(Left) Lasseter in AIF uniform during World War I; (centre) Corner Inlet map; (right) Lasseter’s boat on display at Foster Museum
The man born Lewis Hubert Lasseter (1880-1931) has found a place in Australian folklore for not discovering a fabulously rich reef of gold in Central Australia after inducing a great many people to believe that he did. Despite such dubious claim to fame, he is commemorated in the Northern Territory in a number of ways, among them a casino hotel in Alice Springs named after him and a stretch of road taking visitors west from the Stuart Highway towards Uluru (Ayers Rock) and Kata Tjuta (The Olgas).
Lasseter’s name is also remembered these days in other parts of the country where he had a connection before the disastrous gold-seeking expedition of 1930 which culminated in his death from starvation and sickness while sheltering with Aboriginal people. Among these places is South Gippsland in Victoria, where Lasseter turned up mid-way through 1918.
World War I still had about six months to run when Lasseter arrived in the township of Toora with his wife and two daughters, after being discharged by the army on medical grounds—for a second time—in November 1917. Initially, he tried his hand at prospecting, and found work as a carpenter on soldier settlement homes. He was also employed surveying and repairing navigational beacons in Corner Inlet’s channels using a small boat.
Struggling to make ends meet, Lasseter was soon looking for other ways to improve his financial prospects and to this end he was not above playing the veterans’ card. Although he had never served outside Australia during the war, he did not hesitate to mislead people into thinking that he was a returned soldier.
Lasseter began applying for financial assistance from the government to buy a house and property at Welshpool, on the strength of his supposed army service. One letter he wrote at this time to a member of parliament was on notepaper describing himself as a builder and structural engineer, although there is no evidence he possessed any recognised engineering or building qualifications.
After unsuccessfully trying to get a shipbuilding yard established at Port Welshpool, during 1919 Lasseter—now styling himself as honorary secretary of an organisation called the ‘Returned Soldiers and Volunteers Association of South Gippsland’—began promoting an elaborate scheme to establish an ‘industrial town’ for returned soldiers along the Toora-Barry’s Beach-Port Welshpool seaboard. In 1920, by now living at Foster, he came up with a proposal to meet the district’s power needs by building a hydro-electric plant at Agnes Falls, the highest single span falls in Victoria.
The schemes that Lasseter came up with for developing the district undoubtedly had merit and appeal, and could even be said to be ahead of their time after some were taken up in similar or modified form decades later. But when he actually proposed them, Lasseter’s ideas were also hopelessly impractical by failing to recognise the economic conditions of the post-war period which meant that no financial backers could be found.
Lasseter’s time in Gippsland came to an end during 1923, when he abandoned his family and moved to Melbourne. In January 1924 he re-married at Middle Park, apparently without bothering to obtain a divorce from his first wife. He then described himself as a bachelor with the forenames ‘Lewis Harold Bell’—the first occasion he used the famous alter ego that would carry him through his misadventure into Central Australia.
The legacy of the years Lasseter spent in South Gippsland is debatable. For many locals he is still regarded as the district’s only ‘folk hero’. The work boat called “Victory” that he used to mark Corner Inlet’s channels is now a prized exhibit at the Foster Museum, which also displays a signed blueprint of his local development scheme. Separating the real impact of his grand ideas from their potential worth has, of course, allowed a view to emerge of Lasseter’s place in history that provides one reason the mythology attached to the Lasseter name refuses to die.