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.
