In 1857, a convict named Garbut, then in confinement on Cockatoo Island, near Sydney, created a great sensation, by stating that he actually knew Dr. Leichhardt to be alive and in captivity. His account was substantially this :— “That far in the interior, beyond even the bounds of pastoral enterprise, was a tract of rich, well-watered country, peopled by a colony of runaway convicts, who had married native women, and kept up a communication with the settlements by means of pack-horses, obtaining by this means not only new recruits of their own stamp, but supplies of necessaries and even luxuries. Dr. Leichhardt and his party, he said, came suddenly upon this colony, directly after leaving the settled district, and for fear he or they should divulge its existence, were forcibly detained. Garbut offered, if liberated, to lead a party to the spot, but stated that his brother and uncle, also convicts, had been there as well as he, and sought, we believe, their liberation also. He asserted, that the last of Leichhardt's camps, discovered by Mr. Hovenden Hely, during his expedition in 1853, was within two hundred miles of the settlement which he professed to describe.