It was idle curiosity that first led Lesley Brooker, an ex-CSIRO scientist, to find out who might have been the first Europeans to visit a bush property near Sandford Rocks, Westonia, recently purchased by Lesley and her husband Michael from the National Trust under the BushBank scheme.

Her initial enquiries eventually led to many months of research among the archives of the State Records Office and the Battye Library, as well as hundreds of kilometres travel in the Central Wheatbelt searching for long-forgotten landmarks.