Finding Barclay's Treasure

Retired motor-racing legend Larry Perkins solves a 100-year mystery in the desert.

- Bruce Newton

AFTER AUSSIE RACING LEGEND Larry Perkins became interested in the outback story of Captain Henry Vere Barclay and his missing cache of equipment, it was only a matter of time before the mystery was solved.

Larry, who raced in Formula 1 in the mid-1970s and won the Bathurst 1000 six times in the 1980s and ’90s, has a reputation for logical thinking, a mechanically brilliant mind and a fair degree of bush-bred cunning. After he finished his racing career in 2003 he became intrigued by the Henry Barclay legend.

Retiring brought Larry back to the bush, back to his beginnings. Born in the desert country of north-western Victoria and raised on a farm at Cowangie, going outback once he stopped racing was as logical and natural to him as breathing. He started following the trails of our early explorers, and in 2016, when he heard the story of Barclay’s missing cache, it became an irresistible challenge for him.

BORN IN LANCASHIRE IN 1845, Barclay came to Australia with the Royal Marines as a surveyor in 1863. In July 1904 he left Oodnadatta in South Australia as head of an expedition charged with: accurately mapping the Anacoora Bore on the edge of the Simpson Desert; identifying a viable stock route to Birdsville in Queensland; and searching for evidence of the fate of Ludwig Leichhardt, the German explorer who vanished somewhere in the outback in 1848 (see AG 1 and AG 150).

Barclay and his team nearly fell foul of the outback themselves. Within four months they were deep in the Simpson Desert’s endless waves of sand and temperatures were arcing well above the old 100° Fahrenheit mark (38°C). We know this because of the detailed diary kept by the expedition’s second-in-command and part-funder, South African Ronald MacPherson.