MUCH LORE AND legend is closely tied to places. Such stories often help to forge and maintain a common sense of identity. They may not be widely known outside the locality where they arose, though some are local variants of tales told around the world. A few, however—like that of the Min Min lights—manage to spread widely without losing their links with the places of their birth.
Place-specific stories often contain explanations for the names of local landmarks or for local customs. A large group of these type of legends concerns buried, or otherwise lost, treasure.
The man who sold his Dreaming
Australia’s earliest local tales are, of course, those of the first Australians. And as this next one shows, they are not necessarily set in the mythological world before European settlement. Collected by Roland Robinson from an Aboriginal man named Bob Turnbull, it is a good example of the way indigenous and settler traditions often coalesce. As well as explaining how the local town got its name, it is a cautionary tale about giving up what is most important to you. The term jurraveel, introduced near the end of the story, means ‘a sacred place’, to which Frank Jock was connected by his totem, a bird similar to a bantam rooster.
You know that water-hen with the red beak? He sings out ‘Kerk’, and ‘Kerk’, well, that bird is my totem. Every dark feller has a totem. It’s his spirit. It looks after him and warns him of any danger. In my tribe, the Bunjalung tribe of the Richmond River, his name is geeyarng. And our native name for a totem is barnyunbee.
I want to tell you about a totem that belonged to a dark feller named Frank Jock. Frank Jock had a totem that was something like a little bantam rooster. Everyone would hear this bird singing out. They’d go to look for him, but they could never find him.
Away on the mountain in the lantana, he’d be singing out. He was sort of minding that place, looking after it, you’d say.
Well, the mayor of Coraki wanted to make a quarry in that mountain. There was the best kind of blue metal there. He sent the men of the council to that place. They put three charges, one after another, into the rock. But not one of those charges would go off.
There was a dark feller in the gang by the name of Andrew Henry. He told the mayor of Coraki that he’d have to go and have a talk to Frank Jock. The mayor would have to ask Frank if he could do something so that they could blow up this mountain and make a quarry in it.
The mayor sent for Frank Jock, he said he wanted to see him. ‘Look,’ the mayor said to Frank, ‘can you let us blow this mountain up?’
‘All right,’ Frank said, ‘but you’ll have to pay me.’
So the mayor gave Frank five gold sovereigns and two bottles of rum to let the council blow up the mountain.
The council men went back to the mountain and they put in one big charge. When it went off, it blew the side right out of the mountain. The explosion shook Coraki. A big spout of black water rushed up out of the mountainside. The council had to wait a long time until all the water cleared away before they could work the quarry.
The little bantam rooster, he disappeared. He didn’t sing out any more. Jurraveel I can see you know all about this black-feller business.
Well, after the mountain was blown up, Frank Jock, the owner of that jurraveel, began to get sick. In three weeks he was dead. You see, like it says in the Bible, he’d sold his birthright. It was the same as killing him. He sold his jurraveel to the mayor of the town.
That’s why we call it in our language Gurrigai, meaning ‘blowing up the mountain’. That’s how Coraki got its name.
After Bob Turnbull had finished telling the story, he said to Roland Robinson, ‘You know, I’ve been looking for years for a feller like you to write these stories down. These stories are dying out. They’re lost to the young people. I’d like to think that one day the young people will read these stories and say, “These stories belong to us.”’
Naming places
The American humorist and travel writer Mark Twain visited Australia in the late 1890s. A master yarn spinner and teller of tall tales himself, Twain was mildly sceptical when told by a local liar that the Blue Mountains of New South Wales had been thrown up by the rabbits then plaguing the country. Tongue in cheek, Twain wrote that the rabbit plague ‘could account for one mountain, but not for a mountain range, it seems to me. It is too large an order.’ Whether this was the origin of the long-running joke about Australians outdoing Americans in the size of their lies, the rabbit-pile theory certainly fits into it.
In 1989, folklorists collected at least six different stories about the origins of the Queensland town of Ravenshoe. These included the suggestion that someone had once seen some ravens or crows playing with an old shoe on the creek bank—despite the fact that the name is pronounced Ravens-hoe. (Hoe, or Hoo, is the name of a place in Norfolk). There was also an elaborate story about how local streams, when viewed from the air, meet in the shape of a crow’s foot. Many of the people who supplied these stories thought the town’s original name, Cedar Creek, was a much better choice.
Locals say Crows Nest, Queensland, is so named because Aborigines called the place something like ‘home of the crows’. A more colourful version of this story holds that during the early days of settlement, an Aboriginal man lived in a hollow tree in the town, from which vantage point he provided directions to bullock drivers and cedar getters as well as acting as an unofficial post office. It is said that the settlers called him Jimmy Crow and his tree Jimmy Crow’s Nest, a contraction of which became the town’s name.
Whipstick, near Bendigo in Victoria, is an area of mallee scrub first encountered by gold diggers. As some locals told folklorist Peter Ellis, the scrub was almost impenetrable, twisted about with creepers that whipped back into men’s faces as they struggled through it or tried to cut it down. Other people claimed that Whipstick was named after the whip handles made from the scrub by bullock drivers.
Another story from the goldfields explained how Dunolly got its name. A couple were driving their horse-drawn cart along a track. The woman, whose name was Olive, asked her husband to stop and went to squat behind a bush. After a while, her husband became impatient and called out, ‘Are you done, Ollie?’
Leatherass Gully is another goldfields name that cries out for a foundation legend. In this case, it’s based on an old fossicker who had a leather patch on the seat of his worn-out trousers. The original spelling was Leatherarse, but that was deemed vulgar, so it was replaced by Leatherass.
Walkaway, near Geraldton, Western Australia, was established in the 1850s and now has a population of 612. Some say its name is derived from waggawah, an Aboriginal word meaning either camping place, a break in the hills, or the hill of the dogs. One tradition has it that some of the earliest settlers in the district left when their wheat crop failed. When the Aborigines were asked what happened to them, they replied: ‘Him walk away.’ Another version that alludes to these early farmers’ struggles is heartbreakingly succinct: ‘If you saw the place, you’d walk away too!’ Yet another version involves the railway line that for a time terminated near Walkaway: passengers who wanted to go further north were told they would have to walk a way.
The dramatic legend of Govetts Leap, in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, tells of an escaped convict turned bushranger named Govett who, pursued by troopers, found himself trapped on the edge of a 300-metre cliff. Preferring death to capture, he wheeled his horse around and rode it over the edge. In fact, the place was named after a colonial assistant surveyor, William Govett, who discovered the site in 1831. It is possible that the more romantic version originated from the observations of the English novelist Anthony Trollope, who travelled through Australia during the early 1870s. In his sometimes abrasive account of that trip, Australia and New Zealand, Trollope wrote:
. . . there is a ravine called Govett’s Leap. Mr. Govett was, I believe, simply a government surveyor, who never made a leap into the place at all. Had he done so, it would certainly have been effectual for putting an end to his earthly sorrows. I had hoped, when I heard the name, to find that some interesting but murderous bushranger had on that spot baffled his pursuers and braved eternity—but I was informed that a government surveyor had visited the spot, had named it, and had gone home again. No one seeing it could fail to expect better things from such a spot and such a name.
The Lone Pine seedlings
The heroism and slaughter of the Gallipoli campaign in World War I gave rise to one of Australia’s most enduring national stories: the legend of Anzac. Closely bound up with it are tales related to Lone Pine. This was, on the day of the landings at Gallipoli, part of a ridge officially named 400 Plateau. Australian troops called it Lonesome (later Lone) Pine for a single, stunted tree that rose above the scrub. In August 1915, Lone Pine was seared into Australian memory when a terrible battle took place there. More than 2000 Australians were killed or wounded, and seven won the Victoria Cross. Each Anzac Day, Lone Pine cemetery is the site of the official Australian memorial service at Gallipoli.
Today, Australia is dotted with trees said to be descended from the original lone pine. There are various stories about the origins of these symbolic trees. According to one of these, a Lance Corporal Benjamin Smith witnessed the death of his brother at Lone Pine and later pocketed a cone from the by-then felled pine tree that the Turks had used to cover their trenches. He sent it home to his mother who kept the cone for some years, eventually growing two seedlings from it. One of these was sent to Inverell, New South Wales, the place where her dead son had enlisted. Here it was planted and grew until it had to be cut down in 2007. In 1929, Smith’s mother sent another seedling to Canberra, where it was planted in the Yarralumla nursery. In 1934, the visiting Duke of Gloucester planted this tree in the grounds of the Australian War Memorial.
Although the War Memorial’s Lone Pine is not often featured in official ceremonies, its existence is well known in the Australian community. When the tree was damaged by a storm in December 2008, the incident received nationwide media coverage. Memorial staff also report that ‘small wreaths, home-made posies and the occasional red poppy are sometimes seen resting at its base’.
Another story has it that a Sergeant Keith McDowell of the 24th Battalion also souvenired a Lone Pine cone and kept it with him until the war’s end when he returned safely to Victoria, giving the cone to his aunt, Mrs Emma Gray, who lived near Warrnambool. Mrs Gray kept the cone for a decade or so until she too propagated four seedlings. These were planted variously throughout Victoria from 1933, in Wattle Park and the Shrine of Rememberance in Melbourne, and the Soldiers Memorial Hall, The Sisters, and at Warrnambool Botanic Gardens. However, researchers say they have found no such digger as Sergeant Keith McDowell and the battalion to which he supposedly belonged did not reach Gallipoli until a month after Lone Pine. Nor, it seems, were any Smiths involved in the Lone Pine battle. Nonetheless, the legend of the Lone Pine seedlings is now deeply rooted, and the trees so widely distributed (two seedlings were planted at Gallipoli for the 75th anniversary of the battle) that no amount of historical fact will weaken it.
Like most such legends, the Lone Pine story arises from a powerful national desire for tangible connections to long-ago tragedies. If the connections are incomplete, explanatory tales are spun to bridge the gaps. While the Lone Pines are an unusually stark example of the process, similar needs underlie many national traditions, including the Anzac dawn service.
The first dawn service
Australia’s single most important national ritual is Anzac Day. Before sunrise each 25 April, people gather at memorials all over the country to begin the day with prayers for the fallen of all wars. This dawn service varies in form from place to place and has evolved over time to suit a variety of local needs and traditions. Its basic meaning, however, remains the same. In the years immediately after World War I, the services were relatively simple, spontaneous ceremonies. Over time they have become more elaborate as Anzac Day has developed into what is arguably a more consensual expression of national identity than Australia Day, the anniversary of the first settlement. Given its significance and its emotional resonance, it is not surprising that there are a number of different versions of the dawn service’s origins.
The military version is that the ceremony is derived from the ‘stand-to’, in which soldiers were put on full alert to guard against a pre-dawn (or post-sunset) attack. Great War veterans are said to have remembered stand-to as a peaceful moment of the day in which the bonds of comradeship were keenly felt. Some began to hold informal stand-to ceremonies on Anzac Day, their significance increased by the dawn timing of the first Gallipoli landings. The order to stand-to would be given. Then there would be two minutes’ silence, after which a lone bugler would play the Last Post call and finally the Reveille. It is unlikely that these events were referred to as services, as there were no clergy present and no sermons or speeches. These elements of formality crept in from 1927, when the first official dawn service was held at the Cenotaph in central Sydney.
This event has its own foundation legend. According to the story, five members of the Australian Legion of Ex-Service Clubs were on their unsteady way home in the early hours of Anzac Day after a celebratory evening. As they rolled past the Cenotaph they saw an elderly woman laying a wreath in memory of a lost soldier. The roisterers were so shamed and sobered by this dignified act of commemoration that they joined the woman in silent tribute and prayer. Inspired by this experience, the men decided to conduct a wreath-laying ceremony at the Cenotaph at dawn the following year, 1927. More and more people began to join them, including government dignitaries and representatives of the clergy and the military.
In Albany, Western Australia, the first dawn service took a different form. At 4 a.m. on the day the first Anzac convoy left the town, the Anglican reverend Arthur Ernest White conducted a service for members of the 44th Battalion, AIF. After serving in the war, White returned to Albany. There, at dawn on 25 April 1923, he led a small group of parishioners up nearby Mount Clarence. As they watched the sun rise over King George Sound, a man in a boat threw a wreath onto the water. White recited the lines: ‘As the sun rises and goeth down, we will remember them’—a fusion of a Biblical verse and poet Laurence Binyon’s ‘At the going down of the sun and in the morning/We will remember them.’ News of this simple but moving observance—again with no strong religious overtones, despite a clergyman’s presence—is said to have spread rapidly, and the ritual was adapted and adopted in many other communities.
Though well attested, this version does have a rival in Queensland. There, it is said that the first dawn service took place at 4 a.m. on Anzac Day, 1919. A small party led by a Captain Harrington placed flowers on the graves and memorials of World War I soldiers in Toowoomba, then drank to the memory of their fallen comrades. The observance was repeated, the Last Post and Reveille bugle calls were added, and other communities followed suit.
These different accounts of the origins of the dawn service have many features in common, but each is adapted to its own locality. Like the dawn service itself, they have become part of the edifice of legend that has formed around the Anzac tradition.
Lasseter’s Reef
Many of Australia’s wilder places have a tale of lost treasure. It may be in a reef, a cave, a river or under the ground; sometimes it involves secret maps, indigenous custodians or even pirates. Despite varying details, these legends are suspiciously similar—suggesting that they are more likely to be rooted in folklore than fact. The best known of all is the legend of the ill-fated Lasseter.
In Billy Marshall-Stoneking’s book Lasseter: the making of a legend, he quotes the observation of a Papunya man named Shorty Lungkarta that Australians’ obsession with Lasseter’s ‘lost’ gold reef is just ‘a whitefella dreaming’. It’s a perceptive judgement. Marshall-Stoneking said he was inspired to investigate Lasseter’s story by memories of the 1956 movie Green Fire—about a ‘lost’ South American emerald mine—in which Stewart Granger’s character mentions ‘Lasseter’s Reef’. Green Fire is only one of innumerable films and novels that deal with the El Dorado get-rich-quick theme of the quest for a fabulous treasure.
The ‘mystery’, the history and the folklore of Lasseter’s Reef have been kicking around Australia for over a century. They—and the numerous books, articles and fruitless expeditions the legend has spawned—are a revealing insight into human acquisitiveness.
In 1929 a man named Lewis Harold Bell Lasseter claimed that, years before, he had become lost in central Australia. During his wanderings, he said, he had discovered a reef of gold with nuggests ‘as thick as plums in a pudding’, but had been unable to mark or otherwise document its location. He said he had been saved from certain death by an Afghan cameleer. He claimed that three years later, in partnership with another man, he had managed to locate the reef. Because their watches were slow, however, the bearings they took were wrong and the reef was lost again.
In 1930, with backing from a trade union leader and other investors, Lasseter formed the Central Australian Gold Company, which mounted a large expedition. It was plagued with mishaps almost from the first. Eventually, after considerable strife and bickering, the party split up. Lasseter was stranded in the desert, and died in the Petermann Ranges, southwest of Alice Springs, probably in January 1931. The famous bushman Bob Buck was commissioned by the company to find Lasseter. After considerable hardship and danger, he found and, allegedly, buried Lasseter’s remains, and retrieved the dead prospector’s diary and some letters.
These papers, which included a map of the supposed location of the reef, triggered a futher series of expeditions. The fact that these ended in failure did nothing to quash the legend. At least eight books have been written about Lasseter and his treasure, the best known of which is Ion Idriess’s semi-fictional and often-reprinted Lasseter’s Last Ride (1931).
In 1957, the American explorer Lowell Thomas made a television documentary on the story that included interviews with the ageing Bob Buck and the opening of Lasseter’s grave. This was intended to settle speculation that the remains Buck buried were not those of Lasseter and that the prospector had made his way to safety, only to disappear into either an obscure but wealthy life or anonymous shame. Whatever the truth, a number of people claimed to have seen or met Lasseter in Australia or overseas after the date of his death.
And there is a curse. One of the expedition members took a churinga, a sacred Aboriginal artefact, back to England. Almost immediately, he was plagued by misfortune; there were deaths in the family and he fell into a depression. Finally, he destroyed the precious but cursed object.
In some ways a uniquely Australian legend, the story of Lasseter’s Reef neatly fits the template common to ‘lost treasure’ folklore around the world: an intrepid male explorer stumbles on a fabulous trove but loses its location in his struggle to return to civilisation alive. Perhaps he has a sample of the find. Invariably he has a map or a diary, or some other clue, either too cryptic to be useful or itself mislaid. These scant signs and indications entice others to embark on vain—even fatal—searches. Disturbing the treasure or coming too close to it may arouse its native guardians or trigger some dreadful curse. The treasure remains lost.
Yet the story lives on. We don’t want to let go of Lasseter and his reef. The story is a variant on El Dorado, a universal beacon for the greedy. But it also stirs specifically Australian feelings: the awe and fear that, even in the jet age, the ‘dead heart’ still provokes.
The carpet of silver
On 5 July 1834, the Perth Gazette carried an intriguing report of a shipwreck.
Astrange report has just reached us, communicated to Parker, of Guildford, by some natives, that a vessel had been seen wrecked on the beach, a considerable distance to the northward. The story has been handed from tribe to tribe until it has reached our natives and runs as follows. We give it of course without implicitly relying on its accuracy, but the account is sufficiently authenticated to excite well-founded suspicions that some accident has happened. It appears the wreck has been lying on shore for 6 moons, or months, and the distance from this is said to be 30 day’s journey, or about 400 miles. When the water is low, the natives are said to go on board, and bring from the wreck ‘white money’; on money being shown to the native who brought the report, he picked out a dollar, as a similar piece to the money he had seen. Some steps should be immediately taken to establish or refute this statement: the native can soon be found. He is said to be importunate that soldier man, and white man, with horse, should go to the wreck, volunteering to escort them. We shall look with anxiety for further information upon this point.
This news was met with some scepticism, but the following Saturday the paper published a fresh version of the story. In this rendition, the wreck, or ‘broke boat’, as the Aborigines called it, also had survivors.
The report we gave publicity to last week respecting the supposed wreck of a vessel to the northward, has met with some farther confirmation, and has attracted the attention of the local Government. A Council was held on Wednesday last (we believe) expressly for the purpose of taking this subject into consideration, and, after a diligent inquiry, it was thought expedient to make arrangements for despatching an expedition to the northward, which will be immediately carried into effect. This, the winter season, rendering a land expedition both dangerous, and, in every probability, futile, it has been determined to charter the Monkey (a small vessel, now lying in our harbour) to proceed immediately to Shark’s Bay, somewhere about the distance described at which the wreck may be expected to be fallen in with, where Mr. H. M. Ommanney, of the Survey Department, and a party under his directions, will be landed to traverse the coast north and south, the Monkey remaining as a depot from whence they will draw their supplies, to enable them to extend their search in either direction . . .
. . . The following we believe to be the substance of the information conveyed to the Government: about a week or ten days since, Tonguin and Weenat came to Parker’s and gave him and his sons to understand, that they (Tonguin and Weenat) had recently learned from some of the northern tribes (who appear to be indiscriminately referred to under the name of Waylo men, or Weelmen) that a ship was wrecked (‘boat broke’) on the coast to the northward, about 30 (native) days walk from the Swan—that there was white money plenty lying on the beach for several yards, as thick as seed vessels under a red gum tree. On some article of brass being shewn, they said that was not like the colour of the money; but on a dollar being shewn, they recognized it immediately as the kind of money they meant: but laid the dollar on the ground and drawing a somewhat larger circle round it with the finger, said ‘the money was like that’. They represented that the wreck had been seen six moons ago, and that all the white men were dead: none, as it is supposed, having been then seen by their informants, the Weelmen. They added that, at low water, the natives could reach the wreck, which had blankets (sails) flying about it: from which it is presumed that the supposed vessel may not have entirely lost her masts on first striking, and they stuck up three sticks in a manner which led Parker’s sons to understand that the wreck they were attempting to describe had three masts, but Parker himself did not infer the same meaning.
A day or two after Tonguin’s visit, Moiley Dibbin called at Parker’s with further information on the same subject, but derived from the same distant source; namely, the Weelmen. Moiley had been informed by some of the latter that there were several white men, represented to be of very large stature, ladies and ‘plenty piccaninnie’—that they were living in houses made of canvas and wood (pointing out these materials, among several shewn to him)—that there are five such houses, two large and three small—that they are not on a river but on the open sea (‘Gabby England come’)—that the sea coast, at the site of the wreck, takes a bend easterly into an apparent bay (as described by Moiley on the ground)—that the spot where the white money is strewed on the beach is some (indefinite) distance from the spot where the houses are and more within the bay—that the gabby (surf) breaks with very great noise where the money is, and as it runs back, the Weelmen run forward and pick it up—that the white men gave the Weelmen some gentlemen’s (white) biscuit, and the latter gave in return spears, shields, &c.—that they, Moiley, Tonguin, and Weenat, had never seen the wreck or the white men, and were afraid to go through the territories of the Weelmen, who are cannibals: but that they intend to go as far as the Waylo country, and then coo-ee to the Weelmen, who will come to meet them and give them some of the white money—and that the white men then could walk to the houses at the wreck in ten days—but though the word walk be used, there can be little doubt that Moiley alludes to a ‘walk—on horseback’.
The prospect of rescuing white people from the aftermath of shipwreck and perhaps the depredations of the ‘natives’, together with the lure of money, electrified the small settlement. A few months before, some other Aborigines from the north had brought a few British coins into Perth, claiming that they had received them from the fearsome ‘Wayl men’. This only increased people’s eagerness to find out more, and plans were made for a boat to sail north in search of the wreck.
At this point, a local Aboriginal leader named Weeip enters the story. He had recently been outlawed for his resistance to colonial rule, and his son had been taken as, in effect, a hostage by the administration of Governor James Stirling. Hoping to win his son back, Weeip volunteered to travel north to see what he could discover. He returned in early August, claiming he had been told by the northern people that there were definitely no survivors of the mysterious wreck, but that there was plenty of ‘white money’. The settlers were sceptical, but the Governor released Weeip’s son all the same in return for Weeip’s promise of good behaviour. The Monkey returned in October, having found nothing but some worm-eaten teak and fir wreckage on reefs off Dirk Hartog Island.
Meanwhile, however, other odd stories had begun to circulate. In July, soon after the Perth Gazette’s first story on the ‘wreck’, some Aborigines reported that they had contact with a party of whites living about eighty kilometres inland from the Perth colony. As there was no known settlement at that distance from the colony, this was astounding news. Who these people might have been, if they ever existed, is a mystery. Although highly unlikely, it is conceivable that a group had landed unnoticed and trekked inland to settle in the wilds.
It was eventually determined that the shipwreck stories were old. They had been passed from one generation to the next for perhaps a century or more. Stories passed on in this way tend to compress time spans. In this case, the ‘broke boat’ and the ‘white money’ did have a basis in fact, but that did not become clear until 1927, when the wreck of the Dutch East Indiaman Zuytdorp was first located. She had foundered in 1712, and perhaps thirty survivors had mysteriously disappeared into the continent’s vast emptiness. The only evidence of their coming was the wreckage of their craft and a sandy bottom carpeted in silver coins—a scene that bore out the Aboriginal story of 1834.
The stories of Lasseter’s Reef and the carpet of silver are local legends that have travelled far from their points of origin. Australia has many other tales of hidden, sunken, buried or otherwise ‘lost’ treasures that are little known outside their local regions and perhaps to a few enthusiastic treasure hunters.
The dead horse treasure
One frontier lost-treasure yarn has no map, but involves luck, human frailty and the skeleton of a horse.
Brock’s Creek is about 160 kilometres southwest of Darwin. A group of men made a lucky strike on a very rich find there in 1880. Swearing off the grog, they worked hard to get as much of the gold into the saddle-packs of one of their horses, before the wet season and lack of food overcame them. Within a week they had the horses saddled and ready to go with a fortune in the saddle-packs. They decided to have one drink to celebrate their good fortune. The one became two and then too many. Their drunken merrymaking frightened the horses away, including the one carrying the gold. Despite months of desperate searching, the men never found the horses which would have perished fairly quickly.
It is said that prospectors in the Northern Territory still look closely at any bones they find in the hope that they may stumble again across the dead horse treasure.
The silver reef
The silver reef is a fabulously rich lode said to be located somewhere in the remote north between Wyndham and King Sound in Western Australia’s Kimberley region.
According to one version of the tale, the reef was discovered by a Malay merchant called Hadji Ibrahim some time before European colonisation took place in the area in 1829. After selling a load of silver ore from the trove in Macassar, in what is now Indonesia, Ibrahim returned for more, only to be shipwrecked and drowned. But the merchant had kept a journal of his voyages and recorded all the details of his find—minus its location.
But the story continues. A colourfully named local—‘Mad Jack’—was found dead in his cutter in 1909 near Yampi Sound. Several spear wounds had pierced his body and his head had been split open with a tomahawk. The discoverers of the body found a few ounces of gold in the cabin as well as a kerosene tin full of silver ore.
Some years later, an employee of Ibrahim’s great grandson became obsessed with the legend of the silver reef and made many visits to the area to find it. He was last seen in 1939 travelling through the Kimberley with a group of Aborigines. As far as anyone knows, the reef is still lost.
Black Jack’s booty
Another story in the lost-treasure vein has elements of the classic buccaneer’s trove, a staple element of pirate lore.
Long before the permanent European settlement of Western Australia’s Swan River Colony in 1829, the southern coasts of Australia attracted mainly American whalers and sealers. The whalers usually based themselves on islands where there were supplies of fresh water, establishing semi-permanent settlements and stocking the islands with livestock, including rabbits. They were often, at least in part, responsible for the subsequent hostilities between the indigenous inhabitants and the settlers who arrived later as they terrorised many of the coastal Aboriginal groups. The oral traditions of these communities still hold tales of narrow escapes from one such identity known as Black Jack.
An African-American, Jack was leader of a gang of sealers and whalers operating during the 1830s. He and his crew of cutthroats were based on Middle Island in the Recherche Archipelago, off what is now Esperance. Piracy was also part of Jack’s repertoire and he and his gang were rumoured to have carefully hidden away a horde of treasure for future use. Despite the softening influence of an English lover named Dorothea, Jack was almost as brutal towards his own men as he was to his victims. Eventually, the gang members became sufficiently aggravated by this ill treatment and to shoot Jack in the head while he slept.
But despite frantic searching, the murderers were unable to find where Jack had stashed his loot, and so another lost treasure tradition began, attracting at least one modern day hunt for Black Jack’s booty.