The Beaumonts. Kirste Gordon and Joanne Ratcliffe. William Tyrrell. All names of Australian children who vanished and were never found.
Now I can’t shake the feeling that Gus Lamont, missing since September 27 from his grandparents’ isolated Outback sheep farm in South Australia, may join this small, tragic collection of lost children in the annals of our nation’s history.
Gus disappeared from Oak Park Station, 45km from Yunta – a dusty speck on the map along the lonely Barrier Highway that connects South Australia to New South Wales.
Initial police reports said he had been playing in a pile of sand outside the homestead, owned by his maternal grandparents Josie and Shannon Murray, and appeared to have wandered off at about 5.30pm on AFL grand final day.
Then, on February 5, South Australia Police made a desperately sad announcement: they no longer believed this was a case of a child innocently coming a cropper in the harsh Outback.
Instead, they were now treating it as a ‘major crime’.
Taskforce Horizon – established in the days after the child vanished – claimed it had ‘identified a number of inconsistencies and discrepancies’ in the timeline surrounding his disappearance.
Gus’ parents Joshua Lamont and Jessica Murray are not suspects, and grandparents Josie and Shannon have retained Adelaide lawyers. No arrests have been made and no charges have been laid.
The disappearance of Gus Lamont (pictured) has now been declared a major crime
Police searched an area close to the size of Adelaide on foot and by air, to no avail
Oak Park Station sits amid a desolate Outback landscape
Now, as police build a case against the unnamed person they believe is responsible for Gus’ death, they are also concurrently searching for the little boy’s remains.
Following SAPOL’s press conference on Thursday, February 5, I returned to Yunta for the fourth time, and as I traversed the baking Outback near where the boy was last seen, I was filled with a sense of foreboding that they might never find him.
Already, eight ground searches involving hundreds of police, army and volunteer searchers have been conducted, covering 95 square kilometres.
Ronald Boland, an Indigenous tracker with decades of experience, found nothing.
They’ve also scoured dams and mineshafts and conducted aerial searches spanning 706 square kilometres using technology so powerful it identified sheep carcasses.
After seizing a vehicle, a motorbike and electronics from Oak Park Station in mid-January, police expanded their search to include what they described as a national park bordering the Murrays’ station, which locals took to mean the inaccessible Pualco Range Conservation Park to the south of the property.
Still, there was no sign of Gus – and I fear that, barring a significant breakthrough, there never will be.
On the three previous times I travelled to Yunta to cover this story, it has been buzzing with police, the defence force, the Adelaide press pack, and locals keen to do their part to find him.
Police have vowed to return Gus to his parents, Joshua Lamont and Jessica Murray, neither of whom are suspects
I even saw Gus’ grandparents attempting to get on with their lives, taking a meeting over coffee in nearby Peterborough before running errands in Jamestown.
This time – arriving the day after SAPOL declared they were pointing the finger at a member of Gus’ family – was an altogether different experience.
There was no thronging media pack in Yunta on that Friday afternoon – 7News Adelaide filed a piece that morning and headed back to the city, leaving just me, my photographer, and two ABC crews trying to figure out where to go next.
I’m not even sure if Channel Nine made the trip at all – I was asked twice to do a live cross on Weekend Today to discuss the case, but ultimately was bumped for their Winter Olympics coverage.
The gate to Oak Park Station was firmly shut, with a handwritten sign advising any would-be visitor to ‘smile, you’re on camera’.
Police had warned journalists during their press conference not to enter the Murray property or they would be charged with trespassing.
They didn’t have to tell me twice, given that when I attended the homestead in October offering to tell Josie’s side of the story – which is standard journalistic practice, especially when a child is missing – she angrily threatened to use physical force to remove me, and a few weeks later waved a gun in the direction of my colleague who was attempting to do the same thing.
This time around, I parked on the road outside the property boundaries – not too long ago a constant thoroughfare of police, army and SES vehicles throwing up showers of bull dust you could see for several kilometres – and considered the ominous stillness. The heavy silence.
The gate to Oak Park Station was firmly closed last week after the police announcement
Det Supt Darren Fielke announced Gus’ disappearance has been declared a major crime
As thunderstorm clouds with occasional flashes of lightning formed on the horizon during a days-long 35°C-plus heatwave, the thought of that little boy’s body possibly being out there somewhere, amid the saltbush, red dust, flies and ants, broke my heart.
The Outback is no place for anyone to die, let alone a four-year-old with his whole life ahead of him.
To be clear: the case has always been terribly sad – but until recently the best-case scenario was that this little boy had wandered off, got lost and perished within kilometres of his family home.
I truly believed that, if this were the case, his remains would soon be found and returned to his parents to give him a proper burial.
But as the days ground on with no sign of Gus – not even the hat he was reportedly wearing at the time he disappeared – worries that he had simply become lost turned to suspicion of foul play.
And now, with the investigation taking the turn many predicted it would, you have to wonder if Gus’s name will be etched in South Australia’s history, along with the names of missing children who came before him, and who haunt SAPOL to this day.
There is Jane, Arnna and Grant Beaumont, who disappeared from bustling Glenelg Beach on January 26, 1966. That case is ongoing.
South Australia has a history of children vanishing, never to be found. Pictured are the Beaumont children, who disappeared from Glenelg in 1966
Joanne Ratcliffe, 11, and Kirste Gordon, four, vanished from Adelaide Oval in 1973
William Tyrrell was just three when he disappeared from his foster grandma’s home in NSW
Six years later, in August 1973, Joanne Ratcliffe and Kirste Gordon vanished from a SANFL match at Adelaide Oval.
And while not South Australian, it would be remiss not to mention Gus Lamont in the same breath as William Tyrrell, who was three when he vanished from his foster grandparents’ home in Kendall, NSW, in September 2013.
William was wearing a Spider-Man costume. Gus was last seen wearing a Minions shirt.
The possibility that Gus could become ‘another William’ and never be found is unthinkable and unacceptable.
Jamestown locals have spoken of their sympathy for Jess, who attended school in the town
Detective Superintendent Darren Fielke said: ‘We are all focused and determined to locate Gus and return him to his parents.
‘The disappearance of any child is tragic and distressing – not just for Gus’ parents, but also the entire community sharing their grief.’
Indeed, when Daily Mail approached local residents, the response was a mixture of sadness for Gus – described frequently as a ‘lovely little boy’ – along with anger that someone might have deliberately hurt him.
All agreed they were desperate for him to be found – but many in Peterborough and Jamestown, the closest main towns to Yunta – suspected he never would be.
‘I can reassure the community that despite the complex and challenging nature of the investigation, Taskforce Horizon will continue to thoroughly and meticulously investigate the disappearance of Gus until we get a resolution,’ Det Supt Fielke said.
He promised ‘further searches at Oak Park Station and at several sites on an adjacent national park to locate Gus as new information and intelligence comes to hand’.
My relationship with SAPOL hasn’t always been an easy one since the Gus case began. They were not particularly enthusiastic about the Daily Mail asking the questions everyone wanted answered in the early days of their investigation.
I get it. We both have a job to do and for crime reporters and police, they don’t always align.
But at the end of the day, we all want the same thing – that little boy to be found, and to solve the mystery over what happened to him.
It’s a tough road ahead for SAPOL, because the Outback doesn’t like giving up its secrets – especially not one as terrible as this.