50 Australian Geographic
Being only partly buried
at the site of the find,
this reinforced soda
bottle was one of the first
items spotted during the
brothers’ first trip there.about 100km west of MacPherson’s published location and south
of the Madigan Line – the course of the first European crossing,
using camels, of the Simpson Desert by Cecil Madigan in 1939.
In May last year Larry called his brother Peter and the pair
headed for the Simpson in Larry’s yellow Unimog – an all-
wheel-drive Daimler truck that’s an impressive bit of kit,
thoroughly reworked for comfortable outback travel. It carries
a double bed, kitchen and shower and pulls a quad bike on a
trailer. There have been plenty of times Larry’s hooked up a
stuck 4WD on the back to tow it out of trouble.
Larry and Peter arrived at their location and began a method-
ical grid search on the quad, working within a 5km radius and
checking the lee of every dune.
“I was driving the quad bike and my brother was on the
back; we had numerous false alarms,” Larry recalls. “After four
and a half days we had reached the limit out of our radius. Then
Peter said, ‘What’s that over there?’ So I immediately turned
and went the 20 or 30m, stopped the bike and ran over. And
you could immediately see it was the find. There were four
water containers sticking out of the desert grass and that was it.
“They were the only items visible, but then within a
50m radius we found about 10 more surface items: a bottle,
a porcelain cup, a lamp...a doo-lackey that had something to
do with navigation. And the rest is bloody history!”
Larry hauled out his metal detector and quickly established
there was a huge trove of gear. Nothing had been disturbed,
nothing had been taken. For more than 100 years it had sat in
the desert, slowly decaying but completely undisturbed.
“When you are out looking for something of this magnitude
you think ‘God it would be nice to find it’, but you concede
you probably never will,” Larry says. When he sighted it, he
was overwhelmed. “I could go and win Bathurst, but anyone
can do that. This was a tremendously good feeling. It was just
fantastic to think we had actually found it after a multitude of
searches over more than 100 years.”
Larry and Peter remained onsite for three days. Then, after
concealing the discovery, they left. Three weeks later they
returned with two Northern Territory government–appointed
archaeologists and a photographer. A third trip later completed
the excavation of the site and that time Larry brought several
mates along to help.
“We’ve found virtually everything on the list,” he says. That
includes more than 800 rounds of ammunition, sharpening
stones and a harmonica. The discards tell the story of how
desperate the expedition’s plight was. Even a tiny SA Cricket
Association membership medallion was left behind.
Some of the equipment also prompted Larry to surmise the
expedition had another, secret, purpose.
“It’s not listed, but I think the primary reason they were out
there was searching for gold,” Larry says, explaining the cache
included weighing scales for gold and grain weights, three min-
ers’ picks and two gold-panning dishes.