Medal for croc river rescue
Published: August 29, 2005
SOMETIMES, in the heat of the moment, it’s best not to think too much.
As the sun went down on December 22, 2003, Milton Ellis was on a boat on the Finniss river, 80km south of Darwin, with his life on the line.
Several hours earlier, a crocodile had killed 22-year-old Brett Mann, leaving two of his friends clinging to a tree.
And yet there was Ellis, a rescue worker, sitting in a rubber boat on that same river.
He was focused on the job at hand, not the crocodile that might have been lurking nearby. Better that, he recalls, than the reality: “Rubber’s not going to slow up a crocodile very much.”
Having risked their lives to save the two terrified young men left stranded up the tree, Ellis and police officer Glenn McPhee have been awarded bravery medals for their rescue work that day.
The ordeal began after a quad bike run along the Finniss river by Mann and two friends.
Mann was washing himself on the bank when he lost his footing in the current and was taken by the 4m crocodile.
His two friends - Shaun Blowers and Ashley McGough, both 19 - tried to help, but the current was too strong. They took refuge in the tree, where they waited for 22 hours with the crocodile somewhere in the river below them.
After the alarm was raised, Ellis and McPhee rushed to the scene. They were lowered from a helicopter with a liferaft, landing a short distance upstream from the two survivors.
They tried to paddle using tupperware containers, but the water was moving too fast. So they used the downdraft from the helicopter to help push their small rubber boat across the river.
“We got across successfully doing that,” Ellis says. “We got up to these fellas, and their first reaction was, ‘You guys are bloody crazy, in the water with that croc in there’. He’d been stalking them and keeping them in that tree.”
Ellis says he knew he could also have been attacked by the crocodile, but there was no time to panic.
“You’re so busy trying to work out how to do it, and get the job done,” he said.
“I said to them, ‘We’re here to pick you up, so unless you want to sit in that tree for another day, you have to get into the boat with us’.”
Now living in Brisbane, Ellis, 39, recalls the rescue “vividly” but says he was only doing his job.
“It doesn’t happen every day,” he said. “I’ve done a number of rescues, but nothing like that.”
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