The Australian Outback has always held a magnetic allure – majestic, romantic and relentlessly unforgiving.
For nearly three weeks, its sinister depths have been thrust into the spotlight following the disappearance of four-year-old August ‘Gus’ Lamont from his grandparents’ remote station near Yunta, a lonely speck along South Australia‘s Barrier Highway.
When news broke of Gus’s sudden vanishing on Saturday, September 27, my heart sank. I know the landscape well. I knew in my heart that the chances of a happy ending were slim.
I grew up in South Australia’s Mid North, my childhood spent at swimming carnivals and horse shows in towns like Peterborough, Jamestown and Crystal Brook.
After ditching high school to become a journalist, my first job was at the now-defunct Flinders News – a charming free paper that reached deep into the state’s Outback.
Yunta was technically the farthest edge of my patch, but its isolation and the distance from our Port Pirie newsroom meant that I rarely visited.
To be honest, my editor was convinced there wasn’t much to report on: a pub, a post office, a couple of petrol stations, and little else.
It was a tiny service centre plonked in the middle of red dust and saltbush as far as the eye could see.
Four-year-old August ‘Gus’ Lamont vanished from his grandparents’ remote outback station. I know the landscape well and I’m sadly not hopeful for a happy ending, writes Karleigh Smith
There has been no trace of Gus since he was last seen on September 27
Back then, as a 17-year-old cadet, it was my job to cover everything in those rural Mid North communities, from the local bowls scores to country fire fundraisers.
Occasionally there were horrific car crashes, gruesome farm incidents or factory explosions – but, by and large, these were quiet, close-knit villages that kept to themselves.
I never could have imagined that 20 years later, having now worked in Sydney, Los Angeles, New York and London, I would find myself back in Yunta on the job, covering the most awful of stories.
Even under these grim circumstances, it felt like a homecoming as I bumped along a 40km dirt track after turning off the Barrier Highway, heading for the place Gus was last seen.
The region’s beauty is rivalled by its dangers, even during the bright of day. We had several near misses with kangaroos, feral goats, rabbits – and even a deadly King Brown snake sunbathing on the road as we travelled to Oak Park Station, a sprawling homestead where Gus lived with his mum, baby brother, and two grandparents.
According to police, he was playing in the sand out the front of the home about 5pm. When his grandmother went to call him inside at 5.30pm, he was gone.
Police, the SES, and even the Army were deployed to Oak Park and searched in vain, sending up choppers and drones, and diving in the dams.
The search was scaled back on Friday, October 3, with police adamant the boy had simply become lost – no foul play suspected. Yet there was no sign of him, and given his age, there was little hope he could survive in the harsh, saltbush-studded landscape.
The SES scoured the area alongside police and Indigenous trackers
On Wednesday, the Yunta police station was closed
Yunta, population 60, is a dusty dot on the Barrier Highway between South Australia and NSW
His case has now been handed to the Missing Persons Unit, and when I visited on Wednesday, there was no sign of any ongoing search. The Yunta police station was closed for the day.
Social media theories have spread faster than any missing persons case I’ve ever worked – some plausible, others absurd. A handful are cruelly insensitive to a family facing the agony of possibly losing their little boy forever.
Even before I travelled to Yunta, I lost count of how many people – friends who knew I was a born-and-raised South Australia desert kid – had asked me what I thought likely happened.
Despite police admitting by now that there is little chance of finding Gus alive, my travelling companion and I couldn’t help but keep an eye out, scanning the never-ending horizon for a glimpse of that curly blonde hair, or perhaps the grey hat or blue Minions shirt he was wearing.
Because sometimes, all you can do is hope.
It’s an opinion that Gus’s grandparent Josie Murray shared.
Gus’s grandparent Josie Murray said the family was still looking for their boy
I visited the eerily quiet homestead hoping to share the family’s story in their own words – and, in some small way, to help counter the harshest social media conspiracies directed at the Lamonts and the Murrays.
Josie, her voice unsteady, said that they were still looking for him.
The family has faced intense scrutiny online – from questions about their absence in the media to criticism over sharing just a single photo of Gus nearly a week after he went missing.
But those who choose to live in the Outback are a different breed. They treasure its isolation and silence, and Gus’s grandparents are as remote as they come.
To live here, under the beating sun by day, and freezing temperature drops by night, is not for the faint-hearted.
I can’t stop wondering how Gus managed to disappear around sundown – a time when the Outback birdsong turns to oppressive silence, meaning you could hear a pin drop, let alone the cries of a lost little boy.
Gus had been playing in the mound of sand at the front of the homestead
The Murray family’s Oak Park station is a 40km drive from Yunta down a dirt track
In the Outback, if you don’t feel like cooking, your only options are a pub feed or curry from the Indian family who run the Ampol servo in Yunta.
There’s a small grocery store in Peterborough, 90 minutes away from Oak Park, but a bigger family shopping haul from a major supermarket may mean a two-hour drive to Port Pirie, or even ducking across the NSW border to Broken Hill.
After speaking to Josie Murray, we juddered and fishtailed our diesel four-wheel drive back along the track to Yunta, again dodging Kamikaze kangaroos that seemed hellbent on ending up under our wheels.
We left no closer to understanding what happened to little Gus.
It seems nobody does.
The station was bereft of any police presence and a weary police source said there were no more plans to search this week, as far as they were aware.
Gus’s devastated father Joshua Lamont is staying with family in Adelaide
I know that Gus’s father, who lives two hours away near Jamestown, still has a lot of questions over what happened to his little boy.
After visiting the scene of where he was last seen playing in a pile of dirt, I do too.
But Josh Lamont declined to be interviewed, with his brother telling me he was in no state to talk to anyone
Police maintain that if Gus did simply wander off into the vast Outback he knew so well, it would not have been medically possible for him to survive beyond last week.
If that’s true, the Outback – stunning, eerie, and endless – has claimed another victim.
