“My boy’s been found”, Richard Cass screamed at Sydney airport when told that his son had walked out of the Australian Bush after 12 days surviving in freezing conditions with only grass to eat. “I can’t say I’d kill him ... but I’m going to kick his arse. The millions that have been spent on this search, all because he goes out on a walk without his mobile phone.”

How selfish of Jamie Neale to go off alone, how naive, how reckless — but also how amazing. Australia isn’t all about surfing and sunbathing, it’s about vast, wild, open spaces.

It’s fantastic that this English schoolboy decided that he’d had enough of bars and headed into the Blue Mountains. A teenager without a phone and a gaggle of friends is a rare and wonderful thing. The nearest that many 19-year-olds get to having an adventure is watching Esther Rantzen eating a maggot on I’m a Celebrity ...

More than 150 years ago, my great-great-grandfather, when he was the same age as Jamie, applied for the post of Astronomer Royal and Superintendent of Telegraphs in the new colony of South Australia because he wanted an experience.

Once in Australia, he decided to cross the unmapped interior from south to north taking some telegraph poles with him so that he could connect the continent to the world. As an orphan, he didn’t have to worry about what his parents would say, but the volunteers who went with him weren’t too concerned either, despite being told by relatives that they were insane to try to walk the 2,000 miles.

In the belly button of Australia, they ran out of water and accepted that they would die, until one found a spring and named it Alice, after my ancestor’s wife. The telegraph poles eventually stretched from ocean to ocean. I decided to trace this thin metal line with my husband 20 years ago. A radio presenter said that I was mad, and a local politician suggested I was selfish.

There were no mobile phones and we had to cross the desert in 45C heat in an old Toyota without air-conditioning, surviving on green meat pies. We crashed the car, my husband caught bronchitis, I nearly drowned in quicksand and we ran out of water on the Great Salt Lakes — but we could just as easily have been killed on a skiing trip.

Jamie Neale took the right track when he decided to go into the national park, even if he nearly died: £100,000 on a rescue mission every now and again, whether in the Blue Mountains, Snowdonia or Colorado, is worth it to allow people the luxury of escaping from the predictable and mundane before they head back to the office for the rest of their lives. Or to Muswell Hill and an exasperated mother, in Jamie’s case.

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