Reef Madness

But in 1931 he was living on his wits as a journeyman journalist and looking for an angle to finish a book about a hyped-up gold prospecting expedition. He found it in sorcery, which he used to infill the gaps between the few facts and fanciful descriptions of lands and peoples he had never seen. Ion Idriess’ account of the last months of the life of Harold Bell Lasseter – Lasseter’s Last Ride - gave birth to a legend that repeats in dozens of books, films, poems, paintings, podcasts, websites and exhibitions, is memorialised in the names of a highway and a casino, and has spawned searches and scams that continue a century on. Reef Madness exposes how Idriess confected his first successful book andwhy the story of a failed prospector became a quintessentially Australian myth.

About the Author

Born in Perth, Western Australia, Ernest Hunter trained as a public health physician and psychiatrist in the United States. After returning to Australia in the 1980s he worked for more than three decades in remote northern Australia, most of that time being in Cape York and the Torres Strait. He has published several hundred articles and monographs in the academic and popular press and is author of Aboriginal Health and History: Power and Prejudice in Remote Australia (Cambridge University Press, 1993), and Vicarious Dreaming: On Madman’s Island with Jack Idriess (ETT Imprint, 2019).