The mystery of the disappearance of a four-year-old in the South Australian outback has deepened, after it was claimed that the boy’s father moved out of the family home following a clash with his child’s transgender grandparent.
August ‘Gus’ Lamont vanished almost two weeks ago after playing in the yard of remote Oak Park homestead in the harsh South Australian outback, nearly 200 miles north of Adelaide.
Huge air and land searches have failed to find any trace of him apart from a single footprint in the desert scrub since he disappeared on the evening of September 27.
Gus is understood to have been living at his grandparents’ homestead with his mother Jess and his one-year-old brother Ronnie.
Gus’s father, Joshua Lamont, lives two hours’ drive away, 100km to the west in Belalie North, near Jamestown.
The Daily Mail has been told that while Josh and Jess remained a couple, he does not live on the station because of family clashes with Jess’s transgender parent, Josie.
Joshua was spotted publicly for the first time since his son’s vanishing, seen in Adelaide, where he is staying with relatives, after he earlier joined the search for his son.
His brother Samuel insisted Mr Lamont – who was once a country music singer performing in SA pubs under the name, Billy Tea – was in ‘no state to talk to anyone’.
Mr Lamont was seen wearing a sweater emblazoned with the words A Red Dawn – a metal band which he played bass for in the early 2000s.
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It is understood Mr Lamont only found out his child was missing when police woke him up at his Belalie North home, hours after Gus had vanished.
Gus’ family said yesterday that they were still clinging onto the hope that he would be found safely.
Josie told the Daily Mail, while declining offers of assistance in the search effort: ‘We’re still looking for him’.
‘You can’t help. We are still dealing with this.’
Locals have now urged even well-meaning volunteers to stay away from the remote station as the grieving family grapples with their loss and contends with wild theories online.
‘I know this family very well and they don’t want people turning up and having to just deal with that,’ one neighbour told the Adelaide Advertiser.
‘Even if the people are well-meaning and sympathetic, they just want peace and quiet and to try and work out for themselves what’s actually happened.’
Gus was last seen playing in a mound of dirt about 5pm but had vanished when his grandmother went to call him inside half an hour later.
The boy had been wearing a grey broad-brimmed hat, a distinctive blue long-sleeved shirt with a Minion picture from the movie Despicable Me on the front, with light grey pants and boots.
Despite the vast, flat, featureless landscape surrounding the property, there had been no sight of the boy alive or dead, raising questions about where he could be.
‘I personally am very doubtful he is on the property,’ said Jason O’Connell, an SES member for 11 years, who covered more than 1,200km as part of the search team.
After days of hunting for the boy, Mr O’Connell and his partner Jen had expected to see birds of prey if there was a lifeless body on the property.
‘No birds of prey means he’s not there,’ he added.
‘It’s just wide, open land. There’s really not much there, and I’m surprised because we just didn’t find anything.
‘He’s not on that property.’
The only trace of Gus found was a single footprint discovered about 500 metres from the homestead – and police have since cast doubt on that.
Local tracker Aaron Stuart told the media it was unusual to find one footprint as you would usually find ‘tracks’.
‘You’d find the next one, and the one after that,’ the former policeman told the Adelaide Advertiser. ‘You don’t find one track, you find tracks.’
Assistant Police Commissioner Ian Parrott said his team were ‘confident that we have done all we can to locate Gus’.
‘The determination of every individual involved to find Gus has never wavered,’ he said.
‘Like every member of the community who has been following this sad event, they too have been very much affected by what has happened.’
