Remarkable Survival Stories

FORTY-THREE days in the snow. Seven weeks in the desert. Seven days up a tree. Fourteen days trapped underground.

And now another chapter to great Australian survival stories: 11 days in the bush.

The discovery of British backpacker Jamie Neale, found alive and well in bushland in the New South Wales Blue Mountains, is the latest in a string of remarkable survival stories involving Australians or their country.

Neale, an experienced hiker, had not been seen for 11 days until found.

No doubt an extraordinary survival tale, like those of James Scott and Robert Bogucki.

Both men survived 43 days alone before being rescued from their sharply contrasting plights - Scott was lost in the snowy Himalayas; Bogucki in the hot red sands of Australia's Outback.

Scott, an Australian medical student, became lost in the Himalayas in 1992.

For 43 days, the then 22-year-old lived off melted snow, one caterpillar and, famously, two chocolate bars.

Scott, who many had given up for dead, lost a third of his body weight but maintained optimism; passing the time by recalling in detail happy times and the technical minutiae of his sporting hobby, karate.

"There is nothing extraordinary about me," Scott wrote in his book, Lost in the Himalayas.

"Before this terrible event occurred, I would not have believed for a moment that I would be capable of overcoming such seemingly impossible odds.

"The lesson I have learnt, simplistic as it might sound, is that no difficulty is impossible to overcome."

Most people believed Bogucki had perished in the Great Sandy Desert in north-western Australia in 1999.

The Alaskan ventured into the desert to "spend a while on my own, just nobody else around, just make peace with God".

In the end, he was thanking God.

Bogucki, then aged 33, drank muddy water and ate plants and flowers to sustain himself.

Police called off their search after 12 days but his parents hired specialists trackers from the US to continue looking.

Bogucki was eventually found 43 days after going missing - by media in a helicopter some 400 kilometres from where he was last seen.

The Alaskan's spiritual quest came two years after a British yachtsman also thanked God for his own "miracle" rescue.

Tony Bullimore continually prayed when adrift for four days in the icy Great Southern Ocean after his yacht overturned.

Bullimore, who kissed his Royal Australian Navy rescuers when they hoisted him from the sea, says he survived on "sheer determination, a little water and a little chocolate".

Others can relate only too well to Bullimore's relief at being rescued.

Australian skipper Mark Smith spent 11 days with his New Zealander first mate clinging to a life raft in seas off Vietnam in December 2005.

The pair had purchased a new yacht and set sail from Hong Kong - only for the vessel to sink a day later.

Smith and his first mate, Steven Freeman, licked rainwater from their life raft and drank their own urine to survive before being rescued by Vietnamese fishermen.

Another Australian seaman, Bjorn Bjorseth, was storing his urine to drink when he spent seven days on an inflatable life raft in a stormy Atlantic Ocean in September 2004.

The student, in Europe for a year's holiday, and four others were on a fishing trawler which sank off the south-west England coast.

They lived off one chocolate bar in the final three days of their ordeal, before being rescued when they drifted into mobile phone range.

Stockman David George no doubt wished he had a mobile phone when caught in an unusual predicament in August 2007.

George spent seven days stuck up a tree in Queensland's remote far north, watched by hungry crocodiles.

The then 53-year-old had set out from his cattle station to conduct what he thought would be a routine burn-off.

But his horse stumbled in rough terrain, knocking George unconscious.

Somehow he managed to stay on the horse's back, and after coming to, realised the horse had led him into croc-infested swampland.

He scrambled up a nearby tree, where he spent the next seven days - eating only two sandwiches in that time.

"Every night I was stalked by two crocs who would sit at the bottom of the tree staring up at me," he said.

"I'd yell out at them: 'I'm not falling out of this tree for you bastards'."

George tried to attract the attention of aerial searchers by reflecting sunlight off his tobacco tin and spreading a roll of toilet paper in the tree branches - all to no avail.

After a week, he braved the crocs and ventured from his tree into nearby bushland where he was spotted by a mustering helicopter.

Beaconsfield miners Brant Webb and Todd Russell would have loved to have been above ground on Anzac Day 2006 when an underground rockfall trapped them in the Tasmanian gold mine.

The rockfall killed their colleague Larry Knight but both men were rescued after spending 14 days trapped almost a kilometre underground.

Their rescue was the most famous in Australia since the 1997 Thredbo disaster. Then a mud slide at the ski resort in the NSW snow fields killed 18 people.

There was only one survivor - Stuart Diver, who spent 65 hours in sub-zero temperatures before being rescued.