Lasseter's Legendary Lost Reef

By David Ian Groves

Headlines are made when a gold discovery that is claimed to be Lasseter’s legendary lost reef is made by the international company Krennerite Gold Corp. This is the most fabled lost gold reef in Australia’s long mining and exploration history, purported to have been discovered more than a century before. James Buchanan, a world-famous exploration geologist is intrigued because the region of the rediscovery is not known as a gold-bearing district but is frustrated in his efforts to access the discovery site to test his scepticism. Unexpectedly, James is approached by the Chinese chairman of the board of Krennerite, who is concerned about the veracity of the discovery and the damage to his reputation if any fraud is uncovered. He and James devise a plan which involves James and the chairman’s daughter Pearl posing as tourists in the Central Australian region near Alice Springs and Ayers Rock to remotely investigate the discovery site using a drone. How will they handle their contrasting western and Chinese cultures in the wild and dangerous Australian outback? Will conflict or romance evolve from their interaction? Will the reported discovery really represent Lasseter’s long-lost gold reef or are there more sinister motives and activities at play? Will rapidly evolving and challenging events played out in the Australian outback, in Western Australia, and China make positive or negative changes to the lives of those involved? Only time will tell!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Sep 30, 2022
• ISBN: 9781398431454

David Ian Groves

David Ian Groves is an economic geologist and Emeritus Professor at the University of Western Australia. He had a very successful academic career in terms of 500 highly cited published papers and book chapters, keynote and invited lectures, as well as mentorship of many outstanding postgraduates. He has been awarded 14 medals and prizes, including the SEG Silver and Penrose Gold Medals and the SGA-Newmont Gold Medal, and being inducted into the Australian Academy of Sciences as a Fellow. Since his retirement from UWA, David has been made a National Geoscience Champion by the Australian Geoscience Council, one of the 125 Faces of Geoscience and AIMM Distinguished Lecturer for 2020 by the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy. He has continued his academic career at the China University of Geosciences in Beijing (CUGB), and consulted to industry, being involved in greenfield gold discoveries in Tanzania, Ethiopia, and Canada.

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About the Author

David Groves PhD, DSc is Emeritus Professor at the University of Western Australia and Visiting Professor at China University of Geosciences Beijing. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and has received numerous international medals and awards for his research and teaching in mineral deposit geology. On semi-retirement, he commenced writing novels using his international experience, with this being his sixth, including Naughty in Pink and its sequel Naughty in Australia for children and the two precursors to this novel entitled The Plagues’ Protocol and King Solomon’s Gold following his first novel The Digital Apocalypse.

Dedication

This book is dedicated to my extended family past and present, particularly to my wife, Suzanne; children, Annabel and Iain; and grandchildren, Matthew, James, Joshua, and Kate; plus Joan and David McKelvey.

Copyright Information ©

David Ian Groves 2022

The right of David Ian Groves to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781398431447 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781398431454 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published 2022

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd®

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Canary Wharf

London

E14 5AA

Acknowledgement

I am indebted to my wife, Suzanne Groves, for carefully editing and humanising a draft manuscript. I would also like to thank Liang Zhang who provided advice on the authenticity of the behaviour and customs of the Chinese characters portrayed in the novel.

Chapter 1

The young man sat low, half slumped, in the saddle of his perspiring horse as he tried to nullify the stifling heat of the day under the relentless blue sky. He had left Alice Springs ten days earlier on a direct course towards Kalgoorlie in Western Australia and was now nearly out of water and rations. Half delirious, he prayed that he would soon meet a band of friendly aborigines or another rare traveller who could direct him to a soak or billabong where he could find water.

As he raised his eyes and peered beneath his hat, he saw again the infinite vastness of distant horizons defined by distant hazy ranges he thought must be the Musgrave Ranges as he had left the MacDonnell Ranges far behind. He stared out at the lifeless red monotony of the landscape, dotted by clumps of saltbush and mulga scrub and ghostly termite mounds and began to despair. Looking up, he noticed what appeared to be small flashes of light in the distance. Urging his weary horse forward, he realised that he was seeing glints of light reflecting from discontinuous, low white rubbly mounds up to a metre high, which appeared much higher in the flat red landscape. He rode slowly across and wondered if he was hallucinating because there were coarse specks of what looked like gold scattered throughout a large vein or reef of milky white quartz with some small apple-green patches. He rubbed his eyes to make sure that he wasn’t dreaming and was somewhat reassured by salty water from his tears blurring his vision. From the apparent large extent of the low rubbly quartz outcrop, he thought this could be a major new find. Dismounting from his horse, he pulled a pocketknife from his pocket and easily scratched the soft yellow-orange metal, hardly believing his luck as everything was confirming that this was indeed gold.

He had no hammer, so used some rounded quartz pebbles to break off a few gold-bearing pieces of the quartz vein which he put into his saddle bags. These could be used later as samples to be analysed for gold at one of the assay laboratories in Kalgoorlie, now the site of extensive gold mining. He didn’t know his position accurately but guessed from his travel time that he was somewhere near the border between the Northern Territory and Western Australia. He took some bearings on the distant hazy ranges with his compass and made a sketch of the locality, knowing that he had to return to this place if he survived the westward journey. That night, he ate the last of his rations and all but the last dregs of his water which he shared with his horse. Rolling himself up in his swag, he slept and dreamed of finding a nearby waterhole that would ensure his survival and then imagined the future wealth that his discovery could bring if the yellow mineral was indeed gold, as he was almost certain it was, and the quartz reef was as extensive as it appeared.

He did not remember falling exhausted and dehydrated from his horse early on the following day under a scorching hot sun. He awoke, semi-delirious, on a camp stretcher in a tent within a small camp. As he stirred, he saw a man standing beside the bed offering him some water and hard biscuits. He sat up suddenly, almost blacking out as he did so, and reached out for his saddlebags lying next to his bed. Frantically, he searched for the quartz specimens with the specks of gold and his sketch map, but they were gone.

What happened to me? he asked the stranger while gulping down the water as fast as he could.

You were found unconscious by an Afghan camel driver who brought you here, replied the stranger, introducing himself as a surveyor traversing the Australian outback. What were you looking for just now in your pack?

The young man was now very confused. Had he indeed discovered a gold reef and had the Afghan camel driver removed the evidence of the gold-rich quartz, or was it all a hallucination? He explained the dilemma to the surveyor and promised that if he provided him with provisions to reach Kalgoorlie, he would contact him again so that they could return to the area and make a search for the gold reef.

However, he failed to rediscover its location with the outback surveyor and then tried unsuccessfully for many years to raise money to fund an exploration program to find the reef. Over 30 years later, during the Great Depression, he did raise funds for a sophisticated (for that time) search, but dissension, disappointment and disbelief ended in disbandment of the expedition and his eventual tragic death, aged just 51 years.

Harold Bell Lasseter would never have believed that Lasseter’s Reef would become the most famous lost gold-reef legend in Australian folklore, nor be the subject of a novel, three movies, several TV documentaries and seven songs. Although the ‘holy grail’ for gold prospectors, no one, not even Bob Lasseter, Harold’s son, has rediscovered the reef: that is, at least not before 2025.

Chapter 2

As normal, James Buchanan arrived early at his business class window seat on the South African Airways flight from Johannesburg to Perth in Western Australia, having travelled down from Dar es Salaam in Tanzania earlier that day. He had left his partner Naomi in Mwanza, on the shores of Lake Victoria, the day before and as usual, stayed overnight at the Sea Cliff Hotel. He sat and started to contemplate the series of events that had led to him now being on this long flight. James remembered with pleasure the flight from Australia to South Africa almost two years earlier where he had first met BAT agent Matt Kawolski, kick-starting a series of adventures that had completely changed his life.

He had watched from afar the unfolding saga of the plague-like incidents that had gripped the US and threatened its economy. He had concluded that the incidents were not motivated by religion but by greed related to a major gold discovery in Amazonia. This had led him to contact Matt Kawolski and, through him, President Caitlin Custer in Washington DC, whose investigations via the Bureau for Anti-Terrorism (BAT) had validated James’ hypothesis. This had led to the successful resolution of the matter via a Navy SEAL’s raid into the gold discovery site in Amazonia, with James receiving much kudos from the president and an invitation to attend her tumultuous state visit to Amazonia that had initiated the love affair between Matt and the beautiful president.

A conversation with a gold prospector on a visit to the site of the gold discovery in Amazonia had led him on a chase to discover the fabled King Solomon’s mines. He soon realised that such mines couldn’t exist in Africa, leading him instead to search for a gold treasure romantically linked to King Solomon. His concept that this treasure was hidden in the main solid rock tower at the Great Zimbabwe had been endorsed by President Custer, with excavations under the control of the Smithsonian Institute leading to the discovery of the golden birds of Zimbabwe amongst other gold treasure. This had been a world sensation and placed him on the global stage through his connection with President Custer, who was now engaged to his friend Matt.

James was now on his way to Perth to be interviewed for a professorship in exploration geoscience which had been endowed by the Smithsonian Institute at the University of Australia Perth (UAP) to honour a contract in gratitude for his services. The chancellor had indicated that the position was essentially designated for James but that he had to satisfy UAP regulations by attending an interview and being viewed as the outstanding candidate. This was to involve two public talks on his logical thinking that led to both his success in gold exploration and his solution of international puzzles and a formal interview by UAP senior staff.

James had prepared well with help from the US President’s office staff, who had collated all news videos related to his adventures that had involved Caitlin Custer. Suspecting that the interview could involve some difficult, left-field questions, James had also read several books and journal special issues about all types of mineral deposits, not just gold. The next few days would be quite hectic and potentially stressful, so he ate a light meal with a glass of Cape Blanc de Blanc and joined his African neighbour in a light sleep.

Chapter 3

James awoke to receive a hot towel to refresh his face, a small glass of wine and some mixed nuts. He gazed out of the window as the plane flew parallel to the coastline that was illuminated by street and house lights as it was now late evening and again wondered at how spread out Perth had become relative to its population. He always thought at times like this that we each felt important in our own circle but were really insignificant in the grander scheme of life as we looked down from on high like gods in the sky. He had little time to dwell on this as the plane landed smoothly and taxied to its parking bay.

As usual, as a light traveller, James took down his small case and laptop bag from the overhead locker and headed quickly for the exit using the forward business class cabin to his advantage. He had looked up incoming flights at that time of the evening and realised that there could be long queues and delays as several flights were arriving from Asian destinations within an hour of the South African Airways flight. He was, therefore, pleasantly surprised when he sailed through customs, skirted around the crowds seeking their suitcases on the revolving bag collection bays and exited rapidly.

As he went through the automatic glass door, he saw a couple of cameramen and two smartly dressed young women with microphones approach. He involuntarily looked over his shoulder to check who the celebrity might be, saw no one and realised they were there to meet him.

How was the flight, James? asked one of the female reporters with great originality, thrusting the microphone almost up his nose.

It was fine, but why the fuss about my arrival, Selina? asked James, peering at her press badge.

Before she could answer, the other reporter, Kate, answered, Channel 7 heard you were here to give some public talks on the US plague incidents and discovery of the golden Zimbabwe birds. We understand that the venue is now sold out and wondered if this was because of a social media story that President Custer may attend your talks.

James had no idea of the venue for his talks but was very surprised they were so popular. All he could say was, I’m pleased my talks are to be so well attended, but the president is too busy with her re-election campaign to leave the US at this time. She may visit Perth in the future if re-elected, but as far as I know, she has no definite plans.

How well do you know her and what’s she like? asked Selina.

I’ve met her in the US and Amazonia, both formally and informally. She’s a most remarkable woman. Very impressive in all respects! he replied, hoping that a jealous Naomi didn’t catch the telecast.

As the two reporters jostled for position and James