Charles Mountford on a horse

Charles Mountford on a horse on the ridge of a sandhill in the Simpson Desert.

As an ethnologist and anthropologist, Charles P Mountford traveled extensively through Australia's remote regions from 1925 to 1963, using both camels and horses. In 1938 Mountford joined a South Australian Government expedition to search for the remains of the explorer Ludwig Leichhardt, who with his party, went missing around 1848 during an attempt to cross the continent east to west, from Moreton Bay to Broome. A station owner had reported that he had found what appeared to be human remains, near the Mount Dare station in the north-east. It was speculated that these might be the remains of Leichhardt and his party and the State Government put together an expedition led by Archibald Grenfell-Price, the president of the Royal Geographical Society of South Australia. Disappointingly, the expedition party did not find skeletal remains, but calcified tree roots which the station owner had mistaken for bones. Other items were found however, such as coins and and pieces of leather. The findings were deemed inconclusive and the mystery remains.

The image shown here of Mountford in the Simpson desert illustrates the remoteness of the regions covered on horse back during the 1938 expedition and the use of pack horses to carry water. The image is a contact print, which are taken from the negatives to create a working tool so that the original negatives may be preserved in cold storage.

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