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Australia 2012
Directed by
Luke Walker
101 minutes
Rated G

Reviewed by
Bernard Hemingway
3 stars

Lasseter's Bones

Synopsis: A documentary exploring the conflicting evidence for the legendary existence of Lasseter's Reef, a vast gold deposit hidden in the Dead Heart of Australia.

Along with the ill-fated Burke and Wills expedition, Harold Bell Lasseter's expedition in search of a lost gold reef in Central Australia, which he claimed to have originally found 20 years earlier, is one of the best-known stories of white man’s folly in the Australian Outback. He died in 1931 of exposure in the desert while looking for the reef but left behind a diary claiming to have found it, although no-one has since been able to verify the claim.

Lasseter's Bones explores the mix of facts, myth and lies that shape the Lasseter legend, hooking up with the explorer's now 85 year-old son, Bob, who is still searching the desert for the gold, and more importantly to him, the truth about his father.

Luke Walker’s documentary doesn’t lead us to the reef or for that matter isn’t even able to sort out whether the reef exists but it is nevertheless interesting on many levels. There’s the history and the jumble of inconsistencies that punch holes in Lasseter’s claim and which keep us on our speculative toes. Walker reveals Lasseter to be a man of extraordinary if undisciplined talent, a man who could well have found gold but was just as likely to have constructed an elaborate lie if he hadn’t and largely believe in it himself.

But best of all in his no frills, point-and-shoot one-camera film Walker gives us an engaging portrait of a way of life that now only exists in the splendid isolation of the Outback. Early in the film we see the 85 year old Bob Lasseter at the top of an A-frame ladder which he has set up on top of his 4-wheel-drive in the middle of nowhere on yet another of his annual trips into the desert. It’s a sight which is so frightening in its complete indifference to potential danger that it makes one realize how safe modern Australian life has become. But out there beyond the black stump it’s a different world, one still driven by the imagination and the spirit of the make-do, the same one that Harold Lasseter inhabited. Ultimately, Lasseter's Bones is about people not gold and that's what makes it work.

 

 

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