The Australian El Dorado

“Real Lasseter tragics (and unfortunately I include myself in this club) imagine the reef twinkling out there in the desert, all lonely, calling to us. But the real fascination with Lasseter’s story is due to the fact that it is an unfulfilled narrative; it doesn’t end the way it’s supposed to, and so we are compelled to complete it properly.”

Walker, a former UK soap actor who moved to Australia to make documentary films, is no stranger to the Australian brand of con artistry. His previous film, Beyond Our Ken (co-directed with Melissa Maclean), is about Ken Dyer, the founder of Kenja, a Sydney-based offshoot of the Church of Scientology and a man accused by his detractors of being a charlatan and sexual predator and defended by his supporters as a visionary and a genius. 

Beyond Our Kenwas filmed while Dyer was very much alive and seemingly willing to co-operate with the filmmakers in their attempt to present a balanced picture of his life and work. The film ends with the death of Dyer, who apparently committed suicide, though the organization he founded continues.

While Beyond Our Ken deals with a controversial contemporary subject about which audience opinions may be neatly divided one way or the other, Lasseter’s Reef deals with a legend that defies easy explanation. “This story violates our preferred illusion of the world as a place where great adventures are had and ‘everything happens for a reason’”, says Walker.

“And so, when stories end this way we find ways to correct the narrative. This is how legends are created, by a collective, gradual tinkering with stories that defy our preferred subconscious rhythm of being. Bit by bit, person by person, the story is added to and evolves until it becomes impossible to see the truth through a fog of gossip and rumour. It is a fog I attempt to cut through in this film, and probably in the process only end up becoming a part of.”

Lasseter’s Bones does not solve the mystery of Lasseter’s reef, though it poses an honest and compelling question about how much we really know, and can ever know, about the past.