Hadi Nazari: Lost and Found Down Under (The Naked City)

Hadi Nazari: Lost and Found Down Under (The Naked City)
Image: Photo: AP Image/Supplied by NSW Police)

‘Hadi Nazari: Lost and Found Down Under′  is the latest column (January 14, 2025) from Coffin Ed‘s The Naked City column – featured exclusively on City Hub.


Everybody from the PM down loves a feel-good media moment like the eventual rescue of hiker Hadi Nazari, lost in Kosciuszko National Park for some thirteen days. In a world where the mass loss of life in places such as Gaza, Sudan and Ukraine is now common place, the fact that so many people rallied to locate Hadi, just a single person, demonstrated that every human life is sacrosanct.

It was also part of an iconic Australian situation, where somebody is lost in the bush and the community unites to search for them. It’s been happening ever since the early days of British settlement when escaped convicts became hopelessly disoriented in the unforgiving Australian landscape.

Admittedly they were hunted, rather than rescued, but capture was probably better than a lonely bush death.

In welcoming the rescue of Hadi, the PM mentioned that he would be looking forward to a possible documentary or feature film on this remarkable story of survival. Unwittingly he could have been recalling a previous rescue event that spawned not only a feature film but the top Australian hit song of 1960.

In February of that year a young four year old farm boy Steven Walls went missing in the rugged New England ranges of New South Wales. It triggered what is probably still the largest ground and air search for a missing person in this country, involving a fleet of aircraft and around 5,000 people on the ground. After four days and three nights the young boy was found alive and well, attracting huge media coverage across the country and even internationally.

Country singer Johnny Ashcroft then released what was to become not only a top selling single but a song recorded by numerous other artists including Jimmy Dean in the US and Slim Dusty at home. ‘Little Boy Lost’ became the first gold 45 in both Australia and New Zealand and shot Ashcroft to world wide fame.

The rescue saga resonated with Australians for decades to follow and in 1978 the ‘Little Boy Lost’ movie had its world premiere in Armidale, in the wild New England ranges. A book of the same title also appeared at the time. In April of 2020 Steven Walls died on his farm in Gurya and the local museum opened a ‘Little Boy Lost’ display which included the actual gold record which Ashcroft had gifted to the four year old, some 64 years earlier.

So just how easy is it to get lost in the Australian bush if you are hiking or bushwalking? There’s a certain scornful school of thought that says people who do so have been reckless or foolhardy but is this really the go? On an ABC radio program Trevor Salvado an experienced hiker, also involved in numerous search and rescue operations, explained an incident with his wife whilst hiking in Victoria’s Mount Buffalo National Park.

“We were walking on the track and the bush was just getting thicker and thicker … And then we walked into a position where we couldn’t really see any more [track] markers. And with the scrub thickening up, we actually weren’t quite sure which direction we’d come from. Then we just came to the conclusion, OK, we’re lost. What do we need to do now?”

Many years ago when I was just a youngster I went bushwalking with my mother, brother and young next door neighbour in the Blue Mountains. It was mid winter and we set off, well rugged up, to explore ‘The Devil’s Hole’ in Katoomba. After about twenty minutes it soon became a repeat of the scenario above where the track almost disappeared.

We strayed a few metres in the wrong direction and yup – we were lost as well! Everything looked the same and after struggling through some very dense scrub we eventually found our way onto a fire trail.

]We followed that trail for a couple of hours but it suddenly ended at the base of a huge cliff. It was now dark and cold and my Mum decided it was best to bed down for the night and attempt to walk out in the morning. She lit a fire and we all nodded off. When we didn’t return my dad went straight to the police and the search was on. Luckily they spotted our fire from the cliff tops and around 3.30am a police vehicle arrived on the fire trail to ferry us home.

It was long before the internet and mobile phones and news then travelled very slowly. The Sydney Morning Herald must have picked up on the police radio and the morning edition reported “Mother And Three Children Lost In Blue Mountains”, listing all our names.

Family and friends read it back in Sydney and were obviously alarmed. Whilst the Katoomba police station was being deluged with their urgent enquiries, we were all home snuggly asleep in our mountains holiday home.

Not exactly a tale of survival but another successful rescue!

Comments are closed.