A few months ago a man was liloing down the Wollangambe River, a few hours north-west of Sydney, when he slipped and broke his leg.
Clinging to a riverbank and unable to climb to safety, the man happened upon some incredibly good luck. Or rather, the luck chanced upon him.
Coming towards him was a group of hikers dressed in bright orange shirts.
Not only were these bushwalkersNew South WalesState Emergency Service volunteers, they were members of the SES’s highly specialised bush search and rescue unit.
The BSAR unit is a 220-strong squad of highly skilled outdoors people, who are sent into the most difficult, remote terrain – “tiger country”, as it is called in the rescue world – to find missing bushwalkers.
The team members who found the injured man happened to be on a two-day training exercise in the area.
“What are the chances?” says Paul Campbell-Allen, BSAR’s commander, who remembers the call coming through on the radio, with the prefix “no duff” – this is not part of the exercise.
When someone goes missing in the treacherous Australian bush, the first thing police – the agency responsible for land searches – will do is try to work out their last known position.
“The police are trying to drag in all this information about where they might’ve gone,” Campbell-Allen says. This includes sightings, location of their car, messages they’ve sent, photos they’ve posted, their fitness levels, their state of mind and lost person behavioural data.
The lost person data, which is pulled together in a national search and rescue manual, details the ways different groups typically behave when lost.
Very young children don’t wander far, are likely to seek out shelter but often don’t respond to their name being called out; people with dementia and limited mobility will seek out a remembered place from their past and will most likely move downhill.
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If, when all that information is gathered, and police surmise that a person may be missing off-track, down a cliff, or in steep, densely vegetated terrain, BSAR will get a call.
The bat signal will go out to BSAR searchers – all volunteers – who will take leave from work, grab their hiking packs and head off into the deep bush to search.
On a frosty Sunday morning in May, Tom Begic – a lead trainer with BSAR who has been involved in bush rescue for 15 years – is conducting a weekend of training exercises with the newest crop of BSAR recruits in the national park outside Glenbrook in the Blue Mountains.
They are all fairly outdoorsy people.
“I’m pretty active,” Begic says. “Walking, canyoning, caving, climbing, I paraglide, I Base jump, I skydive, ultra lights, scuba dives, cave dives, you know, the whole lot.”
Most of the other team members are similarly adventurous, he says. “We have people, for example, who have been awarded an OAM for hiking to the south pole … We have people who are out there discovering new canyons around the world, we have people that climb high-altitude mountains. So there’s a very high calibre of outdoors people that join the squad …
“Our job in the training team is to get all these people that already have all these tremendous outdoor skills and fitness and knowledge of the bush and the outdoors … and teach them how to look for people, how to look for clues, and then once they find all that, how to bring those things back to search command.”
Despite this, he bristles at the idea that BSAR is “elite”.
“It sounds wanky,” he says. Plus the broader SES is made up of a range of volunteers and BSAR is just one unit in what is almost always a multi-agency search.
“We just have a different set of skills, you know?”
One of those skills, which Begic is teaching the BSAR trainees in Glenbrook, is how to conduct a contour search – one of the main search methods used by the unit.
This search formation is used in steep terrain, with searchers walking along the slope at the same elevation, rather than up and down it, to save energy.
Each person is situated a few metres behind the searcher above them so that if someone dislodges a rock others aren’t taken out.
The terrain is often so hostile that they carry secateurs in case they need to hack their way through thorny vines.
Other search methods employed by BSAR include “fast reconnaissance”, in which its speediest searchers – some of them competitive trail runners – jog down fire trails and tracks, eyes peeled for evidence that someone has been through before them.
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There’s also “purposeful meandering” – searching areas flagged during the reconnaissance – and “single file”, where team members walk in a line but each have a quadrant of bush to look at, so they don’t have to scan 180 degrees as they walk.
Searchers are looking not just for a missing person but for any clues that a person may have been through the area – dropped equipment, evidence of an old campfire, compressed leaf litter, a footprint in the mud, a scratch in the bark of a tree.
Spotting things in the bush is part of BSAR training. Trainers will plant clues in an area of bushland and then get trainees to walk through it.
“I think there were something like 38 different clues and I only found like 16 the first time,” says Chantal Bronkhorst, a 32-year-old web developer and one of 10 trainees completing training that weekend.
While spotting objects in the bush is a learned skill, some have a gift.
“Some people in the unit are just fantastic at it,” Campbell-Allen says, able to spot “a dollar coin in the grass” more than three metres away.
He recalls a forensic search BSAR were called to assist on. Police had received information that a person who had been missing for 10 years may have moved through a particular area of bush a decade before and asked BSAR to check it out.
“One of the searchers found two holes in the ground in some clay, which were from a walking pole.”
BSAR searchers found the camera gear belonging to Hadi Nazari, the 23-year-old medical student from Victoria who went missing on Boxing Day last year in the Kosciuszko national park and was found – hungry, roughed up but generally well – after 13 days.
Campbell-Allen, who assisted with that search, says the team members who found the gear were elated. The search for Nazari was thelongest search Campbell-Allen has been involved inthat ended with someone being found alive.
Finding a missing hiker alive is, of course, the best possible outcome.
But there are other outcomes, and search types. For many in BSAR, self-harm searches – looking for people who head out into the bush to suicide – are the hardest.
“If it’s a situation where someone is very likely to be despondent or self-harm, we do actually warn our member of that: this may not be a good outcome and you may not want to be involved, which is fine,” Campbell-Allen says, adding that mental health support is offered to team members.
These searches can take a toll, he says. “Particularly if you’ve had a lot of it. It tends to accumulate if it’s not really dealt with.”
For many of the BSAR team members who spoke to Guardian Australia, it can also be emotionally challenging to find nothing.
“Finding nothing is terrible,” says Sam Hassan, who has been part of BSAR for 18 months. “At least if you find something that’s giving a degree of closure.”
Among the BSAR members is a strong sense that they are the searchers that they hope would come looking for them if they got into distress.
Hassan, a 33-year-old who works in IT, only really began bushwalking when he moved to Australia in 2019. He joined BSAR due to a combination of it being fun – “this is the sort of thing I’d love to do on a personal weekend off” – wanting to learn skills to keep himself safer on hikes and a desire to do good.
“The worst thing would be for no one to search and for no one to know what happened,” he says. “And so I look at it and go, even if I don’t find anything, I’ve still put the effort in. And I think that makes a big difference, not just for the families, but for the people who are lost, to know that people are out there … looking for them.”
Justine Douthwaite, an emergency doctor and BSAR trainer, cites the examples of search and rescue in other countries, where loved ones have to employ private search teams, or where searches get capped at a set number of days.
“I think as a society, Australians are like: that’s not how we operate. We will always try and find our people.”
In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org