Ian Elliot and the Wildtrax crew hunt for a tiny hole in the desert

The search for John Forrest’s 'Gun Bucket Hole'

Ian and the Wildtrax crew hunt for a tiny hole in the desert.

By Ian Elliot

Group at Gun Bucket Hole.

Photo by Paul Kennedy.

In 1869, in response to an Aboriginal claiming knowledge of the bones of white men and horses away out to the east of York, an expedition was mounted to see if this could explain the disappearance of Ludwig Leichhardt and party over two decades earlier. Surveyor John Forrest was placed in charge of this expedition which travelled over a vast tract of previously unexplored regions. Not only did they fail to find any trace of the bones, sadly they didn’t notice any of the nuggets they must have ridden over as they passed across what later became some of our richest goldfields. Forrest’s furthest east on this trip, reached in company with his Aboriginal assistant, Tommy Windich, lies a little less than 50km eastwards of the presentday town of Laverton. Here he climbed a tree that he marked with the letter F and described the country he could see ahead. Having not found enough reliable water sources to go further, the two of them were then forced to reluctantly retrace their steps back to the rest of their party who they had left near Mount Malcolm. I’m sure Forrest would have been chagrined to know that a huge waterhole, Nardoo Rockhole, lay just ten miles ESE from the spot where they turned back. We searched unsuccessfully for Forrest’s marked tree back in 2012 and I’ve since found that Peter Hill of Laverton and the late Harry Leaver of Dongara also had a look for it years ago without result. Even Frank Hann tried to find it as early as 1914, and his failure suggests that it had probably burnt down some time in the forty-five years between his and Forrest’s visits. Recently, though, my interest in this area was rekindled in reading of the finding of a tiny rockhole from which Forrest got water just six miles before he turned back. He and Windich came across this 'small hole in some rocks' completely accidentally. Its mouth was too small to admit a pannican so Forrest used the leather gun bucket from the barrel end of his rifle scabbard.

Gnamma country.

This enabled them to extract about two litres of muddy water which, after straining it through his pocket-handkerchief, the explorer pronounced to be first rate. Despite its significance to Forrest’s explorations this 'Gun Bucket Hole' has never been shown on maps. Enquiries of Peter Hill, a long time Laverton resident, drew a blank, but my Frank Hann researches revealed that Hann was shown this rockhole by a sandalwooder named Boase in 1917. He mentioned it in letters to the Laverton Mercury and Truth newspapers in 1917 and 1918 respectively and these letters convinced prospector James Tregurtha, who was then working at Burtville, that he must have camped close to this rockhole in 1901. He went out looking in 1918, found it, and described it years later in a letter to the 'Over the Plates' section of a 1938 Western Mail. From all this data I gleaned that the hole was funnel-shaped, was situated on a small granite knob and had an additional small hole on its south side that allowed small birds an easy entry. I reasoned that, if we hunted over all the areas in the neighbourhood shown as granite on the geological 1:100,000 map, we should come across it. However, I had to put up with a certain amount of derision from some members of the Wildtrax crew when they found out how small the hole we were seeking actually was. A tiny hole in a vast desert. The distance from Perth that took the explorers two and a half months to traverse, our 4WDs can cover easily in just a couple of days. Negotiating old fenceline tracks has to be done slowly and carefully, though. Camels walk through the old fences leaving long lengths of heavy wire, some of it barbed, coiling across the track. These can foul your tyre treads, axles or drive shafts so badly they can stop your forward progress if you don’t clear them away. After negotiating miles of overgrown fenceline access, we camped near the search area late on a warm afternoon last September, a little more than 151 years after Forrest and Windich had passed through. Up and at it early the next morning, I was disappointed to find that the first area I’d elected to search, an area I’d thought to be the most likely because a track to it was visible on Google Earth, was foliated and so broken up that it was most unlikely to be rockhole territory. We moved off to search other granite areas with similar results and I began to have doubts concerning my methodology. There was plenty of thick vegetation to get through on many of these search areas and I was glad we’d taken the precaution to fit our old split rims with 16 ply rag tyres that could withstand the onslaught of pushing through the mulga thickets. Not the best on bitumen, but just the thing in the bush. We had zero punctures although the duco (what’s left of it, anyway) on my lead vehicle took a bit of a beating. At one stage I pulled up with a five centimetre diameter branch stuck in my grill. Fortunately, it had stopped millimetres before destroying the air-con condenser. Patience pays off though, and as we came around a stand of trees and had a view to the west, I was thrilled to see some low,

Mulga stabbing.

red breakaway faces – granite knobs – in the distance. We headed towards these with a rising sense of excitement and all tumbled out of cabs to search the first ridge on foot. Nothing, until returning to our vehicles geologist Mike Donaldson sang out. He’d found the first gnamma but it was too large to be the one we sought. In fact we found six gnammas altogether in this area before we dropped on to the right one. When we did, though, there was no mistaking it. It was at the foot of a granite outcrop, it was funnel-shaped with a very restricted entrance and it had a horizontal entrance on its south side. And it was only 10.00am. Terry Bentley poked a stick down into it to a depth of well over a metre, but like all the other gnammas out there after a three year drought, it was bone dry. But this was definitely it and we were all elated at having tracked it down. I hadn’t expected us to be the only people who’d found this feature over the years and such turned out to be the case. Balanced on a rock shelf nearby was a small, brown enamel teapot. It had been filled with sand to prevent it getting blown away in a willy willy. We left it where we’d found it but I’m sorry now that I didn’t empty the sand out temporarily to check whether there was anything else inside it. About 300 metres NW of the hole we found an old track that led generally westwards to the fenceline track we’d been following earlier. Two of our party had stuck to the fenceline because they had radials on their vehicle and trailer and, although this track wasn’t visible on Google Earth, it allowed them to drive out to our find. Near an old tank on the fenceline an aluminium plate was nailed to a tree. On the plate was stamped 'F 1869 L.G.H. 1991.' This suggests to me that L.G.H. was tracing Forrest’s route in 1991 and I suspect that it was they who made the track between the fence and the rockhole. I’d love to hear from L.G.H. sometime should he or she read this. I reported the finding of Forrest’s 'Gun Bucket Hole' to the Laverton Shire President to see if he wanted to publicise the position of the feature and formalise tourist access to it, but he feels that visitation should be limited at present. They have experienced too many sites being littered with rubbish once public access begins. If anyone really wants to visit the site they can contact me through the magazine. Geographic Names at Landgate will be approached to see if they want to approve the name for use on future maps.

Funnel entrance as described by Hann. Aluminium plate on mulga 4km NW of hole. Teapot found near the hole.