Seven people almost given up for dead after disappearing in unforgiving desert in south-western Australia 15 days ago walked into a general store in the town of Cook yesterday and wondered what all the fuss was about.
"They're searching for a lost adventure tour group," shopkeeper Mrs Dorothy Matilda told them as two noisy planes flew overhead one after another. "Probably for their corpses anyway."
"Really," said one of the men, in an English accent, as he scoffed down a coke. "Do you get many adventure tour groups here?"
"Only particularly stupid ones," said Mrs Matilda. "There's not much to see out there on the Nullabor Plain. Not much can survive there in the heat either. It was 130 degrees yesterday. Who in their right mind would want to put their lives at risk to see it?"
"Um," said the man, flashing a business card. "My name is Major Jeremy Billycock-Smythe and I am a principal of Trojan Tours. I think we are just a eensie teensie bit off track. Um, this isn't Perth by any chance, is it?"
So ended happily a remarkable search and rescue mission.
Major Billycock-Smythe, a former British Army officer and former mercenary, set out on Tuesday, December 14, with three Australian men, two American men and a New Zealand woman to walk in thongs (flip flops) from the eastern end of the 260,000sq km barren desert plateau in South Australia to Perth in Western Australia.
Soon after, they were sighted by a truckie who stopped to see if they needed help on the Eyre Highway. They said they didn't.
Fears grew about their safety, however, when they failed to make further contact with anyone for six days.
Three helicopters and two fixed-wing aircraft and land parties guided by Aboriginal trackers scoured the desert without finding a trace of them.
"We were looking in the wrong bloody areas," police search and rescue chief Inspector Randolph Birtwistle said yesterday.
Soon after the truckie left, they began going around in circles and ended up yesterday in Cook, quite near to their departure point — and a few thousand miles short of their intended destination.
"Oh blast," Major Billycock-Smythe said on learning this.
"I knew I should have taken a compass with me.
"I blame this blasted Australian sky. In England, the suns rises in the
east and sets in the west. You'd think it would be the opposite down here,
eh what?
"And the stars? How was I to know all the constellations would be upside
down and pointing the wrong way?"
Inspector Birtwistle estimated the cost of the search to the Australian taxpayer would be about $1.3 million, and berated the travel group for being grossly underprepared for the conditions.
But that barb took none of the gloss off emotional scenes at Cook yesterday as members of the group - sunburnt, foot-sore and a few pounds lighter than they were two weeks ago - were reunited with family members who had probably been resigned to never seeing them alive again.
And there was an unexpected bonus for scientists.
The group brought out of the desert with them a little desert rat kangaroo, a male, which was thought to be long extinct. The desert rat kangaroo, which is the size of a rabbit and noted for its speed and endurance, was last sighted in 1931.
"Curious little animal," Major Billycock-Smythe said, stroking its head, as he handed it over to Professor George Rowbottom, the officer in charge of breeding at the Royal Canberra Institute of Saving Endangered Species, who
had come expressly to collect the rare animal. "Two of them came into our
campsite on Christmas morning. I expect they just wanted to check us out."
"Two!" spluttered Professor Rowbottom. "No one has seen ONE for nearly 70 years and you saw TWO!"
He threw his right hand to the side of his head in exasperation. "Pity you couldn't catch the other one too. It might have been a female. We might have had a breeding pair."
"Oh, it was a female. Most definitely," Major Billycock said.
Professor Rowbottom's jaw dropped.
"And we did catch it," Major Billycock-Smythe said. "I remember it well.
"We were all feeling rather dejected because we weren't quite sure where we were. We knew it was Christmas Day because we had a calendar with us, which we had been marking off.
"Imagine our absolute delight when we came face to face with a group of
Aborigines.
"I didn't know if they were friendly but we really didn't have much choice,
what.
"I consulted my Latin for Tourist Phrase Book and thought I'd open with a pleasantry. 'Nice place you have here, this land of No Trees,' I said.
"That's what Nullabor means, you know. It's Latin for No Tree. That's why I had the phrasebook with me. Always be prepared, I say.
"Anyway, they just looked back at us blankly.
"'Do you speakee Latin?'" I said.
"More blank looks. Then they took off, without a word in any language.
"Do you think they thought we were Catholic priests wanting to convert them?
"At this point, we really didn't know what to do.
"Our spirits were at a low ebb so I suggested that we pitch camp early and just try to enjoy the day.
"Being a military man, I'm used to making the most of circumstances but the others weren't so jolly about it.
"I guess you can't blame them.
"By this stage we had very little left in the way of provisions, let alone
a turkey.
"Then a strange thing happened.
"We were sitting around in a circle, try to keep our spirits up by talking
about what we were dream about eating for Christmas dinner when these two little animals wandered into our campsite.
"They were very friendly; too trusting really.
"We flipped a coin."
He looked down fondly at the male desert rat kangaroo.
"We were saving him to celebrate the new year."
©December 28, 2000, John Martin. All Rights Reserved
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