Australia AUSTRALIA - 4YO AUGUST (GUS) Missing from rural family home in Outback, Yunta, South Australia, 27th Sept 2025

[twomoresmores]

Exactly.
I think they announced it so people couldn't accuse them of not being transparent.

Fair enough. I just figured they'd get on and do it then announce, if needed, '....as part of the search for Gus.....'. If no result, then no announcement needed. I wasn't aware that the press would be 'encouraged' to be in the locality.

 

[HoneyBunOne]

Depends on a whole lot of factors. Excuse the incoming essay, but I’ll try answer your question the best I can.

If the property has been owned by the same family for several generations and the business hasn’t bought out neighbours or other paddocks to expand, there shouldn’t be a debt burden to service which is a big assist in running a “small” family business.
Anyone trying to run a sustainable operation will have drought plans and ideally will be able to absorb the hit from a dry year or so, particularly if they’ve been profitable in the past and money has be put away in farm management deposits to draw on in leaner years (like now).
Cashflow is very seasonal even in a regular year, most sheep operations will basically generate an income once or twice a year and that has to stretch across the rest of the year to cover everything else (including living expenses for whoever is running it). One, the wool clip if you’re a woolgrower - not that wool prices have been substantial over the past decade compared to running costs - and two, lamb sales if you’re running a self replacing flock.
In a drought if you don’t have the manpower, reserves or infrastructure to containment feed (grain and hay or a combination pellet) you have no choice but to de stock.
Wiser operators will “lighten off” early and take advantage of the higher prices before everyone else panics and sells once the dry really sets in, because the livestock market is very supply/demand driven so a glut of supply naturally drives prices down.
If you sell off all of your livestock, you’ll have a sizeable cash injection at that point so budget to cover overheads and survive off that, not an unfamiliar concept to most of us - The issue in de stocking totally, whether by choice or necessity, is that you’ve crippled your future earning potential, and will likely have to borrow money to re establish a breeding flock when seasonal conditions recover, and on it goes.
Obviously whether you are running stock or not, expenses like pastoral board/council rates still need paying (and given the absurd property prices these days it’s always a sizeable hit) registration and maintenance on vehicles, telephone and internet, maintaining fences, water infrastructure, tracks (most properties have earthmoving equipment of their own to maintain their own internal roads) and pest management all still needs to be paid for.
This is why corporates are becoming such a huge player in the Australian agriculture industry for better or worse, and many small towns (see Yunta or nearby Peterborough) are basically dying as it’s increasingly difficult to support a family, let alone multiple generations of a family, on the income from a properties like this, despite the million dollar valuations on paper.



As I’ve tried to explain above, I’d say majority of the properties under these circumstances are hard pressed supporting an owner/operator and their family.
Labour is expensive (and rightly so, everyone deserves a fair wage for their work) so unless you’re a large corporate entity (like Jumbuck or McBrides invoked in another comment here) most family enterprises will do as much of their own maintenance as humanely possible from vehicles to water infrastructure and fencing. Spending on contractors is generally reserved for the really labour intensive, more specialised tasks like shearing, but it’s not completely unheard of for people to do their own shearing or whatever if you’re in a position where keeping costs down is more important than efficiency.
From experience living in similar isolation, I’d say one of the adults on the property would head to a regional center once every few weeks for “stores” - maybe Burra, Peterborough or Jamestown, maybe Port Pirie or Clare for “bigger” shops at Woolworths or Coles - if you’re running sheep you generally butcher your own meat and only buy in what you don’t grow yourself.
There’s no milkman coming by once or twice a week with supplies, and being less than an hour from Yunta I’d be very surprised if they didn’t collect their own mail from town.

Thanks for the insight. I have great respect for shearers, it's back breaking work, dealing with a huge, uncooperative beasts for hours on end in an unenviable hunched over position. I've seen some very old guys doing it in record time and they're just amazing. I imagine they'd have to get shearers in, or call on extended family. If they're truly running 3000 sheep, that's a LOT of work, even if you account for many being lambs and not in need of shearing.

Google tells me the current female world sheep shearing record is 517 in 9 hours, just for interest sake.

 

[essareem]

But.. but...

Didn't family ask Media firmly
to KEEP AWAY from property??

Is this new search STILL within the property?
I guess so.

The media are still allowed to be on a public road.

 

[HoneyBunOne]

But.. but...

Didn't family ask Media firmly
to KEEP AWAY from property??

Is this new search STILL within the property?
I guess so.

Nothing says a good scoop like planting yourself as close as you physically can, without getting arrested, say on a public road, and using your best telescopic lens to capture that front page news pic.

 

[Total_C]

I’ve seen a few people asking why they even announced this, and honestly I think it’s just practical. When the police and ADF turn up tomorrow with all their trucks and gear, people are going to notice. Oak Park is remote but it’s not that remote. I could get there from Adelaide in four hours or so. Locals, truckies on the highway, anyone passing through would see that kind of activity straight away.

So maybe putting it out there early is just about getting ahead of that. If people start spotting Defence vehicles or aircraft, they’ll start ringing media anyway. This way SAPOL controls the story before everyone starts speculating. It also probably helps keep people away once they know it’s a formal operation.

And just to point out, it was the family who asked for no media (via police), not the police themselves. The police just said there won’t be a spokesperson at the site and that updates will come from Adelaide. To me that reads like, sure, you can go out there if you want, but you’re not getting access to anything.

 

[Dotta]

DBM

 

[tedtink]

Does anyone know if Australia has a ‘no fly/ no drone map website and if restrictions have been put in place in the new search area?
ETA - Was thinking if LE feel they may have found something significant this might be done?
TIA

 

[spiritualdreaming]

Marg was right it is 1799 Oak Park Road - Screen Recording from source Location SA Viewer

Note: I don't know who owns the parcels of land surrounding it, any of them could be their land as well.

It's bloody confusing as other maps show 1799 Northside of Oak Park Road. But given 1799 and lot 6 have the exact same plan parcel ID I thought they maybe under the same Title Deeds? But then data from realestate.com doesn't match up if 1 was sold in 1999 and the other in 2022.

The zoomed out map is from realestate.com, the zoomed in one is from Google earth.

Just more confusion to add to the case

 

[SouthAussie]

Does anyone know if Australia has a ‘no fly/ no drone map website and if restrictions have been put in place in the new search area?
TIA

There is a govt website here that shows drone restricted zones and 'needs authorisation' zones. But I think these are static zones, not any temporary ones.

Experience

spatial.infrastructure.gov.au

 

[spiritualdreaming]

Does anyone know if Australia has a ‘no fly/ no drone map website and if restrictions have been put in place in the new search area?
ETA - Was thinking if LE feel they may have found something significant this might be done?
TIA

I was actually wondering if media will attend but stay on Oak Park Road and use their drones for coverage.

 

[essareem]

It's bloody confusing as other maps show 1799 Northside of Oak Park Road. But given 1799 and lot 6 have the exact same plan parcel ID I thought they maybe under the same Title Deeds? But then data from realestate.com doesn't match up if 1 was sold in 1999 and the other in 2022.

The zoomed out map is from realestate.com, the zoomed in one is from Google earth.

Just more confusion to add to the case

It is very confusing, and to be honest I don't know a lot about it on a scale this big.

From what I know, it goes cadastre > parcel > lot.

 

[CredibleSauce]

Thanks for the insight. I have great respect for shearers, it's back breaking work, dealing with a huge, uncooperative beasts for hours on end in an unenviable hunched over position. I've seen some very old guys doing it in record time and they're just amazing. I imagine they'd have to get shearers in, or call on extended family. If they're truly running 3000 sheep, that's a LOT of work, even if you account for many being lambs and not in need of shearing.

Google tells me the current female world sheep shearing record is 517 in 9 hours, just for interest sake.

Oh absolutely. My husband was a shearer before coming home to run the farm (which ironically, my very determined FIL built bit by bit with his own shearing wages in the 70’s) but even we don’t shear our own main clip without the help of a contracted team.
I’m no doubt biased but there is such an art to it, people would be stunned by the precision and care that these professionals put into the work.


Slightly more on topic, I don’t know if they’re necessarily running wool sheep either, if any. Dorpers and other shedding sheep are increasingly popular so the signs of use at the shearing shed yards could easily just be from work drafting/drenching/tagging/loading, not necessarily indicative of shearing taking place on the property at all.

 

[FromGermany1]

I looked into this further and it appears that for a child of 4 and up, 1/2 mile per year of age is a good rule of thumb. So Gus should have been able to walk 2 miles without undue difficulty.

How Far Can Kids Hike? (With Math Formula) - Mom Goes Camping

You want to go hiking with your kids? That's awesome. As a nature nerd with two daughters (now 14 and 6 years old), I absolutely love hiking with my kids. However, it's also really important that you choose a hike which your kids can actually handle. Which leads us to the question... How far can...

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Obviously this depends on how active and fit an individual child is and how used they are to being active. No doubt there are some very sedentary kids who would struggle to walk 100m but equally there will be 4 year olds in traditional nomadic groups who could easily cover 5 to 10 miles in a day.

Apropos distance: I didn't wonder, why there wasn't a fresh footprint of little Gus, but I wondered, why there was a footprint of him at all at the location, which was mentioned. Was there something special to be seen, because someone would walk or travel in that direction with little Gus or why an adult even had to get there (as it is far from home, afaik)?

 

[ChatteringBirds]

Just my opinion, but I don't think LE would announce a search ahead-of-time because they want to be transparent or give the media a heads-up or anything like that. Maybe for logistical planning or, possibly, as part of a strategy?

 

[Megnut]

My own curiosity -- this location, is it narrow or broad? If it's as promising as the announcement might imply, did LE put security in place, to protect the site overnight? LEOs? Cameras? Drones? Surveillance of any POIs?

JMO

 

[TMich6811]

Just my opinion, but I don't think LE would announce a search ahead-of-time because they want to be transparent or give the media a heads-up or anything like that. Maybe for logistical planning or, possibly, as part of a strategy?

Or distraction? IMO

 

[BreakingNews]

I've only seen reported in the earlier day's being a 2.5km radius

Maybe he was driven out there. MOO

 

[Megnut]

There's been no mention -- are there horses on site?

 

[whitelilac]

I work in mining and wanted to share a bit of context on what police might mean when they talk about the “special drone with infrared capabilities” and why they’ve said it could take weeks to analyse.

In our industry we use LiDAR and other survey tech to scan and compare terrain over time. Even a relatively small scan area produces a massive dataset, hundreds of millions of data points and sometimes hundreds of gigabytes in size. Once the point cloud is processed we can overlay it with previous scans or base survey data to detect subtle changes on the surface.

It’s incredibly accurate. You can pick up small depressions, new wheel tracks, compacted soil, or areas that have been dug or filled. When vegetation is sparse, like out there, the ground reads very cleanly. A few millimetres of change over a large area can be mapped out once the data is filtered and modelled.

That’s why it’s described as quite complex technology. They’re not talking about infrared to pick up heat signatures ten days later, that wouldn’t be useful now. What they’re doing is using multispectral or LiDAR-type imagery to look for disturbed earth or any physical surface change that doesn’t match the baseline.

The analysis takes time because every grid of data has to be reviewed, filtered, and compared. It’s slow detailed work but it can show things the human eye would never catch from the ground or a helicopter.

I’ve attached an example from a low precision LiDAR terrain scan I have been working on, not from the search area. Even at low resolution you can still make out roads, small depressions, and compacted areas. You can imagine how high resolution police data would reveal far more detail.

In simple terms they’re not searching for Gus directly with this drone tech, they’re scanning for evidence of disturbance, areas where the ground tells a story. Once that analysis is complete it could guide them to where to look next.

View attachment 618625

I am coming back to this post by @Total_C , which I found fascinating and enlightening.
see also post #613 (page 31) for more info and examples
I wonder if this particular technology has uncovered something which has led to this new search tomorrow.

 

[musicaljoke]

If they didn't make the announcement everyone would probably be saying "why didn't they tell anyone they were going to do another search? What's the big secret? They said they were scaling back."

Probably whichever way the police try to deal with the publicity, there will be speculation. Everyone wants Gus to be found.

imo

Indeed. The announcement halts all the whiners who want the police to doooo something!