Dr Richard Harris SC OAM // A deep dive into the anaesthetist, adventurer and Australian of the Year 2019

favorites ever. Please ignore any time specific references, although most of our ya is evergreen, so hopefully you enjoy it as much as I did the first time, the second time, and probably the third time that I've listened to it.

I truly soak this one up, as you guys can tell since a year later, I'm still banging on about it, and I'll keep this week's fresh episode for you for next week, which is also a banger you might have seen on socials that We very very closely followed the amazing Jess Fox's Gold Metal performance in Tokyo this year and was so lucky to be able to sit down with her while she is in we are preparing for the World Cup to chat about that experience, Her Way,

Toya to get there and everything else in between, which I'm so excited to share, So make sure you've subscribed to get that one as well next week.

but without risk taking, we don't become resilient. We don't become confident. We have to do things that challenges and can be hard or uncomfortable. If you think you're no good, it's something, the best way to fix it is to just do it.

will bear all the facets of seizing your Yea. I'm Sarah Davidson or a spoonful of Sarah, a lawyer turned funentrepreneur who swapped the suits and heels to co found matcha Maiden and matcha Milk Bar. Sez the Ya is a series of conversations on finding a life you love and exploring the self doubt, challenge, joy and fulfillment along

the way. Sometimes I choose our guests out of purely selfish curiosity to converse with a particular person, regardless of whether anyone else would find them interesting, although I suspect most of you will be as fascinated by doctor Richard Harris as I am.

a nethetist anyway, you know what I'm saying. So unique, in fact were his skills that he was pretty much the only person in the world equipped to help sedate and thereby save the thirteen young Thaie boys of the Wild Boars soccer team who got stuck four kilometers into a cave in Thailand in the rainy season of twenty eighteen, along with diving mate and co author Dr Craig Challon, with whom he won Australian of the Year last year. I don't think I need to say much more to

explain why I'm fascinated by historian skill set. I gush a lot in this one, but I just couldn't fathom the enormity of the task before him, the details of which definitely went over my head watching it on the news at the time, among many other things. Harry also has his own wonderful podcast, the Real Risk Podcast, so was equipped with a proper mic, such a pro so that'll be a nice little break from our guest zoom audio.

I highly recommend both his book and his podcast, the latest episode of which is actually with the legendary James Cameron of Titanic fame. I'll include links at the end, and I hope you enjoy doctor Harris, even though you very humbly told me I was only allowed to call you that once. Welcome to the show.

And that's mainly because for people who have been in the media, and particularly yourself, after having read your book twice in the past couple of weeks, it can be so easy to put people on a pedestal and forget they're not superheroes, even though of course I still insist.

big extended family, very Australian upbringing here in Adelaide. Life for me revolved around summer. You know, I would be pretty much in my short snow shirt, pair of thongs and walking, whether it was walking the streets or walking the beaches, getting sun burnt so badly every year that I would sort of count how good a summer it was by how many times my back peeled off, you know,

that sort of disgraceful upbringing that you would be. You know, the parents would be sent to prison for child abuse now if that happened.

one story in the book. I think that I came back from catching some reef fish which were completely inedible, and I laid them proudly on the beach in front of all the parents. I must have been twelve or thirteen at the time, and this lady came over to me and went, oh, OK, what have you caught here. And I said, well, I don't really know what their names are, but this is you know, I'm pretty proud of myself. And she said, well, you know, this one's are such and such, and this is what it eats

and that's where it lives. And of course you can't eat that one, it's not edible. And one by one she went through the fish and told me what they were, and told me about their habits and all this sort of stuff. And she then said, very cleverly, so what are you going to do with them now? And I suddenly felt this wave of shame over me that I just killed these really interesting and pretty fish for no reason whatsoever. And from that point on I kind of changed the way I looked at the water, and it

really made me think about what I was doing. So it didn't stop me spearfishing. I mean I loved I did enjoy it, and so, but I would only shoot a fish that I could eat. And I decided to learn the names and the habits of all these fish. In fact, she gave me a book. I've still got it.

The first book I had, called The Marine and Freshwater Fishes of South Australia, was produced by the South Australian Museum, and I had all these beautiful black and white plates of the fishes, pictures and names, and I just studied it. I became obsessed by it and decided then and there that I was going to be a marine biologist, which a dream that I really hung onto actually, And it was almost a toss of the coin choice between that, veterinary science and medicine for me, which of the three

I would do. And I ended up in medicine, partly because I got the marks to do it, and I missed out on vet science. Interestingly, I had enough marks to be a doctor, but not to be a vet and a cousin who was doing marine biology told me that there were no jobs in the field and taught me out of it. So it was and still is quite a strong interest for me.

And you know, medicine didn't put an end to your marine adventures at all.

And I'm starting to see, you know, some colleagues who are maybe ten years older than me, they're getting close to retirement, and some of them have said to me, Ah, I sort of admire the way you've conducted your life, Harry, you know, or other outside interests, because I'm suddenly thinking I don't know what I'm going to do with myself. I've got nothing else. And you need doctors to be pretty focused, obviously on their job, and you'd want that

in your doctor as a patient. But I also think it's very important that your doctor has a life outside of medicine, because how can they relate to people normally. I mean, some doctors don't really have to if they're looking at your X rays or looking at a piece of view under the microscope. But you know, if you want your GP to be a well rounded person, so they have some idea of what goes on outside their office.

who tend to be not necessarily the most successful. And the whole idea of this podcast is to separate and make a distinction between success and fulfillment, because I think we chase success, we get on this very productivity hamster wheel and end up on this autopilot's circuit that can lead people to be in their fifties and sixties and retirement age and have no hobbies and no interests and no experience and think what have I done this time?

But the people who have sort of recalibrated from financial metrics and titles and looked for joy and had activities, I call them your playt eight. Like if you don't play outside your vocation, you're missing a whole part of yourself that's for joy and exploration and that develops other sides of you that actually makes you a better worker as well, because you've got a.

don't think i'm the worst. Fortunately, it's not a bad place to be. No. No, So I don't think I'm a star of Anesesia by any stretch. But my career has been so interesting to me, at least because I haven't been happy just to give anesthetics nine to five. I've really mixed it up in terms of the places I've worked, the types of medical work that I've done, which include stuff aligned with but not purely anesesia. The whole time, so that's been really important to me as well.

I find I get this sort of five year each with my work. Where I go, I think I need to shake things up a bit and try something a bit different. I always do some anesesia, but the other half the time or part of the time, I might be off doing diving medicine, or eero medical retrieval work, or working in a third world country, or just something different. And as long as it fits in with the family, which it usually does, you know, it's been a huge success for me.

So diving in hyperbaric medicine was an obvious one because of my interest in diving since such a young age, and a lot of hyperbaric medicine units in the public hospitals in Australia are run by an esthetus or intensive care doctors or emergency medicine people or occupational physicians tend to be the group, but anissaus primarily, so I was always surrounded by people who worked in that field and it was always in the back of my mind that

that's something I'd like to do. And yeah, an opportunity came up, basically, so I started to do that and working part time, and I was just starting to think about maybe I've done this for long enough. I'd been working there about twelve years part time, and I actually opened the health Essay Health computer to renew my application or whatever it was, and the advertisement popped up for MedStar,

Theessa Ambulance eramedical Service recruiting. Now I went, oh, that's me, And that had been the other thing that I'd just been thinking about because I did a bit of it when I was training as an anissa, certainly in Adelaide and New Zealand. I did some so that had been in the back of my mind is something I'd like to revisit. And so this message popped up on the computer. I said, wow, I could just give them a call.

I suppose see what happens. And I knew the guy who was the director of the service, and so I just gave him a ring and said, look, I haven't done this for the last eight years or something, since I was a trainee or a bit longer. Perhaps is it worth me coming down for a chat? And he said, sure, Harry, come down, We'll have a talk. And there it was. So I got into that and really threw myself into that. Then I found it to be really to my liking. I love the excitement of that work, and I love

the organization and the people that work. They're amazing bunch of doctors, nurses and paramedics, all really extraordinary people. And yeah, it got right into it and was going well until this crazy thing in Thailand happened when I had to sadly sort of step away from it because I just didn't have time to commit to it.

opening and new experiences your comfort zone. I have stepped out of it once, obviously, leaving corporate and moving into business, and I sort of patter myself on the back for five years, thinking like I'm never going to have to take another step out of my comfort zone, but it catches up with you over time you grow into becoming comfortable again, and you need to continue to seek out those next steps that challenge you. And I'm sure you probably didn't imagine that the thail end step would be.

I mean, that's a huge jump in challenge from a difficult thing to something that the globe thinks is impossible quickly. Just before we go there, I mentioned before we started recording that I'm also a sucker for a niche community and just digging really deep into things that day to day most people have no idea about. But when you start to dig beneath the surface, it's there's a whole

worldwide community of people who are fascinated by something. And I didn't actually think about cave diving as being such a specific skill, like separate to just deep sea diving or open water diving.

basically going beyond the normal recreational dive limits. So, as an open water scuba divy, you're told that really the maximum depth you should ever go to breathing a tank of air is forty meters, maybe even thirty is recommended, and you have a single tank on your back, you've got two regulators coming off that, and you always dive with your dive buddy right next to you. That's the

sort of mantra don't hold your breath and ascend slowly. Well, when you go technical diving, you're looking to extend those limits, whether it's in depth or duration or into what we call the overhead environment, which might mean inside a shipwreck or inside a cave or with an artificial ceiling above you, which is a decompression ceiling, which means that you can no longer go straight to the surface because you've got to do stops on the way up, otherwise you get

this decompression sickness or the bends, and to do that it requires a lot more training, It requires a lot more time in the water, and it requires specialty equipment and sometimes other gases that you breathe on as well.

And cave diving, you can train for cave diving the same way as you can train for some of these other aspects of technical diving, and a lot of cave divers sort of gather all these certificates along the way, so they become proficient in deeper diving with mixed gases, and they might start using rebreathers, which are a different

type of diving equipment. They certainly have to learn to use more than one scuba tank to prolong both their duration but also their redundancy, because if you're obviously in a cave and you can't go straight back to the surface, if one of your pieces of equipment fails, you have to have a backup, and you need to back up for everything including your lights and your tanks, in your

ear supply and so forth. So in Australia, the easiest way to learn all this is through the Cave Divers Association of Australia, and they've got three or four levels of training. I say three or four because I should know, but it keeps changing, so I think at the moment of three, yeah, And it takes maybe four to six years probably to go through that training progression quite slow and arduous, and you need a lot of time underwater

in between each of the levels of the courses. And because there's so much attention to detail and safety, the sport is actually incredibly safe and the risk of a bad accident, which means a death really in this sport is very very low.

for the situations that you're going too. What mentally keeps you going through say a zero visibility you know, tunnel that your top and your bottom at both scratching, Like, to me, that's just so scary and foreign. What makes you keep going? Is it the view that you're going to get at the end. Is it the things that you've seen at the end of some tunnels that makes you go? Or the fact that no other humans been there? Is it the adrenaline or the risk? Like what brings you back every time?

and training and pattern recognition and muscle memory. It's just having done this sort of stuff time and time and time again, in gradually increasing difficulty circumstances. And that starts right at the very beginning with the training. You don't actually get to see very much at all during cave diving courses because you've either got a blindfold on or someone's ripped your mask off face. So, yeah, the courses, I mean, the courses are run not in those sort

of environments. They're running open water sinkholes where you can just pop up to the surface. But mentally, I tell you, you're in a cave when someone puts this blindfold on you and then taps you on the shoulder, which means something bad's about to happen to you, and they pull your regulator out of your mouth or or you know, cut the line that you're following to get out of the cave. All this sort of stuff. Then you have to fall back on the training that you've been given

and solve the problem. And if you don't solve the problem, you don't pass. And they give you a thing called a stress test at the end of the course, which sort of throws all these things together in quick succession. And I think some people, I mean most people pass these things because they're you know, you're pretty comfortable underwater

by the time you start this sort of course. But some people actually go, you know what, this is not for me because I don't like the way I'm feeling, or I don't like the way this makes me feel. So maybe cave diving is not for me. But for most people who obviously who pass the courses, they get a lot of pleasure out of that environment. Yeah, and actually the more advanced you get, the more gnarly some of these places are. They can actually be quite fun.

It's like sort of three dimensional problem solving with your eyes closed and the clock tickings. It's kind of weird, but it's fun.

that happened? Or can you even dive professionally. Had you ever done rescue missions before?

And you'd think, well, why would you ever need to do that, But you know, as cave divers and cavers, we often go to remote caves which we have to visit by passing through a sump, a water filled section of the cave. For example, out on the nullaboard plane, there's a very well known cave called Cocklebitty Cave and it's about six kilometers long and most of it is underwater, but it's interrupted by two rock chambers a third and

two thirds along the way. So to cross these rock chambers you have to get out of the water and carry all your diving equipment across this underwater mountain pretty much and then back into the water and then head off again to the next one, and then at four and a half kilometers in there, you come across the second one, which is even bigger and longer, and again

have to carry all your equipment across it. And these places like a huge rock pile, their massive boulders about forty meters high that you have to climb up and across the top and then down the other side into the water. So I was out there with Craig, actually Craig Challon, and I said, I remember saying to him, what happens if one of us falls over here and breaks your leg? Or how would anyone possibly rescue us?

Because the only way out is back through the water, back across the other mountain, and then back through the water to the entrance. That seems like an impossible quest. So it was kind of selfish self interest that made me think, well, we need to we need to get organized,

because I don't think anyone could rescue us. So I went home and we gathered some of the emergency services around, the police divers and some very experienced cave divers and so forth, and we ran this little weekend of chit chat and exercises, scenarios and came away with a kind of a coarse structure which I've subsequently taught every year since in South Australia, but also taken it over to

New South Wales and New Zealand. So we'd spend a fair bit of time by the Thaire Cave Rescue thinking about how we were going to approach this sort of problem. But we never anticipated they would be non English speaking children at thirteen of them, and in such a difficult cave, and people who were not cave divers. I mean, they were quite good cavers, the fact that they've gotten themselves that far in, but they certainly weren't divers.

then we all knew that the world came together. There was a lot of difficult to get in them out, but then they got out, and I think a lot of us missed a lot of the subtleties in between of actually how literally small the chances were of a successful removal of the children from that cave were.

were nine chambers, you know. I think we all thought that this cave diving again, misunderstood that it was just some boys in a cave. But there were like nine different chambers to get in, and you're in your wet suits and you're dragging all your stuff, and even just to get in to find them was a challenge, let alone, to then work out how to bring out thirteen of them who couldn't dive themselves.

dive in. When once they got some divers there, like the Thai navy guys, they tried to dive in there. It was physically impossible to swim into the flow of water appearing from the entrance of the cave. So then they called these British guys Rick Stanton and John Valanthine because of some local contacts a guy called vern Unsworth, a British caver who lived in the area. Rick and John are extremely proficient, like they are the go to

guys for this sort of thing. There are two of three or four people in the world who have even swum an injured person out through a cave underwater like this before, so they had the experience the runs on the board, I guess, and also Rick and John in particular, they're kind of the rock stars of our sport, if you like. They are very very highly regarded, very tough guys, very capable.

pretty despondent. They thought, there's no way that anyone's getting in there to get these kids, even if they are still alive, and the chances are frankly that they've already drowned.

But they stuck around for a few days. They kept trying, and the reins eased off, and gradually the water settled to the point where they could actually start to make some forward progress, and in what I would say is the greatest diving achievement of the modern era from what I've seen, they drag these huge sacks full of climbing rope with them and laid this rope through the cave to where the kids were over the next three to four five days, and that would be extremely difficult and

dangerous dive to do. You can imagine the water is like coffee. You cannot see your hand in front of your face. You're just pushing and swimming, pulling yourself hand over hand, pointing yourself into where the strongest flow is coming from. You have no idea where you're going. There's so many places in a cave like that that you can get trapped or hooked behind a rock in the flow,

or squashed or whatever. And they would tie off the rope every fifty meters or so, so they always had this rope they could follow back out find their way home, and every now and again they'd pop up into an air chamber, from which point they could walk or wade or swim on the surface to the next point where they had to go back underwater. And as you say that, repeated nine times and a very very long way, about two point four kilometers in the end, so it's a

hell of a journey. And then finally popping up into Chamber nine, whereby they took their masts off and sniffed the air to see if they could smell any sign of where if the kids were in there. And Rick I remember him telling me that when he first smelt the air in that chamber, he thought he'd swum into a tomb, because he said the smell was so bad that he was expecting to find the bodies of these

kids floating in the water. So, you know, huge pressure on these guys, and that must have been just horrific swimming through that water waiting to find all these bodies. When suddenly these lights came on up the hill up to the right, and one by one, all these boys started running down the hill. And you've probably seen that amazing bit of video from John Valanthin's head camera when he says how many of you are there, and one of the boys, Adul, who speaks a little bit of English,

says thirt. John says, brilliant, you're all here. Rick, being a bit of a wise guy says he'd already counted them by then he knew there was so that's pretty cool. And of course the whole world suddenly went, yeah, they're saved, you know, no worries. But anyone who knows anything about caving and cave diving went, oh my god, what do we doing now?

an attempt to drill. There were some attempts to drain the water out the entrance.

we're training for something that will probably never happen. And I know Craig and I were secretly hoping that we would get called over to Thailand because you felt like a fireman who's never put out a fire, you know, you want to get a gold And it's funny, I've spoken to quite a few soldiers, especially special forces, people who are desperately keen to actually test what they've learned and their training and just and themselves, I suppose, which

is hard to understand and maybe even harder to sympathize with, but I sort of understand it. Now, You've got these skills and you really wonder whether you're up to the task yourself, and you want to put them to some good. So yeah, we were keen to go and to say I'm the only person in the world who could have done that. It's a slight exaggeration. There are definitely other cave diving anesthetis, but maybe no one else is silly

enough to get involved. But I just happened to know Rick Stanton and some of the other people that were already there, So yeah, I was always in the crosshairs, I suppose.

thirteen families. It's just absolutely incredible. And I love how you and Craig were actually really honest about from the very beginning, how you were kind of angling to figure out how you could get over there, because you did, we actually have skills that were relevant to offer to a very very difficult problem once you actually got there, and then I mean, everyone who's interested you can read in the book there's a lot about even just diplomatically,

how you get someone there, and then you get them immunity when they're going to go into something so intense and high risk. Can you describe the actual tunnel to us and like what you actually faced, because again I don't think any of us really understood at the time that it was hours in, hours out. The only way really that was left after exploring all the options was to sedate the children, and then it was on your shoulders to choose with what how long would that last?

Would they panic if they woke up? You're sedating them, so who's diving them out? All the other divers had never injected anyone with anything before, Like my mind, just none of us in the public heard really because it was just so technical. But like, how did you and Crag go about making some order in the chaos?

the rescue. Because the river floods again, no diving can be achieved, and if we can't drill a hole or something else, then those kids to have to stay there until the end of the monsoon, which is conservatively three to four months, probably more like five by the time all the water drains away again. And that turned out to be the reality of that, by the way, so we really had twenty four hours to make a decision

how we were going to do this. As soon as I arrived, there was an assumption and actually quite a lot of pressure on me to agree to this anesthetic plan. And I had said to Rick on the phone before I even left Adelaide, that I think that's impossible. It cannot be done. It's never been tried. I can think of a million ways those children will die if we

try and do that. But I'm prepared to come over and maybe as a doctor, I can go and look after the kids while you guys come up with a better plan, or as a cave diver, and maybe I can just give you guys a hand in the rescue or even in the recovery of the bodies, if that's what's needed, because the kids still had to come out

one way or the other back to their families. So on that basis, we went over and as I say, as soon as we hit the ground, everyone's going, right, well, how are you going to anesetize and what are you going to do? I'm not doing it. I'm not even talking about it until I've looked at what else is

going on, until I've seen the cave for myself. And of course I'd been racking my brains for the last twenty four hours anyway, thinking about how I would anesthetize them, and getting as many opinions from friends and colleagues about that in the meantime, so I had a bit of an idea what I was going to do if it came to that, But for me, that was off the table until it was absolutely the last resort. And you've mentioned all the plans around water pumping and draining the

cave and drilling and all these sorts of things. I had to be sure my own mind that none of those things were possible. I had to be sure that it wasn't possible to teach the kids how to know just the rudimentary diving skills we could safely escort them out awake. I had to be sure that we couldn't maybe just stock up the larder with food in there for them and let them sit there for three months,

if that was the safer option. And so my first request or demand really was that I had to dive the cave myself and have a look at it and see the kids for myself, see the environment they were in, see how difficult the cave was, and that would just

help me get my head around all this stuff. And that's all I had to do, really, to be very sure in my own mind that there was no way these kids were coming out any other way than anesthetized, and that they would not survive more than a few weeks in there without food and proper medical care and so forth. And not only that, but there were four Thay Navy military people in there with the kids, and

they were in exactly the same boat. If the kids were not rescued, that meant those four men would also perish in there. So it was a bit of responsibility to do something. And I actually still believed, really right until the last child was out, that this would not work, and I believed it with all my heart. To be honest, I'd still thought there's no chance that this plan can conceivably be successful, and that any of these kids could survive,

let alone all of them. And the only reason I managed to push your head with the plan was that the alternative seemed even worse to me, and that was to leave these kids to die very slow and lingering death. And I couldn't walk away from them with that, you know, on the card. So we had to try it. And I thought that, well, at least if the kids die under our care, they'll be anesthetized and asleep when it happens. So when you put it in those sort of binary terms,

it seemed like a pretty clear choice. You know, it was a bad outcome for me if we went with that plan, but either way, the kids would be dead, and we forget that.

ultimate solution did become. And also I'm so fascinated by self doubt and how psychologically how much of a barrier that can be to us in our day to day lives, but let alone in a situation where the outcome that you're doubting is actually fatal for people, you know, children. I just don't know how you stayed focused for such a huge task with so much weight on your shoulders.

And I've heard you speak about how what you actually had to do with the children to test their masks and stuff that is, by any normal standards in any normal situation, counterintuitive to anything that you would do for someone's well being, But it's what you had to do. So talk us through the sort of mental challenge you went through in coming to that plan and then actually executing it, not knowing each day that any of them had survived until you got out at the end of

the day. Like if anyone doesn't know, doctor Harris was in Chamber nine with the children all day and the other divers were diving the children out sedated. So do you want to maybe explain that process as well, so that people know how it happened with the other divers sort of taking one child.

take charge of one child each. I would call each child down one at a time. They would already be dressed in a wetsuit. They'd come down and sit on

my lap in the water. Was at the base of a very steep slope, so I was in water up to my lower chest, I guess, and I couldn't really get much higher out of the water than that, So I'd cock a knee up and they would sit on my knee with their top half of their body up out of the water, and I would show them the needle and syringe and I would then inject them in the leg with ketamine, the anesthetic drug, and it would take about five minutes for that to work, and they'd

slowly get a bit knotty and then get limp and become like a rag doll and fall asleep, and so I'd support their head and their face to make sure their airway was okay whilst that happened, and then the British diver would bring over the full face masks that we were going to use to make sure that their face and airway stayed dry during the diving extraction, and then we'd try and put that on the kid's head, which is actually quite hard to do when the kids

will floppy like a rag doll. So we had a few issues with that, and a couple of kids sort of ended up flopping into the water by accident. And you know, it's not even funny, but it is, well, that kind of is, but it wasn't you know, I agree entirely. I mean, it was just a circus and we were sort of giggling at times because it was just so awful and it just seems so hopeless. It's like a movie of how not to give an anesthetic basically.

But anyway, with us. So we get the mask on, and we do the straps up so tight because we're terrified that these masks would get dislodged or bumped with all the stalic tights and projections in the cave, and the poor kids ended up with squashed noses and I think some blood noses and things. But anyway, they were safe, obviously. And then once the mask was on, then I would

do this first test. And I remember very clearly with the first boy that we did this too, getting him and just pushing his face down into the water for just a few seconds, and then lifting him up again and expecting the mask to be half full of water and seeing that, okay, it's still dry, and so try again for maybe twenty seconds, and then finally leaving him lying face down in the water. And I remember very clearly the feeling of this is not what I'm supposed

to be doing as a doctor. You know, I feel like I'm basically ethanazing this child. It's like drowning a kitten or something. It just felt it felt awful and

so so wrong. But the kid be bubbling away happily, you know, the bubbles coming out of the face mask as they should and so the British dive would then go off and get his own equipment ready, and whilst he was doing that, I'd get the kid make the final preparations by tying the kid's hands behind their back with a carabine a clipped to two cable ties, and

then wrapping their feet together with a bungee cord. And the idea of that is to make them into the most streamlined kind of dart that we could, so they'd be easy to push through the water and through these tight restrictions in the cave. Because if their arms were flailing about then obviously they would get injured or tangled

in the ropes or the projections in the cave. But more importantly, if they suddenly woke up underwater water, then they might reach up and rip their mask off, or even more worryingly, do the same to the rescue diver and drown the rescue diver. Because you can imagine if you're in the tight confines of a very restricted part of the tunnel, you can't see anything at all, and suddenly this kid starts waking up and thrashing around, you're

both going to end up dying. There's no way that one of these British guys was going to just abandon a child. You know, they would do everything in their power to try and rescue them, and that would almost certainly end in the death of both of them. So, you know, the first rule of any rescuers to protect the rescuers number one, and then the victims come a close second, but it has to be in that order, because without the rescuers, you can't do anything for the other boys. Yeah.

they were pretty tight. Like if I was any bigger, I would struggle Fortunately the floor of the cave was mud, so that actually works in your favor because you can scrape a bit of a trench through, and the more times people go through, the easier it gets.

arm to find where that hole is. And as I say, it's like a blind three dimensional problem solving exercise, which is fine when you're by yourself and you've got time on your side, but when you've got someone else to worry about, and knowing that the anesthetic will be wearing off and you've got to keep moving, the kids getting colder every minute they're in there. There's a lot of pressure on these British guys to do this, and a huge amount of mental strain and stress on them.

often it would need to be given. There's really no recipe for what we did, so I just had to best guess it, really, and just as best we could as we went along. Now, of course, these other divers aren't medical people, and so they took on an enormous responsibility. I mean, they never would have looked after an unconscious person on the surface, let alone underwater when you can't

see the patient. So, you know, imagine if I asked you to do this right now in a you know, if I turn the lights out and said, right, there's an unconscious person there, just look after them for three hours, keep them alive and if they start to wriggle, inject them in the leg. They'll give you one little torch. It can shine on them briefly while you do the injection.

any other time during the rescue. I sort of got it into my head that I don't know how we got away with day one, but tomorrow this is definitely going to all come unraveled, and we're going to be found out to be the fraudsters that I know we are. You know, I just was so convinced this plan couldn't work. And so that night, you know, I virtually had no sleep. It was raining all night, so I was listening to the rain on the roof of the hotel, thinking we might not even be getting back in to see that

boys again. And you know, that was really tough each day saying goodbye to the remaining boys and those military guys, thinking if it rains tonight, you guys are dead. We're going back to our hotel. We might never see you again. I felt very guilty leaving each day, I have to say, and I.

diving with anyone else in those conditions. They just get in your way, so you're completely by yourself for those few hours swimming out, and I found that actually quite relaxing strangely, and helped me like a deep yeah, get some mental energy back, thinking about okay, what do we do? What could we do better? I wonder if any of them are alive, but we'll soon find out, I suppose.

You could get a free haircut there outside the cave entrance if you had the time. Unfortunately, there's some beautiful typhood being cooked there and these huge woks, but we didn't have time to even see any of that. It was like a sideshow ali at the agricultural shows. It's just people with all these stools and you know, this sort of happy atmosphere it was an amazing place. I only got stall. It was like that. It was I only got to very briefly walk around at once and

just to see what was going on. But it was so colorful and vibrant, you know. But yeah, and then it was back into the meetings or planning or you know, sorting out equipment and stuff. But it was kind of a cool atmosphere there, and overwhelmingly this feeling of community that all these people were there for one reason, one reason only. It was extraordinary thing to be a part of. Actually, it was a real privilege.

You know, here's a plan. I think it's got one hundred percent failure rate. But we're but but it seems better than leaving them to die of illness, starvation, or exposure. What do you want me to do? I mean, how could you ask a parent to make that decision? It's impossible, I think.

own sake. I mean, I couldn't. You couldn't do that to a child if they were resisting. It was hard enough to do it with someone who was being nice to you.

a lot of time to relax in between. I mean, we gradually we're getting colder and colder during the day. Of course, we're in the water for all of that time, and the water was twenty three degrees, but we only had had thin tropical wetsuits on, so it was pretty shivery. By the end of the last boys, I'm pretty ready to get going as soon as the last kid's done.

expectation that that was the case. And I was quite appalled actually when I got home and found that there was all this media attention and focus on us, I just really well, I actually did quite a good job at hiding from all the media for at least sort of two to three months, and it was only because of the South Australian of the Year and Western Australian of the Year awards that we received that we started to feel like we couldn't really hide from it much

longer because it would seem a bit rude if we've been giving it an award and we wouldn't even talk about it, So we kind of had to roll over in the end.

got nothing to do with sex. It's just obviously guess your attention out four different UN workers who go on these expeditions rescue missions in all the major war zones of sort of the last twenty years, Rwanda, Cambodia, Somalia, and how they just spend their whole trip trying to get to safety, and then they get to safety and they can't deal with normal life, so they find another war zone and they all keep finding each other thinking.

then back to work. And you know, and that's the way I was to work. Well, I got home on the Friday night, and I thought, I'll take Monday off, treat myself to a long weekend, and then go back to work on Tuesday. Stop it. And you know, that's just the way I was thinking about it all. I didn't think it was that big a deal, honestly, and I thought we'll probably get a nice letter from you know, maybe the premiere or something saying good job.

So he said, well, the only way to prove that is to have someone anesthetized in a pool wearing the life jacket, and of course I can't ask anyone to do that, so I'll have to get myself anesthetized and get in the pool. So he is the first and only person that I'm aware of prior to this rescue who has been anesthetized and then intentionally put in water, and so he has always been a hero of mine, and that kind of has come the full circle that I ended up getting that award, which was really nice.

but of course had many many rejection slips. But the great thing about this adventure is that it's opened a few doors for me in that regard, And until COVID started, things were actually starting to progress quite well with a concept for a documentary series. So I'm that's still on the table, but has just had to be put to bed for a little while until the nasty virus goes away. The other exciting thing that I've just started is I

had my first fora into motor sport yesterday. I've bought an old I've bought an Old nineteen sixty eight mini, and yesterday I did my first hill climb event in it. Absolutely loved it.

this funny old little car. It doesn't seem to go very fast.

him to write the forward. And then I've just interviewed him for my podcast. So no, so that is super exciting.

see how that goes. And had I known how much work it was, Sarah, as you probably already could have told me, maybe I wouldn't have rushed into it. But I've done twelve. Now can I give it a plug? It's called Real Risk.

like I've just got OCD. I think, whatever I do, I'll throw myself into it, and then I suddenly get sick of it and I'll never run again. And that's what that's the phase I'm in right now. We're not running phase.

for you. I think. As Australian of the Year, the message I wanted to get out was to young parents and to kids that it's very important to get outside, have some adventures, take a few sensible risks, get off your screens and explore your local environment, whether that's jumping on your bike with your best friend and riding up to the park and damming up the creek and catching frogs and all that stuff that kids should be doing instead of playing on their computers, and to the parents

to let them go and ride their bikes around. They're not going to get snatched by a predator, They're not properly going to get hit by a car. And you know, I'm a parent, and I know it's very hard and there are risks out there. But without risk taking, we don't become resilient, we don't become confident. We have to do things that challenges and can be hard or uncomfortable,

and that will make us overall much better people. So wrapping kids up in cotton wool and hovering around them, not letting them even get a scratch, actually will make them much worse off in the long run.

a day. And I saw that in the way that the Thaie children were not released to the media straightaway, kept together and sent on a meditation retreat together without their phones, without social media, and I just thought that's such a valuable takeaway for all parents that you know, they don't need to be on their phones, they don't need to be on screens, like there's a lot of happiness outside of that world that we need to allow children to explore. You know.

the resilience of the kids as well. You know, whether it's their Buddhist faith or the fact that they're just country kids who are kind of rough and tumble kind of guys, or whether it's that ethos that you find in Thai culture of forgive and forget and move on. Those kids are the real heroes of this story. And the four Thai Navy seals, you know, amazing people, and the fact that they.