Larry Perkins (above)
ina BRM in early 1977,
during his Formula 1
career. Captain Henry
Vere Barclay (le ) used
a di erent kind of horse-
power a century earlier.A
FTER AUSSIE RACING LEGEND Larry Perkins
became interested in the outback story of
Captain Henry Vere Barclay and his missing
cache of equipment, it was only a matter of time
before the mystery was solved.
Larry, who raced in Formula 1 in the mid-1970s and won
the Bathurst 1000 six times in the 1980s and ’90s, has a reputa-
tion for logical thinking, a mechanically brilliant mind and a
fair degree of bush-bred cunning. After he finished his racing
career in 2003 he became intrigued by the Henry Barclay legend.
Retiring brought Larry back to the bush, back to his begin-
nings. Born in the desert country of north-western Victoria
and raised on a farm at Cowangie, going outback once he
stopped racing was as logical and natural to him as breathing.
He started following the trails of our early explorers, and in
2016, when he heard the story of Barclay’s missing cache,
it became an irresistible challenge for him.B
ORN IN LANCASHIRE IN 1845, Barclay came to Australia
with the Royal Marines as a surveyor in 1863. In July
1904 he left Oodnadatta in South Australia as head of
an expedition charged with: accurately mapping the Anacoora
Bore on the edge of the Simpson Desert; identifying a viable
stock route to Birdsville in Queensland; and searching for
evidence of the fate of Ludwig Leichhardt, the German explorer
who vanished somewhere in the outback in 1848 (see AG 1
and AG 150).
Barclay and his team nearly fell foul of the outback themselves.
Within four months they were deep in the Simpson Desert’s
endless waves of sand and temperatures were arcing well above
the old 100° Fahrenheit mark (38°C). We know this because of
the detailed diary kept by the expedition’s second-in-command
and part-funder, South African Ronald MacPherson.
Running out of water and faced with a five-night (it was
too hot to travel by day) trip back to Anacoora Bore, the expe-
dition dumped any gear that was not absolutely essential for
survival. There were hundreds of kilograms of it, ranging fromwater barrels to bullets. MacPherson’s diary recorded exactly
what was left.
The expedition eventually made it safely back to civilisation
and Barclay returned to the desert in 1905, but never collected
the gear he left neatly stacked in the lee of a sand dune. Plenty
of others have since gone out in search of Barclay’s discarded
equipment. The first recorded formal attempt was in 1915.
Another was in 2013. And there have been plenty of informal
searches as well. None had been successful until Larry Perkins
came along.T
HE FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEM was the location given
in longitude and latitude by MacPherson in his diary.
Go to that spot and there’s certainly no cache, nothing
but sand and spinifex.
“It just didn’t add up,” explains Larry, who believes Barclay
has not been well known to many Australians because he
neither found anything of significance nor died while exploring.
And yet the mystery intrigued him.
Late in 2017, Larry travelled to Adelaide to spend a week at
the Royal Geographic Society of SA reading MacPherson’s
diary and Barclay’s 1905 report of his two expeditions.
He looked at the maps, meticulously examined the routes
and the conditions, traced their daily positions and came to the
logical conclusion that the longitude and latitude where every-
one had searched were incorrect. People were looking in the
wrong place.
“So MacPherson made a mistake?” I ask. Larry f lashes a
cunning smile before answering. “They weren’t silly. The error
has enormous logic to it.”
At the time the diary was written, MacPherson and Barclay
had every intention of going back to collect their abandoned
equipment. We don’t know why they didn’t, but if you follow
Larry’s logic they certainly came up with a plan that fooled all
treasure hunters for more than a century.
Larry did his own calculations and came up with the spot
on the map that he thought made sense for the cache to be, PHOTO CREDITS, FROM TOP: BOB HARMEYER/ARCHIVE PHOTOS/GETTY IMAGES; NATIONAL LIBRARY OF AUSTRALIA48 Australian GeographicBARCLAY’S JOURNEY