Another link in the Lasseter Story-

William and Vera Bryant
of Piesse Street, Boulder
by Chris Clark

One day in September 1960 a Western Australian Police officer visited a cottage at 193 Piesse Street in Boulder City, to speak with the occupants, William and Vera Bryant, a married couple aged in their 50s. The officer was making inquiries on instructions from Police Headquarters in Perth, in response to a request from a man in the Western Sydney suburb of Seven Hills named Robert Lasseter; he had written in July that year to the chief of police in Laverton, asking for information about a former resident at the Piesse Street address thirty years earlier known only as ‘W. Johanson’.¹

Robert (“Bob”) Lasseter happened to be the 34-year-old son of the famous (or notorious) figure who—posing as Lewis Harold Bell Lasseter, real name Lewis Hubert Lasseter²—had inspired an expedition into Central Australia in 1930, in search of a supposedly vast and rich gold reef that he claimed to have found, then lost, as a young man decades before. Under the glare of nationwide publicity, the expedition had not only spectacularly failed in its quest but resulted in the lonely death of the man responsible for guiding it into some of the most formidable and least hospitable country in Australia.³ The purpose of Bob Lasseter’s request was to establish if there was any truth in claims that Johanson had been speared by Aborigines while attempting to go in support of his father in the months before “Harry” Lasseter died in early 1931.

As the police officer who called at Piesse Street was to discover, Bob Lasseter had already initiated his own inquiries with the Bryants some twelve months previously, trying to establish who Johanson was and how he became connected with his father in mid-1930. When Bob Lasseter’s mother died in 1943,⁴ he had come into possession of fragments of correspondence between Johanson and his father—dating from the time that the ill-fated expedition was still organising for departure into Central Australia. Johanson’s identity and fate had since become significant to Bob Lasseter, once he began thinking of taking up the search for the gold reef his father claimed existed.

The former miners’ cottage at 193 Piesse Street, Boulder, which was home to William and Vera Bryant from 1929 until at least 1960. (Author photo, 2014)

As it happened, the Bryants were ideally placed to shed light on the Johanson mystery. Because they had been living at 193 Piesse Street for 30 years, they still remembered the man from Sweden—real full name Olof Emanuel Johanson—who had begun boarding with them soon after they moved to Boulder from Adelaide in about April 1929. What the Bryants related about their knowledge of Johanson upended popular understanding of the unsolved mystery surrounding the Lasseter saga, because they not only confirmed his presence on the WA goldfields and his safe departure therefrom (dispelling the myth about spearing), but they also provided an explanation for what he was doing in that period and how and why he could have become associated with the murky path of Lasseter. For as it turned out, William Bryant actually knew Johanson more than five years before the Swede took up residence as a boarder at Piesse Street.

In 1922 Bryant had found himself working with Johanson in Adelaide when both men drove motor vans for mail contractor W. D. Cosgrove.⁵ William Thomas Bryant was then a single man, aged 22, and most probably living in the Bryant family home, a two-story stone residence dating from 1880 at 83 Gove Street in North Adelaide. His family at that time comprised his parents, James Thomas McRidge Bryant and Mary Ann née Nottle, and four siblings aged between 20 and 9: Norman Vivian, Emily Rita, Lela Penpraze and Richard L. (“Dick”).⁶

Sometime during 1923 William went to New South Wales looking for work. He found employment as a motor mechanic, and while living at Rose Bay, Sydney, in May 1926 he married Vera Florence Harrison, an 18-year-old machinist from Bondi whose family were from Marrickville.⁷ The couple continued to live in Sydney for more than a year until a family tragedy most likely compelled William to return to South Australia.

About midnight on 24 December 1927 Norman Bryant was returning from Crafers in the Adelaide Hills on his motorbike, with two friends riding as passengers in a sidecar. While turning a sharp bend in the Mount Barker road, the bike struck a guardrail and all three were thrown onto the roadway. Norman suffered a fractured skull and died in Adelaide Hospital in the early hours of Christmas Day. Press reports described him as a 25-year-old labourer living at 14 Barker Road, Prospect (which is where the Bryant family had moved); he was recently married and left a widow named Amy Florence.⁸

When William Bryant arrived in Adelaide with his new wife in the wake of the accident, he would discover that his mother had taken in a boarder at Barker Road to supplement her husband’s income.⁹ The boarder was Olof Johanson. According to Bryant, Johanson informed him that, in the interval, since they last met, he had made an attempt to find the ‘Lasseter Gold Reef’ although he gave very few details of the trip. Later research reveals that it would have been true that Johanson had been in the Outback once by that point—but in the far north-eastern corner of SA (actually Arrabury station just over the border with Queensland), and his purpose had nothing to do with searching for gold.

More important was Bryant’s assertion that, shortly after he and his wife left Adelaide for Boulder, Johanson set off on another journey to Central Australia ‘in search of the Gold Reef’. Bryant claimed that his mother furnished Johanson with blankets and other camping equipment for the trip, on the understanding that he would pay for this equipment at some later date, but in letters to her son Mary Bryant said that she had never seen the Swede since. Again, the Bryants’ recall is helpful, although probably slightly out in some fine details; Johanson did journey to the north-western corner of the state, more likely during 1928 than 1929, and his purpose was hunting dingoes for the government bounty on their scalps rather than anything specifically to do with gold-seeking.

What this information does, however, is link Johanson’s next move with the lives and story of the Bryant family in WA, because Olof’s decision for seeking a livelihood after his return from dingo-hunting was to head west to the then-expanding goldfields about Wiluna. It was, probably, a coincidence that reconnected him to the Bryants at Boulder, because to obtain the health certificate necessary before securing work in WA’s mining industry, meant first submitting to medical examination—which at that time meant presenting himself at Kalgoorlie-Boulder, then the nearest examination centre to Wiluna.

Research of the Bryant family history reveals that William’s decision to move to Boulder from Adelaide was not the bold striking-out in an entirely new direction that it might have seemed at first glance. The reality was that not just William but his four siblings were all born in Boulder after his parents married there in 1899.¹⁰ James Bryant had been born at Kadina in South Australia in 1874, the eldest of six children of William Henry Bryant and his wife Emily Holland née McRidge, who married at Kadina on 26 June 1873.¹¹ Following James were: Edgar Floyd (b. 1876), William Ernest (1879), George Harold (1883), Jane Grace (1885) and May Victoria (1887), all born in SA.¹²

By the 1890s the entire Bryant family had definitely transferred en masse to WA, judging from those that followed James to the matrimonial altar in the first years of the 20th century. Next was Edgar, married Annie Eva Northey, at Boulder in 1906,¹³ followed by Jane, also at Boulder to Thomas William H. Lennell, in 1907,¹⁴ and George, married Elizabeth Ann O’Donnell in Perth, also in 1907.¹⁵ Of the others, Ernest died at Boulder in 1902, apparently unmarried and aged just 25,¹⁶ while May never married before dying at Kalgoorlie in 1945.¹⁷

James seems to have stayed resident with his family at Boulder during the First World War years before moving away,¹⁸ a pattern which was followed by other of his siblings. Edgar, for instance, joined a syndicate seeking a mining lease at Ora Banda on the Broad Arrow goldfield in June 1914, but by 1921-26 he was operating a corner store at 65 Bagot Road, Subiaco, and by the time of his death on 26 May 1951 he and his wife Eva were living at Richmond, Victoria.¹⁹ In March 1916 George enlisted from the Perth suburb of Leederville where he was employed on the railways, and by September he embarked for overseas service with the Australian Imperial Force. By December he joined the 51st Battalion in France, where he was wounded in action in October 1917; by March 1918 he was on his way back to Australia where he was discharged in August.²⁰ He continued living in Perth and died there in 1958.²¹ Grace may have married at Boulder, as noted previously, but by her death in 1971 she also was residing in Perth.²²

Once James and his family left the eastern goldfields sometime after the war, only his mother Emily and sister May continued living at Kalgoorlie-Boulder. Emily Bryant had lost her husband on 18 September 1915,²³ leaving her to survive him by 25 years. When she passed away on 18 May 1941, at the age of 89, she was residing at 32 Boulder Road, Kalgoorlie.²⁴ As already noted, May only survived her mother by four years.

In taking his family to live in Adelaide, James Bryant was not only returning to his own South Australian roots but also returning his wife to hers. Mary Ann was the daughter of a Cornish immigrant William Henry Nottle and his wife Mary Ann Oliver née Hawke (also from Cornwall), who were married in 1871 when he was aged 26 and she was 16. Mary was the second of 13 children born in the mid-North area of South Australia north of Adelaide, between Burra and Port Augusta, in the period 1872-1896. Her parents both died in Adelaide—her father in January 1933;²⁵ her mother in December 1934—and were buried in the North Road cemetery at Nailsworth. There is no indication that they had taken their family to live in Western Australia at any stage, so the circumstances in which Mary Ann met and married James Bryant at Boulder remain unknown today.

Having returned to their home state, James and Mary Ann Bryant lived out their lives in Adelaide. James died at their final home address at 66 Archer Street on 13 June 1950,²⁶ and his wife followed him on 23 June 1966. Both were buried at Nailsworth.²⁷

Throughout these years William and Vera Bryant stayed in their ex-miners cottage in Piesse Street, Boulder, raising two daughters in the meantime. William died at Boulder in June 1971, aged 70;²⁸ his remains were taken to Perth and buried in the Karrakatta Cemetery. Vera survived him by 37 years, dying at Greenmount, Perth, in April 2008, aged 100.

Grave of William and Vera Bryant – Karrakatta Cemetery

References

1. Police Commissioner J. M. O’Brien to R. Lasseter, 21 Sep 1960: State Records Office WA: Police Department file 73/394, Lasseter H. B. of “Lasseters Reef” fame—report re Expeditions to Search for.

2. Gerald Walsh, “Lasseter, Lewis Hubert (Harold Bell) (1880-1931)”, Northern Territory Dictionary of Biography, revised edition, Darwin, NT: Charles Darwin University Press, 2008, p. 335.

3. Chris Clark, The truth about Lasseter: why his elusive gold reef never existed, West Geelong: Echo Books, 2019.

4. Nepean Times (Penrith, NSW), 15 Apr 1943, p. 1.
5. Chris Clark, Olof’s Suitcase: Lasseter’s Reef mystery solved, West Geelong: Echo Books, 2015,
6. 102-103.
7. Children as listed in death notice for James Thomas Bryant in Advertiser (Adel), 14 Jun 1950,
8. 20
9. NSW Birth Deaths & Marriages (BDM) marriage reg. no. 8537/1926.

• Age (Melb), 27 Dec 1927, p. 10; Observer (Adel), 31 Dec 1927, p. 54; Chronicle (Adel), 31 Dec1927, p. 40; SA BDM marriage reg. in Adelaide 1927 (Bk/Pge 313/295).

9. Electoral roll for 1927 (Division Adelaide; Sub-division North Adelaide) listed James Thomas Bryant as ‘laborer’, but by 1928 (Division Adelaide; Sub-division Prospect) he was shown as ‘ironworker’.

• WA BDM marriage reg. no. 369/1899. The births of James and Mary’s children are recorded as William (reg. no. 1265/1900), Norman (1502/1902), Emily (256/1905), Lela (439/1908) and Richard (69/1913).

• South Australian Register (Adel), 15 Jul 1873, p. 8, confirmed SA BDM marriage reg. Bk/Pge 95/914.

• The children of William and Emily Bryant are taken from the death notice of Emily, see West

Australian (Perth), 22 May 1941, p. 1. The list is confirmed from SA BDM birth registrations for Daly district: James (Bk/Pge 137/347), Edgar (163/112), Ernest (216/166); for Frome, George

(297/492), Grace (360/379), May (397/160).

• WA BDM marriage reg. no. 108/1906.
• WA BDM marriage reg. no. 105/1907.
• WA BDM marriage reg. no. 535/1907.
• WA BDM death reg. no. 1417/1902.
• WA BDM death reg. no. 218/1945.
• Western Argus (Kalgoorlie), 5 Dec 1916, p. 16, mentions Norman Bryant as a student at the

South Boulder State School.

• Kalgoorlie Miner, Mon, 8 Jun 1914, p.7; Annette Green, Heritage Assessment of King’s Road, Subiaco, April 2017, p. 63; Herald (Melb), Mon, 28 May 1951, p. 6; Vic BDM death reg.no.5659/1951.

• National Archives of Australia: B2455, Bryant G. H.
• WA BDM death reg.no. 1790/1958.
• WA BDM death reg.no. 2311/1971.
• https://billiongraves.com/cemetery/Boulder-Cemetery/149782; WA BDM death reg.no.103/1915.

• West Australian (Perth), 22 May 1941, p. 1; WA BDM death reg.no. 109/1941.
• Chronicle (Adelaide), 12 Jan 1933, p. 36.
• Advertiser (Adelaide), 14 Jun 1950, p. 20.
• Information from a headstone in Nailsworth (North Road) Cemetery.
• WA BDM death reg. no. 2212/1971.

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Moya Sharp

Owner at Outback Family History

My name is Moya Sharp, I live in Kalgoorlie Western Australia and have worked most of my adult life in the history/museum industry. I have been passionate about history for as long as I can remember and in particular the history of my adopted home the Eastern Goldfields of Western Australia. Through my website I am committed to providing as many records and photographs free to any one who is interested in the family and local history of the region.

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