An Australian stockman who was left bleeding and dazed after being thrown from his horse spent seven nights huddled in a tree without food or water, trapped by crocodiles circling below.

David George, 53, climbed the tree and built a platform of branches after finding himself in the middle of a swamp infested by nesting crocodiles.

“Every night I was stalked by two crocs who would sit at the bottom of the tree staring up at me,” Mr George said yesterday.

“All I could see was two sets of red eyes below me and all night I had to listen to a big bull croc bellowing a bit further out. I’d yell out at them, ‘I’m not falling out of this tree for you bastards’.”

Mr George, a father of one, set out alone on August 1 from the remote homestead on his Silver Plains cattle station in Cape York, in far northeast Queensland, to start burning scrub across the vast property.

Late in the day his horse stumbled, throwing him to the ground and knocking him unconscious.

When he came to, hours later in the pre-dawn darkness, he found his horse waiting nearby and mounted it in the hope that it would take him home. Instead it took him deep into a swamp infested with crocodiles.

“I had to get off the horse and fall on the 8ft [2.5m] swamp grass to clear a path. I fell straight into a crocodile nest,” Mr George said after being discharged from hospital.

“That spooked me. There were some monstrous tracks and the big ones are never far from the nest. I couldn’t go back, it was too far and too dangerous, so I headed to the nearest high ground and stayed there, hoping someone would come and find me before the crocs did.” He climbed into a tree and tied himself to a branch with rope, later building a platform higher up on which he could rest. Over the next few days he tried to attract the attention of airborne search teams by reflecting sunlight off his tobacco tin, waving his shirt on a stick and spreading lavatory paper in the branches. “The scrub was that thick they could not see me. It was very frustrating — they flew within 20ft of me at one stage,” he said.

After three days his food — two meat sandwiches — was gone. “If I hadn’t seen the crocs circling me, and if I hadn’t fallen into the croc nest, I would have made a push for it. But I knew the safest thing was for me to sit tight and wait,” he said.

For several more days George continued to hold out hope, shouting at the prowling crocodiles and praying to Aboriginal spirits. But when his entreaties yielded nothing, he finally resigned himself to his fate, writing a poignant farewell letter to his son.

“Surrounded by crocs and snakes,” he wrote, etching the note onto the back of his tobacco tin. “See choppers every day, flying too low — can pass a footy to them, blind p*****. Love you, my son.”

On the eighth day, he was found. The search had involved the Australian army, police and Aboriginal trackers who were alerted to his disappearance by his wife. He was winched from the tree by an army helicopter crew who spotted him from the air.

“They gave me a chocolate bar after they winched me up to the chopper — it was like a gourmet meal,” Mr George said. His wife, Elizabeth, said that she had prepared herself for the worst after her husband had been missing for a week. “The main thing was that it is croc country out there. Every time one of the search parties would fly back in they would talk about how big the crocs were,” she said.

Mr George said that he spent a lot of his time yelling in an attempt to keep the crocodiles away from his horse, which remained near by until the day before he was found. It eventually wandered home.

Against all the odds

Lost in the Australian Outback, Ricky Megee survived for almost three months on frogs, lizards and raw leeches before being rescued in 2006. His rescuers described Megee as “just a walking skeleton”

Ari Afrizal was working on a building site when the 2004 Asian tsunami pulled him into the ocean. He survived for two weeks eating floating coconuts on board a makeshift raft before he was rescued

Martin Lake, from Warwickshire, sparked two rescue operations in a fortnight in 2006, after twice becoming lost in the Australian Bush. Police believed that his second venture was an attempt to find an item that he had lost on his first. Mr Lake said that he “felt a bit daft”

Sources: Times archives

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