Australia Outback Survival Story - To Fight the Wild Review - Australian Outback Hats and Bush Knife

I was looking through my selection of bush hats and I got to thinking about Australia’s outback and realized it is more than just outback hats. That brought me back to the man who epitomized the outback back in the day Rod Ansell. Ansell was the legendary bull catcher who Crocodile Dundee was based off. What I also find fitting in the day of commercialized global warming and how Al Gore et al are saving the planet, Ansell had a reverence for the environment back in the 1970’s way before it rewarded you in dollars to be so.

His story of survival in the outback is legend and remains instructive. It is a story of intense mental and physical survival.

Let us take a nostalgic look back at Ansell’s’ survival story in Australia’s outback. He wrote a book ‘To Fight the Wild’ with author Rachel Perry. It is written in Ansell’s accessible Australian colloquialisms and expressions with a striking ‘it is what it is’ acceptance of his situation. Which is both very telling and implores a simple wisdom that many people never grasp. Certainly seems lost in this day and age of everything now with an iPod and iPad. I still get a little smile from Ansell insisting he was "not lost, but stuck". Seems like many passages in our lives. Australia’s outback certainly would enhance that feeling.

To fight the wild begins with Ansell, who is a bull catcher by trade, taking a trip down the Victoria River with his two cattle dogs. He is in a very remote corner of the Northern Territory in Australia’s outback. His small boat is caught in a strong current and the boat capsizes. Ansell leaves it as a mystery, with a crocodile the implication. He loses his supplies and equipment.

Ansell makes it out of the water with his two dogs, a bush knife and 20 rounds of ammunition. For seven weeks hunts around his camp base by the Fitzmaurice River in Australia’s outback. It is a true story of bush survival and Ansell’s superior bushman skills. Ansell survives both heat exhaustion and dehydration after a three-day search for fresh water. He shoots wild cattle to stave off starvation for he and his dogs.

Eventually a group of Aboriginal stockmen stumble upon him and he is rescued. You can follow his trek with geographical references on a map at the front of the book.

It is unfortunate that Ansell's life went into tailspin after he felt let down after receiving no financial gain from Crocodile Dundee. He fell on hard times suffering from depression and eventually psychosis that saw him die in a violent shootout. Sad how far he had fallen from a life that exemplified his inner strength, self-belief and resourcefulness.

This book has been compared with other first-hand survival accounts. These are well worth investigating.

• Lauren Elder and Shirley Streshinsky's “And I Alone Survived” (Dutton, 1978; o.p.)
• Dougal Robertson's “Survive the Savage Sea” (Sheridan, 1984).

If you can get a copy of  ‘To fight the wild’ grab it, a great read for children and anyone interested in Australia’s outback. Oh you don’t need an outback hat to read it!