Twenty years on, the ballad of a damaged Beaconsfield mine survivor

Brant Webb says he never thinks about the horror that visited him almost a kilometre beneath the town of Beaconsfield 20 years ago, but the truth is that he remains damaged by it in body and mind.

He continues to receive alternative therapy that he says relieves him from years of crippling anxiety.

Not so long ago, he had surgery to relieve the pressure on his spinal cord from a bulging disc that threatened to prevent him from walking.

He still has eight bulging discs to contend with.

They are the result of him being smashed on the head by a mountain of rocks on the night of Anzac Day, April 25, 2006.

So powerful was the impact that his body height was compressed – and remains so – by 6.4 centimetres.

And then there was the mysterious effect of fumes vented from mines following the use of explosives. The odourless fumes got inside Webb’s head.

He says that some years ago, he suffered blackouts that caused him to crash two cars, each time after driving past a vent when explosives had been set off in different Tasmanian mines deep below.

A psychiatrist diagnosed a causal link with the terror that accompanied the explosions used to try to rescue Webb and his fellow worker, Todd Russell, from the collapsed mine – which also threatened to kill them.

The psychiatrist suggested aversion therapy.

Webb says he lay next to a vent on the hill above Beaconsfield’s mine and was rendered unconscious for two hours; he was badly sunburnt when he came to. The next time he tried it, he blacked out for half an hour. The third such experiment appeared to free him.

On that Anzac night 20 years ago, the people of Beaconsfield, a small Tasmanian mining town in the Tamar Valley, awoke to what felt like an earthquake.

Nine hundred and twenty-five metres below the town, in one of the most dangerous gold mines in Australia, a tunnel of rocks collapsed where Brant and two other men, Todd Russell and Larry Knight, were working.

What followed became a saga that captured the imagination of Australians and many others across the world.

Within two days, the body of Larry Knight was found in the rubble. But Webb and Russell remained missing.

Within five days, most of those who had rushed to the town – reporters, mine rescue workers, paramedics and the then chief of the Australian Workers Union, Bill Shorten, who became the spokesman for Beaconsfield’s miners – had all but given up the missing men for dead.

But then came whispers from the deep.

Rescuers had taken to using high explosives to try to drive a new tunnel through hard rock to where they believed Webb and Russell had been working.

On the evening of Sunday, April 30, 2006, the mine foreman, Steven “Salty” Saltmarsh, and Pat Ball, the mine’s underground manager – on the wild off-chance the men were still alive – decided to take one last look at the collapsed tunnel before authorising any further blasting.

They knew any more such explosions would kill the men, in the unlikely event they were still alive.

Unbelievably, Saltmarsh and Ball heard the sound of singing.

Brant and Todd, certain they were about to be destroyed by the concussion from explosions that had been ripping through their lightless prison and in an effort to hang on to some form of sanity, had chosen to roar the one song they both knew: The Gambler, by Kenny Rogers. “You got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em, know when to walk away, know when to run ...”

Their voices, powered by near-hysteria, penetrated the rockfall.

It was another week, however, before Webb and Russell would finally see the sky again.

Every moment of that long week was fraught with the likelihood they would die as a narrow lifeline was drilled through many metres of hard rock to the tiny cavern in which they lay, bringing encouraging voices, clean water, space blankets, medicines and containers of high-protein nutritional drinks, which they learnt to hate.

Explosives were still required to reach the trapped men, adding to their constant fear of dying beneath another rockfall.

It was a week during which the nation put aside its everyday cares and gave itself collectively to the indrawn breath of hope in the deliverance of two strangers.

Through all the twists and turns of the extraordinarily dangerous rescue operation, culminating when the two men almost miraculously returned to the light, punching the crisp morning air of May 9, the affairs of state, politics and individual dramas seemed not to matter at all.

I got to know both Webb and Russell – and sometimes, almost more than I could bear to know about their ghastly ordeal – after they emerged from the dark because I was commissioned to write a book about it all, called Bad Ground: Inside the Beaconsfield Mine Rescue.

Russell, a big local football hero, presented himself as a stoic who had no need of treatment for PTSD.

His life since hasn’t run smoothly. He is divorced from Carolyn, the woman who sat by the mine every night willing him to live. He is currently hospitalised with a serious illness. While he was absent from his home, thieves broke into his house and stole all his guns and his car, which was found incinerated.

Russell and Webb, who shared so much during the 321 hours of their precarious entombment, haven’t spoken in 10 years. They were always opposite in interests and temperament.

Webb summed it up soon after emerging from the mine: “Him and I had nothing in common. He doesn’t like fishin’, he likes shootin’. I like watching animals run around, he likes ’em on his wall. He’s a Ford man, I’m a Holden man. I like rock music, he likes country and western.”

And so the distance has grown.

I failed to contact Russell this week, but Webb, a man of unusually cheerful disposition, was, as always, up for a chat.

He was much keener to talk about appearing on stage with rock band Foo Fighters in Launceston in January than to discuss his ailments.

When he was still trapped in the mine, Webb asked for an iPod loaded with music by the Seattle band.

The Foo Fighters’ founder, Dave Grohl, heard about the rescue, offered to have a beer with the two miners anywhere in the world and wrote Ballad of the Beaconsfield Miners to honour them. Foo Fighters first performed the song for Webb and Russell at the Sydney Opera House in October 2006.

In January this year, Foo Fighters returned to Australia and decided to give a one-off show in Launceston.

Grohl arranged backstage passes for Webb and his wife, Rachel. They have always loved the sea and own a 25-foot pocket cruiser yacht. They sailed to Launceston for the concert, mooring close to the concert venue.

“Yeah, we moored 900 metres from the concert and 52 steps from the bar at Rosevears [Hotel],” chuckles Webb. “I got to go on stage with Dave Grohl and the band and introduce our song in front of 26,000 people. It was magic.”

Brant and Rachel still live in the same house in Beauty Point where they lived before the mine collapsed. A big spa sits in the middle of the backyard where the Webbs entertain their wide group of old friends, just as they have always done.

They have two children and three grandchildren, which Brant says makes them both very happy.

He runs a small building maintenance company and Rachel works in a doctors’ surgery where she has been employed for many years.

There were no April 25 events to mark the 20th anniversary of the seismic event that led to the rockfall.

Anzac Day, insists Brant, is a special day for those who have always commemorated Anzac, but it wasn’t a day to remember a rockfall.

“Nah, May 9 is the day we got out,” he says. “Freedom Day. There’ll be a gathering in the park on Freedom Day for all those people who have worked in the mine, and Billy Shorten will be there; he wouldn’t miss it for the world. He never forgets us.”

Shorten, now vice-chancellor of the University of Canberra, threw the weight of the Australian Workers Union behind the miners and their families during the rescue and long after it.

“I can’t believe 20 years has gone by so fast,” says Webb.

“I can feel it in my body, though. I was 37 then, so I’m 57 now with diabetes and cholesterol and all those bulging discs.

“I got robbed of a lot of my health, but I was still given 20 more years to live, so there you go.”

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