A small footprint in the dust was the only thing left behind when little Gus Lamont vanished.

It was found 500 yards from a pile of red dirt which the four-year-old liked to use as a sandpit. 

His grandmother says she saw him playing there at 5pm two Saturday evenings ago.

Half an hour later, when Gus was called in for dinner, he had gone.

Though hundreds of police officers, numerous soldiers, countless volunteers, and an Aboriginal tracker have searched tens of thousands of acres of Outback, the blond, curly-haired young boy remains missing.

What started as a simple missing person’s case has evolved into a chaotic media spectacle, with an increasing number of reporters, TV crews, and TikTok ‘true crime’ enthusiasts descending on this remote part of South Australia, nearly four hours north of Adelaide.

A flurry of bizarre theories, involving everything from wild animals to abandoned mine shafts, have been brought up and ruled out, while the unusual lifestyle of Gus’s sheep-farming family is gradually being exposed to the public.

The known facts are as follows: At 5.30pm, Gus’s mother, Jess, who lives on the secluded homestead with her parents, realised she couldn’t find him.

Gus is pictured. His father lives two hours’ drive away, 100km to the west in Belalie North, near Jamestown

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

As the sun began to set, worry turned into panic, and for the next three hours, the family desperately searched their sprawling homestead, calling out Gus’s name into the dusk. Once night fell, at 8:30 pm, they contacted the police.

An extensive search operation followed, utilizing helicopters, drones, infrared cameras, trail bikes, and teams of divers who checked the farm’s water tanks, ponds, and reservoirs.

For a week, investigators scoured the enormous Oak Park Station. It covers an astonishing 150,000 acres of scrubland and desert.

Each morning, convoys of trucks traveled the 18-mile dirt road, bringing visitors from the outskirts of the windswept town of Yunta, home to two petrol stations, a pub, a post office, a police station, and an official population of 60.

 They would then scour the rocky landscape covered with salt bushes and other shrubs which make it all too easy for a child to disappear.

That 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 dead.

No further leads have emerged and, after a week, rescuers admitted the operation had shifted to a ‘recovery phase’, with the focus on locating remains.

The little boy vanished almost two weeks ago after playing in the yard of remote Oak Park homestead in the harsh South Australian outback, 300km 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

But the little boy’s family refuse to give up hope. On Thursday, Gus’s grandparent, Josie, spoke for the first time, telling the Daily Mail that while the police no longer believe he will be found alive, the family are continuing their search.

‘We are still looking for him,’ she insisted, declining offers of assistance. ‘You can’t help. We are dealing with this.’

Josie cuts an unorthodox figure in this God-fearing Outback community, where to quote one recent visitor, ‘men are men, and sheep are scared’, and social attitudes hark back to the era of Crocodile Dundee. She happens to be a transgender woman.

Born Robert Murray, Josie is Jess’s biological father. Josie’s wife, Shannon, is Jess’s biological mother. Locals say Josie transitioned around 2015. 

‘People were obviously a bit shocked,’ says one. ‘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”.’

Citizens of Yunta speak highly of the Murrays. Shannon’s late father Vincent Pfeiffer, who ran the farm until his death in the 2010s, was a famously tough individual who survived three years in Japanese PoW camps during the Second World War.

After returning to Australia, he married Shannon’s mother, Clair Jones, and began working on the farm. A pillar of the community, he was an active member of the town’s rifle shooting club. 

In more recent times, the family has been involved in the Yunta Race Club, which stages amateur ‘gymkhanas’ at which competitors race everything from horses to motorbikes.

Gus’s grandparent, Josie Murray – a transgender woman who locals say transitioned many years ago – told the Daily Mail the family had not lost hope

Josh Lamont broke cover in Adelaide, where he is staying with relatives, after he earlier joined the search for his son

While locals have been protective of the family, the same can’t be said of many online followers of proceedings, who subjected Josie to grimly predictable abuse on social media when details of her gender identity began to emerge.

A second unusual piece of the family jigsaw involves Gus’s father, Josh Lamont, who has spent much of the past fortnight searching the farm.

He and Jess turn out to have a complex love life, described by one acquaintance as a sort of ‘commuter relationship’. While officially a couple (who have a second son, one-year-old Ronnie), they have in recent years tended to largely live apart.

A family friend said Josh previously spent time on the Murray family station, but moved out a couple of years ago because of clashes with Josie. He lives two hours’ drive towards Adelaide, in a tumble-down bungalow, sold for $A81,000 (£40,000) in 2022, in a town called Belalie North. Relations are believed to remain relatively strained.

‘Josh doesn’t think it’s safe for kids to be out there. He thinks it’s dangerous,’ the friend said. Gus and Ronnie occasionally visit the bungalow with their mother, judging by the presence of a child’s bike next to the building’s front steps.

Late 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.

A former musician, Josh was once the hard-drinking frontman of a successful country rock ’n’ roll band called The Cut Snakes, who performed in the bars and pubs of rural South Australia and in 2019 won the ‘People’s Choice Country’ gong at the region’s prestigious Music Awards.

Despite the vast, featureless landscape surrounding the property, the boy managed to evade all search efforts and even the location of his remains is a mystery 

At Mr Lamont’s Balalie North home on Wednesday, two hours west of the homestead where Gus went missing, Gus’s bicycles could be seen still parked on the verandah

The band seems to have split up during Covid and there is little record of Josh performing since. He has earned money as a tradesman, who ‘helped build the Yunta community centre’, according to Fleur Tiver, whose family own the station next to Oak Park and have been neighbours of the Murrays for more than five generations.

Josh has family in Adelaide, where he was photographed this week, having taken a break from helping with the search. ‘It’s pretty much devastated him. It’s his little boy, and he’s pretty close to his son,’ said a friend.

He has not commented publicly. Indeed, before Josie’s remarks this week, the only words issued by the family came via a joint statement put out by Bill Harbison, a friend. ‘We’re devastated by the disappearance of our beloved Gus,’ it read.

‘It has come as a shock to our family and friends and we’re struggling to comprehend what has happened. Gus’s absence is felt by all of us and we miss him more than words can express. Our hearts are aching and we are holding on to hope that he will be found safe and well.’

Elsewhere, rescue workers are said to have discounted several theories that might explain the four-year-old’s disappearance, not least those involving animals.

While dingos, a wild dog, have been responsible for abducting small children, 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 designed to safeguard 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 almost certainly have discovered evidence of a struggle.

Gus 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

Local topography, meanwhile, makes it almost impossible that a stranger could have abducted him. The nearest major public road is the Barrier Highway, a desolate 600-mile road that takes long-distance truckers to New South Wales. But to reach it, Gus would have had to wander 30 miles.

Even reaching the nearest minor road would involve an 18-mile walk along the drive to the property. And no outsider can get within several miles of the homestead without being spotted due to the clouds of dust their vehicle produces.

That hasn’t stopped a viral photo, which shows a blond child similar to Gus being carried into a truck, from circulating on Facebook. However, a BBC investigation established that it was an AI-generated forgery created by a notorious fake news account named ‘Celebrity Today’.

Police divers have searched every pond and water tank in the area, and although some think Gus might have fallen into a well or mine, none has been found within several miles of the property.

The Outback is, of course, famously treacherous. At this time of year, temperatures reach the high 20s by day, but drop to single figures overnight. 

There are precious few naturally occurring sources of food or water and it seems unlikely that a four-year-old would be able to survive such conditions for any significant period of time without help.

So while the mystery of Gus Lamont’s disappearance has yet to be solved, the chances that the little boy with blond curly hair and a Minions T-shirt will be found safe and well are, sadly, getting smaller with every passing day.