Baying for his blood - Todd Russell

Herald Sun, Page: 1. Saturday, 7 June 2008

Beaconsfield survivor Todd Russell is a modest bloke who finds sanctuary in a simple life. But he is hounded by critics who decry his love of hunting. Bob Hart uncovers the man behind the camouflage

Todd Russell is an uncomplicated man. Had fate not intervened, his would have been a life of simple pleasures and few surprises.
But an underground rock fall at Beaconsfield, Tasmania, on Anzac Day, 2006, followed by the most dramatic rescue and improbable tale of survival of our time, changed all of that.
Millions of us shared those 14 inconceivable days in that cramped hellhole, a kilometre below ground, with Russell and his cheery mate Brant Webb, both miners. Both top blokes.
And when they emerged, upright and defiant, we wept and cheered. After which life was resumed and it was business as usual. For us.
For Russell also, two years after his ordeal, life has returned to some sort of normality.
Though his is a more secure and celebrated life than it would have been had his world not fallen in.
It is unlikely, for example, that he would have found himself, as he did recently, kitted out in top-shelf hunting gear, heavily camouflaged, suitably armed and concealed in bushland in a Victorian state forest.
He was waiting for that wiliest and most sought-after of Australian game animals, a sambar deer, to break cover.
Five scenting hounds from one of the finest packs in the fast-growing Victorian sport of hound hunting, owned by hunt master Geoff Maggs, were trying to persuade a stag to move in his direction.
Russell’s thumb hovered over the safety on his .270 Ruger deer rifle.
He concentrated intently, trying to read the baying of the hounds, listening for the sounds of a sambar crashing through undergrowth.
"I started hunting when I was nine or 10 years old," Russell had said earlier as we watched the excited hounds go about their business.
"I grew up in Beaconsfield, in a house in the middle of town.
"My dad has always been a hunter and he took me out, when I was old enough, to hunt rabbits and wallabies.
"When I was 17 he took me deer shooting for the first time and I was hooked. I’ve been doing it ever since. But not as effectively as people can do it in Victoria.
"We don’t have sambar deer in Tasmania - they’re Victorian.
"And we are only allowed to stalk deer, not hunt them with hounds, for that reason."
Even in Victoria, only the rugged sambar can be hunted with scenting hounds, then only with small dogs beagles and bloodhounds.
"Tasmanians are allowed only a month, March, to shoot male deer and in the second half of that month we can shoot female deer," Russell says.
"Then the season opens again in May for female deer. And that’s it.
"It doesn’t really compare with Victoria. I have never done anything like this in my life and I love it.
"And I will certainly be back, probably in September, to do it again."
Russell’s life is now richer and fuller than it could ever have been had the accident not happened and had he not shown himself to be one of history’s great survivors.
Both miners were compensated handsomely for telling the story of their ordeal and were flown, in luxury, to New York to share their experiences with a huge television audience.
Russell, once a man of few words, now supplements his income from work connected to the mining industry with occasional appearances on the speakers’ circuit. He is in demand.
And he has used at least some of his share of the $2.6 million the two men received from the Nine network for that thing TV folk call exclusivity to secure his future and to provide himself and his family with the sort of life he has always wanted. Nothing more. Nothing too fancy.
"I love hunting. But my real love, above everything else except my wife and family, is the outdoors," he says.
"And that’s why the first thing I bought was a bit of land near Beaconsfield. It’s my little piece of paradise.
"It’s just a hobby farm, right on the Tamar River, a little way out of town. I have a couple of cows running around and my dogs.
"It’s peaceful and very quiet. In fact, the loudest thing there are the birds.
And that’s the way I like it these days."
Russell’s passion for hunting was one of the things that amounted to a difference of opinion between him and Webb, a fanatical fisherman who never hunts.
Russell never fishes and fails to see the point of the exercise. And for a big and demonstrably brave man, he is strangely uncomfortable, he confesses, with sharks.
“I just don’t like fishing, perhaps because of sharks. My motto has always been that if sharks don’t come on my land, I won’t bother them in their water,” he says.
“I only swim in swimming pools because I like to see what’s beneath me.
“I could fish right off my own back doorstep if I wanted to. But I’m just not interested. I have my hunting and my dogs, and those are my passions.
"Mind you, since I first talked about hunting, which was one of the many things I thought about to pass the time when I was in the hole, I’ve copped a hell of a lot of criticism.
"It seems amazing, but since my interest in hunting became public I’ve had people writing to me and calling me a maggot and a worm. Always anonymously, of course. These people are cowards.
“One of them, some sort of animal rights person, said I should have been left in the ground to die, which is nice. Really nice.
“I’m probably one of about 30,000 shooters in Tasmania. But because of the exposure I got and the fact I’ve always been honest about my hunting, I became a target.
“But I don’t really care. I believe what I believe. Hunting is my passion and I will never give it up for anybody.”
Russell’s deep affection for the outdoors was just one of the things that sustained him during his ordeal. But it was an important one.
“Lots of things went through my mind when I was down there,” he says
“Not a minute went by when we weren’t talking about something or thinking about something, so I suppose most subjects were covered.
“But if I try to think of the one thing that got me through, it wasn’t hunting. It was thinking about family, about loved ones.
"That was the really big issue - the wife and the kids. Somehow I could hang on to them and they powered me along."
When people tell him they could never have done what he did, as many of the deer hunters did as he sat by the campfire sipping a bourbon and cola after the day ’s hunt, did he believe them?
“Not really, no. People have no idea what their bodies, or their minds, are capable of doing until they are put into a position where they have to fight their hardest just to stay alive," he says.
"In my case, my body just shut down. I didn’t go to the toilet for 14 days. And yet I ate for the seven days after they found us and afterwards everything just returned to normal. Your body can do amazing things.
"People tell me they could never have done it because they are a bit claustrophobic. But look, I was a miner. And if I’d been in the least bit claustrophobic I would never have been down there in the first place, would I?"
The area in which Russell hunted, as a guest of Victorian Hound Hunters, the 2000-strong state body, is the Buffalo River Catchment, a state forest nest Myrtleford in northeast Victoria.
It’s an idyllic spot, teeming with sambar and other wildlife, only 40km from the old tobacco town.
An unsealed road runs alongside the Buffalo River, a viable trout stream, and comes finally to The Abbeyards - a cattle property where hound hunters gather every weekend through the season, which runs from the second week after Easter to the end of November.
Victorian Hound Hunters has established a large shed on the property near which scenting hounds are tethered.
The shed is adjacent to a cleared open space in which a mighty campfire of sawn logs is set each night of the hunt.
Around it tall tales are told, steaks are seared and eaten and cold beers consumed.
After which swags are unrolled and a great deal of loud snoring ensues, until an hour or so before daybreak, when the fire is relit, tea ’s up and the dogs become restless, sensing that it ’s time once again for the hunt.
Russell was unsure how his knee, worn and torn during a footy career in which he twice represented Tasmania, would handle the chase.
It had been injured in the rock fall and damaged yet again when, in another of those opportunities brought about by his underground ordeal, he played in the 2007 Ted Whitten Legends Game at Telstra Dome.
He kicked a goal on All-Australian full-back Mick Martyn, who returned the favour by landing on Russell and injuring his knee, on which he later had more surgery.
"I copped it on that night too, but it was very different from the way I’ve copped it over hunting," he says.
"When Mick landed on me, some bloke shouted from the sidelines: Onya Mick! Bury ’im! Pile rocks on him, mate! ’
"That was pretty funny, I suppose. I think he might have been a Collingwood supporter." Russell’s job now is on the fringes of the mining industry: he is involved mainly with training and safety.
But despite assurances he gave, mainly to himself, after his ordeal, he occasionally goes underground, purely as a visitor.
"It’s a very different experience these days," he says.
"When I was down there every day, I took things for granted. But now I am very alert and cautious.
"And when I hear noises that I don’t think I should be hearing, I ’m out of there."
Apart from that, Russell’s ordeal has left few deep scars.
"Life’s treating me pretty good. I live in my piece of paradise, I tinker around there all day, potter about, and I am enjoying it," he says.
"Things, on balance, have worked out for me. It has changed my life, obviously, but I believe these things happen for a reason.
"I am still trying to work out what, in my case, that reason was. And maybe one day I will. But we need for nothing these days. Everything we’ve got we own and I ’m just enjoying life."