Camel hunters in outback Western Australia walked 50km from their bogged four-wheel drive to find “one little bar” of phone service and contact their families for help.
Les Robinson, 46, and Danny Azevedo, 34, set off from Kalgoorlie, 593km east of Perth at 6am on Sunday for a day-long camel shooting expedition.
Their families raised the alarm at 10pm when the men, who were due to get home at 5pm, were five hours overdue.
Police began searching for them by air from first light on Monday and volunteers from the State Emergency Service searched the area around Coonana.
On Monday afternoon, the men reached Cundalee, a heritage-listed former Aboriginal mission town 160km east of Kalgoorlie that was abandoned in the 1980s when it ran out of water. The Spinifex people who lived there moved to Coonana, 10km away, and then on to Tjuntjuntjara. Only one woman still lives in Coonana.
Tracey Robinson, Les Robinson’s wife, told the local paper the Kalgoorlie Miner that she received a text message saying he was OK.
“He just said, ‘Honey, I’m OK, I need help and some more water’,” she said. “He said, ‘I’m just really really tired’.”
The men are understood to be dehydrated but otherwise fine.
Robinson said her husband regularly went camel shooting to get meat for their mastiff, and went to this spot in particular “a few times during the year”.
She said he had a satellite phone but had forgotten to put it in the car, as he had recently bought a new one.
“I think because of the rain the car got heavily bogged and something broke on the car because my husband is so good in the bush – he’s got every bit of recovery gear,” she said.
Fiona Pemberton, from the Tjarutja Aboriginal Corporation, said roads around both Cundalee and Coonana turned sloppy in recent rains and police had issued warnings about vehicles that weighed more three tonnes.
Last year Perth man Reg Foggerdy got lost on a camel hunting expedition and survived six days lost in the desert north of Kalgoorlie by eating black ants.
Foggerdy had been hunting on the edge of the Great Victoria Desert, 170km from the nearest town of Laverton, which is in turn 360km north of Kalgoorlie, and set off after a camel on foot, wearing shorts, a T-shirt and thongs.
Police warn people who get stranded in the Australian outback not to leave their car as it makes them harder to find.
