Up a remote gravel track near the dusty outback town of Belalie North in South Australia is a little house that time forgot.

The two-bedroom bungalow, with its cracked walls and sun-baked tin roof, sits on a ten-acre plot which is being grazed by four moth-eaten sheep.

Alongside its driveway, you’ll find half a dozen cars, in various states of decay. On the verandah is a child’s bicycle, with stabilisers on the back wheels.

The place appears to have been abandoned some time ago.

Visitors who dare approach the front door can glimpse the deserted and spartan interior.

In the kitchen, the doors on a fridge-freezer are ajar. On the wall is a calendar someone has filled with daily appointments until March. They haven’t touched it since.

This is the home of Josh Lamont, a sometime rock musician whose band The Cut Snakes played the pubs and bars of South Australia before disbanding during Covid. Property records show he bought it for $81,000AUD (£40,000) in March 2021, around the time his first son, a blond-haired boy named Gus, was born.

That was now a lifetime away. For on the evening of Saturday September 27, police called on Josh to say that Gus had been reported missing from Oak Park Station, an outback sheep farm roughly two hours’ drive north.

Augustus ‘Gus’ Lamont, 4, was reported missing on September 27 this year after vanishing from his home near Adelaide

When the Daily Mail knocked on the family’s door last week, to gently ask whether they had any further details to share, we got a hostile welcome from Gus’s transgender grandmother Josie Murray, who was brandishing a pump action shotgun (pictured)

The child had been living there with his mother, Lamont’s girlfriend Jessica Murray, and grandparents Josie and Shannon.

Gus had apparently last been seen around 5pm, playing on a mound of red dirt that he used as a sandpit. By the time he was called in for dinner, half an hour later, he’d vanished. No one has seen him since.

A huge search, involving dozens of police officers, soldiers, a small army of volunteers and an Aboriginal tracker was quickly mounted.

Yet despite scouring tens of thousands of acres using drones and helicopters, and last week draining a small lake beside the property, it came to nought.

The closest anyone has come to finding something resembling a clue came in the early days of the search, when a single footprint was found in the dust, 500 yards from where he was last seen.

In the meantime, what began as a simple missing person’s case has become a major news event, drawing a collection of news reporters, TV crews and TikTok ‘true crime’ obsessives to this remote corner of South Australia, roughly four hours’ drive from Adelaide.

Various outlandish explanations for Gus’s disappearance, involving everything from wild animals to disused mine shafts, have since been investigated and discounted. And as the case enters its seventh week, police seem to be no nearer to working out what has become of the missing child. In fact, there seem to be more unanswered questions now than there were when he first vanished.

All of which brings us back to Josh Lamont’s house and the calendar hanging on the wall.

One of the last appointments it lists for March was ‘term starts’, presumably marking the introduction days for Gus at a local nursery school where he was due to start full-time in January. Importantly, that trial day was the occasion when the official police photo of Gus, in a grey and blue Peppa Pig T-shirt, appears to have been taken.

As far as we can establish, that nursery school visit also represents the last time anyone outside of the child’s immediate family can remember seeing him.

The Daily Mail has visited almost every property in Yunta, the nearest town to Oak Park Station, populated by only 60 people.

While many residents knew the Murray family, and were aware that Jessica had two children (Gus has a younger brother named Ronnie), no one could recall catching a glimpse of the boy since he was a baby. Neighbours in Belalie North said similar. Meanwhile in Jamestown, where the nearest pub to Belalie North is located, a bar worker said that while Josh Lamont is a fairly regular customer, he hadn’t seen Gus since 2024.

Put another way, the missing boy seems to have barely left his home in the six months leading up to the day he vanished. The only people who had seen him alive during that period were the ones who then reported him missing.

A casual observer might find this peculiar. But in the Australian outback, geography dictates that families can live very secluded lives.

Oak Park Station is a case in point. Spanning some 150,000 acres of scrubland and desert, an area roughly the size of the former county of Middlesex, it is 30 miles from the nearest major road.

Getting from the house where the Murrays live to town takes an hour. You then find yourself in Yunta. But it’s more a collection of houses than a town, and consists of two petrol stations, one pub, a post office and a police station. The closest medium-sized grocery store is in Peterborough, another hour away.

The Murray family have been largely silent since Gus vanished, until a few days ago, their only detailed public comments had come via a 150-word statement issued by Bill Harbison, a family friend, three days after the boy went missing. ‘We’re devastated by the disappearance of our beloved Gus on Saturday afternoon,’ it read. ‘We’re struggling to comprehend what has happened. We miss him more than words can express.’

There has been no update from the family. And when the Daily Mail knocked on their door last week, to gently ask whether they had any further details to share, we got a hostile welcome from Josie Murray.

In fact, she was brandishing a pump-action shotgun.

‘Who are you? ‘Get out! You are trespassing, get out, get out,’ she yelled. ‘Are you deaf? Get out!’ When our reporter attempted to apologise, she was told to ‘Shut your face and get out!’

The encounter left our reporter shaken. But police later sought to portray the incident as a misunderstanding, saying Josie wasn’t using the gun to threaten her visitor, but was carrying it because she’d seen a snake on their porch.

Local Deputy Police Commissioner Linda Williams insisted: ‘There was no intent for the person having that firearm at that time to be threatening.’

Despite a massive search operation, the emergency services have been unable to locate Gus, with locals voicing fears that the youngster may have falled down one of the abandoned wells and mines that pockmark the area

That explanation raised several questions, however.

Firstly, snakes are protected in South Australia. Didn’t that make it illegal for Murray to shoot one? Secondly, are pump action shotguns an appropriate tool for dispatching a reptile at close range? And thirdly, if dangerous snakes really are in the habit of taking up residence on the porch, why did the family allow their four-year-old child to play unsupervised outside on the day he vanished?

The police have yet to address any of these points, just as they are refusing to comment on the question of when Gus was last seen by anyone outside his immediate family.

What we do know for sure is that Josie cuts an unorthodox figure in this God-fearing community, where social attitudes hark back to the era of Crocodile Dundee. For she happens to be a transgender woman.

Born Robert Murray, Josie is actually Jess’s biological father. Josie’s wife, Shannon, is Jess’s biological mother.

Locals say Josie transitioned in 2015, around the time Shannon’s father Vincent, a Second World War hero who’d ran the ranch for several decades, died.

‘People were obviously a bit shocked,’ one told the Daily Mail. ‘But over time they came to terms with it, and for the most part people have come round to the view of “live and let live”’.

The family have since led largely unremarkable lives. However, locals say the years since Gus’s birth brought some conflict between the generations.

Specifically, friends of Josh say that he had spent extended periods of time at Oak Park Station but had moved out a couple of years ago due to a ‘personality clash’ with Josie.

He and Jess have since enjoyed a complex love life, described by one acquaintance as a sort of ‘commuter relationship’ where they remain a couple but largely live in different homes.

Although Josh tolerated his children living on the remote farm while they were infants, he ‘doesn’t think it’s safe for kids to be out there,’ a friend said, and was planning to move Jess and the boys into his home in Belalie North later this year.

That would have reduced the amount of time the little boy spent being ferried to and from his school.

On September 27, the night Gus vanished, Josh was found asleep in his home by police. It’s unclear why Jess had not phoned to tell him their child was missing, but analysis of his movements that day are believed to have ruled out any involvement in the disappearance. He has since visited Oak Park Station to assist with the search and is now believed to be living with family members in the suburbs of Adelaide.

Meanwhile, the known facts surrounding the case are as follows: at 5.30pm, Shannon had realised Gus was missing. And with the sun starting to sink, the family spent the next three hours frantically searching their rambling homestead. After darkness fell, at 8.30pm, they called the police.

A major search began that night, involving helicopters, drones, and infrared cameras. The next day, and for most of that week, convoys of trucks and trail bikes brought search teams to the farm, while teams of divers explored its water tanks, ponds and reservoirs.

But the dusty footprint, found after three days, is the nearest anyone has come to locating Gus, with police saying it showed ‘a very similar boot pattern’ to the pair he’d been wearing, along with a blue long-sleeved Minions T-shirt and a grey sun hat.

Yet an Aboriginal tracker concluded that it could have been there for a week before the night Gus went missing. In the absence of any further footprints, the trail went cold.

Local topography makes it almost impossible that a stranger could have abducted him. The nearest major road is the Barrier Highway which takes long-distance truckers to New South Wales. But to reach it, Gus would have had to walk 30 miles

After a week, rescuers admitted the operation had shifted to a ‘recovery phase’, with the focus on locating remains. That wound down a few days later.

However, a team returned on October 17, for another four-day search. At the end of the month they drained about three million litres of water from a dam.

In the absence of evidence regarding Gus’s fate, various conspiracy theories are doing the rounds. Police have discounted most of them, particularly those involving wild animals.

Dingos, a wild dog, have previously been responsible for abducting small children. But there are precious few in the land around Yunta, since sheep farmers tend to shoot them on sight. The region is also protected by a 1,200-mile dog fence to protect livestock.

Crocodiles, which inhabit more tropical northern regions of Australia, are not found in the south.

Gus is too big to be taken by an eagle, and if he had been attacked by a wild pig, searchers would have discovered evidence of a bloody struggle.

Local topography makes it almost impossible that a stranger could have abducted him. The nearest major road is the Barrier Highway which takes long-distance truckers to New South Wales. But to reach it, Gus would have had to walk 30 miles.

And if he had simply wandered off and perished, some remains ought to have been found by now.

So, some six weeks after the little boy with curly blond hair went missing, this great Australian soap opera shows little sign of ending. And every passing day seems to bring more questions.