Email
Seeing is believing, according to the man who first encountered Shannon Fraser after she emerged from 17 days lost in dense tropical scrub in north Queensland.
The 30-year-old woman was naked, save for a plastic fertiliser bag wrapped around her, and her skin all over so badly sunburned she nearly bled, farmer Brad Finch told Guardian Australia.
Fraser’s tale of survival, reportedly eating small fish and insects as she slogged her way through forest at the foot of Queensland’s highest mountain, made global headlines this week.
It has beggared the belief of locals who wonder how a visit to a popular swimming spot in an area not considered particularly remote could go so badly off track for so long.
Even police, who led a fruitless 800-hour search involving two helicopters, sought a more detailed account from Fraser from her hospital bed in Innisfail on Friday.
Police Inspector Rhys Newton said investigators had spoken with Fraser and there were “no bells going off to doubt her version”.
“If I was a religious man, I’d say it were a miracle,” Newton said.
Finch, who momentarily thought he was the target of an elaborate prank upon seeing the wilderness-ravaged Fraser in a nature reserve carpark, said: “Seeing her, I don’t doubt her – at all.”
“Even now it’s pretty unbelievable, I had to really think about it when I was telling the detectives but if you’d seen her you wouldn’t doubt her story,” he said.
Finch, who manages a banana plantation next to the Golden Hole reserve, had driven to the car park at 8am to get better reception on his mobile phone to check the weather.
“I was on my own for five or 10 minutes then I could hear this strange noise, like a high-pitched scream or yell,” he said.
“I spun around and she was standing in the middle of the car park.
“I stuck my head out the window to ask if I could help and she was all right and she started repeating could I help her and rambling a little bit.
“Then I worked out what was going on and that it was actually her. It took a few seconds to put it together, I was waiting for someone to jump out of the bushes with a camera and say ‘gotcha’.”
Finch, who used to hunt pigs in the area until it became “impenetrable” with stinging trees and lawyer cane in the wake of cyclone deforestation, saw scratches and march fly bites on Fraser “from top to bottom”.
Finch said she was so badly sunburnt parts of her body seemed at risk of bleeding.
“She had quite a big gash on one of her legs which looked like it might have been done when she first got lost, that was healing up but looked like it was pretty bad.”
Finch said he quickly put her in his car and drove to hospital, during which time she became more coherent and began to detail her ordeal.
She told him she had had a fight with her fiance, who she and a friend had gone swimming with, and run into the bush.
Upon realising she was lost, she sought higher ground, which led her away from the river and the tracks that would have guided her back to safety.
Incredibly, she decided to climb Mt Bartle Frere, which Finch said took “a whole day walking on a track let alone when there’s no track”.
She would have made her way through stinging trees and spiky lawyer cane, known locally as “wait-a-while” for its knack of sticking fast to hikers’ clothing.
“It takes three hours to get a few hundred metres even with a machete”, Finch said.
“No rescuer or search party in their right mind would try to walk up that hill looking for someone.”
When the helicopters flew overhead for the first two days, Finch said Fraser would have been making her way through that scrub up the side of the mountain.
By the time she made her way back down, having found a creek and soaked her shredded body in it for three days, there was nothing overhead.
Finch said even in her disoriented state “she knew she’d been in there for 17 days”.
“[But] then she told me a lot of things on the way to the hospital that sounded unbelievable,” he said.
“That she hadn’t eaten for 17 days, and that she didn’t drink water for the first five or six days.”
Fraser reportedly told her family she had lost 16kg over that time.
;