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He also had the prospects of getting the backing to go and find his gold reef when he hoped to be able to make up to my mother for some of the heart-ache he had caused her.

He eventually got the backing from a dubious crowd on the outer fringes of politics in N.S.W. at the time and the leadership of the expedition was put in the hands of a man named Blakeley who disliked my father intensely – almost from the beginning they where at loggerheads as Blakeley tried his very best to obtain from him the location of his reef which my father was too shrewd to give to him as he knew once he did that Blakeley would have no further need for him.

My mother received a note from him at this time saying that “things were not going as he expected – there was considerable friction between himself and the leader of the party and he had taken to sleeping in the truck with one eye open for his own protection as accidents can happen”. This letter was not addressed in his handwriting – as though he had slipped a note to someone he met on the quiet.

After a lot of mismanagement and wrangling he eventually went of with a dingo shooter named Johns. Not long after Johns returned to say they had had an argument during which he had shot and disabled my father's left arm and left him with some water and food and two camels – also at this time there was a great hunt on for two airmen that got themselves lost in that area and no one seemed to be unduly worried for some weeks over his continued non-appearance.

He suffered great privations but located his reef – only to find that it was in an area the blacks regarded as sacred near a burying ground – he pegged it and one evening his camels bolted with his precious water supply. The only thing he could do was try and get on friendly terms with the blacks by bartering the few possessions that remained with him for water and food.

His films and papers he used to bury under the ashes of his camp fires but the blacks used to watch and dig them up again and Bob Buck told me he saw some of the gins wearing the exposed film around their necks as they liked the red paper.

Finally he got weaker through lack of proper food the tribe abandoned him to fend for himself but an old blackfellow he called “warts” and his gin stayed with him until near the end and shared their few roots and ants etc. with him. However he died alone of dysentery and sandy blight in a lonely cave in the Peterman Ranges. The blacks came and put his body in a tree wrapped in bark as they do with their own for a certain period.

Meanwhile the crowd in Sydney contacted Bob Buck of Tempe Downs Station and got him to take his camels and black boys in search of Lasseter – Bob Buck told me that they insisted on him going about 100 miles out of his way to Illabilla to report where the party had stayed to make their headquarters. He said (when I saw him in Melbourne at the City Club Hotel) that if he had not had to do this he thought he would have got there before he died as he had not died very long before he found him. There had been much underhand doings in Sydney and we have had to prize every bit of information out of them as their sympathies were entirely with the family he left in Sydney.

Bob Buck

As nothing came of the mine we felt that there was no need to embarrass those children who were growing up ....

Over the years there have been many stupid and lying articles printed in various papers, just to use the Lasseter name to sell their papers. We feel that it is time the whole truth was printed, as I am the only living person who can give all the facts and dates pertaining to his life.

My mother died about 18 months after he did – her death was hastened by the grief over the way he suffered and died. She loved him all her life and forgave him for all the heart-ache and misery he caused her.