Anthropologist Herbert Basedow was one of the first Europeans to document the Derby Boab Tree. In his 1916 expedition to the Kimberley region, Basedow photographed it and captioned the image as "the hollow trunk of a live Boab used by the aborigines as hut and burial place, Mayhall's well, King Sound". Basedow (1918) also wrote that: "[t]he natives have long been in the habit of making use of this lusus naturae [freak of nature] as a habitation; it is indeed a dry and comfortable hut". He found bleached human bones lying on the floor, which suggests that Aboriginal people had also used the tree as an ossuary for the dead. The human remains seen at the tree by Basedow and other early non-Indigenous visitors have disappeared, and may have been stolen.
