 3 March, a Netherlands East Indies KLM Dakota passenger plane prepared to take off with eleven anxious passengers. As the Dakota was about to taxi to the runway the airfield manager handed the pilot, Ivan Smirnoff, a sealed brown paper package, telling him to look after it. A bank would take delivery of the parcel on arrival in Australia, the airfield manager said. Ivan’s mind was on more pressing matters, so he dropped the parcel into the first-aid chest and took off straightaway for the safety of Broome. It was around 1.15 p.m.
As the plane climbed into the sky, the Japanese were attacking Australian coastal communities far to the south. Smirnoff and his passengers, including a mother and her eighteen-month-old baby, made their nine-hour flight mostly without radio contact. They only began to realise that Broome had been devastated by a Japanese aerial attack just before sunrise when they received a terse message: ‘Airstrip is OK for the time being.’ Around 80 kilometres out of Broome they saw the thick pall of black smoke left behind by nine Mitsubishi Zero fighters.
Unfortunately, three of the Japanese fighters returning from the raid spotted the Dakota and raked it with bullets. The baby was hit in the arm and her mother shot twice in the chest. Another two passengers were wounded and Smirnoff was struck in the arms and hip. He desperately threw the plane into a steep spiralling descent, pursued closely by the fighters. As the port engine burst into flame he had to act quickly. Smirnoff turned the aircraft towards the beach, managing to bring it down more or less level and then to swing its front section into the sea, extinguishing the engine fire. One of the passengers, himself a pilot, would later recall the Russian national ‘put up the greatest show of flying anybody in the world will ever see’.
But although Smirnoff had piloted his plane, crew and passengers safely onto the sands of Carnot Bay, they were still in trouble. The Japanese strafed the beach, wounding another passenger, before they turned back towards their base in Timor. The passengers cautiously crawled out from beneath the Dakota where they had taken refuge. The radio was undamaged and they were able to send an SOS. Smirnoff asked a KLM official among the passengers to retrieve the stricken plane’s documents, including the sealed brown paper package, but the package was lost in the surf. With more immediate concerns, the passengers and crew made a temporary shelter under parachute cloth and hoped for a rapid rescue.
Later that morning a plane appeared. The bedraggled group on the isolated beach waved until they realised it was Japanese. The pilot dropped two bombs. Both missed. The plane disappeared but later another dropped two more bombs that fortunately failed to detonate. Despite these lucky escapes, the situation of the survivors was desperate. They needed fresh water but there was none to be found. By the next morning three of the wounded passengers were dead.
Smirnoff despatched two small groups to Broome, unaware that an Aboriginal man had seen the crash and reported it to the Beagle Bay Mission, about 40 kilometres away. A rescue party from the mission met the two groups sent from the Dakota. On 6 March, a Royal Air Force plane appeared above the survivors on the beach, dropping s
upplies and a message that the relief party would reach them the same night. But the party did not arrive until 3 a.m., too late to save the baby. The shattered survivors and their rescuers trekked slowly back to the mission and two days later were trucked to bombed-out Broome and relative safety.
It was only some time later in Melbourne that Captain Smirnoff became aware of the contents of the brown paper package he had been handed, when he was visited by a police detective and an official of the Commonwealth Bank. They had come to collect the mysterious parcel. Smirnoff told them what had happened and that the parcel was missing. What was in it?
The answer Smirnoff received was the start of an enduring mystery. The parcel had contained a cigar box filled with thousands of high quality diamonds rescued from Amsterdam before the invading German forces arrived. The gems had been on their way via the then Dutch East Indies to safekeeping in the vaults of the Australian Commonwealth Bank. They were valued at the time at half a million guilders, approximately twenty million dollars in today’s money. Where were they?
From this point, the ongoing story of this bloody journey becomes murky. After the survivors of the tragedy were rescued from the crash site, a local beachcomber and lugger master named Jack Palmer and the crew of a powerboat travelling with him came across the wreckage. They salvaged its remaining contents and Palmer found the package, either in the plane or in the surf, and quickly discovered its alluring contents. He divided the gems up, hiding most of them beneath the sand in an aluminium container and distributing the rest among his companions, telling them to keep quiet about the find.
Palmer was on his way to enlist in the army. He reached Perth and went to the district military commandant where he told the story of the crash and his discovery of the diamonds. To prove his point, he produced two salt cellars full of small stones to the astonished officer.
Great Australian Journeys Page 10