Stuart Diver woke up to a roar that sounded like a low-flying plane. The floor was shaking. The windows rattled. It was 11.35pm and 4,000 tons of mud, building and debris was hurtling down the mountainside in Thredbo, New South Wales, towards Bimbadeen Lodge, where he had been asleep with his wife, Sally. In a few short seconds, the ceiling of their apartment caved in and they were entombed by the concertinaed building. Diver fumbled around in the pitch black room for a way out, cutting his hands and feet on broken glass. But there was nowhere to go.
“I heard the noise and put my head up, but as I rolled forward the wrought iron headboard came down and pinned Sally to the bed.” Freezing cold water from a broken mains water pipe on the road above them soon started “flying around”. Diver, found a small pocket of air to breathe by arching his back and tilting his head up. He tried to cover Sally’s mouth to stop her from drowning but he couldn’t save her. “Sal dying in my hands will stay in my mind forever,” he wrote in his 2012 book, Survival.
Once he knew there was nothing he could do for Sally, the 27-year-old ski instructor started to fight for his own life. It was the middle of winter and he was lying on a slab of concrete with a rock puncturing his back, wearing only his boxer shorts. “I was wet, cold, muddy,” he says. For the next few hours, he was intermittently tortured by the icy water laced with diesel and sewage that would ebb and flow through the concrete tomb in which he was trapped.
“Before then, I would have said I was claustrophobic.” But trapped in the darkness, with only 3cm of room between his face and the concrete for the next 65 hours, he found that in situations of complete helplessness “you actually get an amazing feeling of calmness come over you”.
Diver was raised in Melbourne with his intrepid, no-nonsense Glaswegian parents, Annette and Steve, and his brother, Euan, who was one of the first-responders on the scene. They hiked the Thredbo mountains at weekends, and sailed, swam and fished. At just six weeks old, in terrible weather, Diver ascended Mount Kosciuszko, the highest mountain in Australia, strapped to his mum. “I wonder how we survived,” he laughs, recalling a photograph he recently found from a holiday in Nepal, where he’s teetering on the edge of a glacier beside roaring, class-five rapids. Alone. “We were in places that kids probably should never have been.
“Walking nine hours a day is not a young person’s idea of fun but where we went and what we did definitely made me who I was.” The pain of trekking in the rain, carrying heavy bags “did make me a much more resilient person as an adult.”
By the time he started university, Diver knew he wanted to be a ski instructor but decided the sensible thing to do would be to get a degree in hotel management. At The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, he met Sally, a beautiful blond woman with an infectious smile. “I’d always had this old fashioned vision that I was going to meet someone who had similar outdoor interests and we were going to get married and have a family and live happily ever after.”
After dating for four years, he proposed in Sydney and they celebrated their engagement on Bondi beach with fish and chips and a bottle of red wine. They got married in November 1995, then moved to Canada, where they both found jobs in the hospitality industry at the SilverStar mountain resort in British Columbia – Sally as a restaurant manager and Diver as a ski instructor. Six months later, they returned home.
They arrived back in Australia in the winter, where Sally lined up work at the Thredbo Alpine Hotel – the European-style ski resort in the Snowy Mountains of New South Wales that Diver now manages – and Diver completed his second season on the slopes. Eight weeks before the landslide, they moved from a rented property in town to Bimbadeen Lodge, the staff block for the Thredbo alpine village that was available thanks to Sally’s job. “If I could have made that decision slightly differently, then the world would be a different place.”
The day of the landslide had been like any other. Diver finished work on the slopes at 4.30pm and met Sally at the hotel so they could do their weekly shop in Jindabyne, a larger town half an hour away. They bought some takeaway noodles at Nuggets Crossing shopping centre before driving back to the lodge, watching TV and falling asleep early.
A little before midnight on 30 July 1997, the 108km road embankment holding up Alpine Way began sliding down the hillside of Thredbo. A leaking water main had saturated the space below the road, causing a landslide that pushed the two-storied timber Carinya Lodge from its foundations down the mountain and on to the four-storey Bimbadeen Lodge, which was made from reinforced concrete, at high speed, burying 19 people. “I look at that 27 years on and I can’t work out how I survived,” says Diver.
He was trapped in the rubble for three days, during which: “I was in so much physical pain from the cold.” He started urinating on his frostbitten feet to keep them warm. He’s not sure if he was hallucinating or dreaming, but towards the end of the ordeal his mind took him to warmer places. At one point, he was an actor on a movie set somewhere in the desert, at others his mum would be rubbing his feet to warm them up, just as she did when he was a child on the ski lifts. But loud noises would bring him back to reality, which was getting more grim by the minute.
Outside, there were more than 600 rescuers working tirelessly in overnight temperatures of -12C with a wind chill of -30C to find signs of life. The cutting equipment and chainsaws kept freezing, while the lodge itself was on a steep incline of the hill and the instability of the land was making the operation particularly perilous. Any sudden movement could trigger another landslide and further endanger the rescuers, as well as any survivors trapped underneath.
“I knew there were all these other people in the building above me and I thought that they had been rescuing them,” Diver says of the 15 to 20 people who lived in the lodge. “I kept thinking: ‘That’s OK, get everyone else. I’ll be down at the bottom.’”
Amid the din of saws hacking through concrete, firefighter Steve Hirst heard a sound at the 54-hour mark.
Stuart remembers him shouting: “Rescue party above. Can you hear me?”
The sound of the man’s voice gave him new energy after what had felt like a lifetime of being trapped, but it would take another 11 hours to free him – and it was just the start of an intense emotional rollercoaster. Diver realised that the first responders might not be able to get him out. He was trapped 2 metres underground, under three concrete slabs, so the team had to dig a tunnel sideways to reach him.
It was paramedic Paul Featherstone’s job to keep him positive, assessing his medical condition and talking to him about the mountains – his happy place – before he was dug and drilled out in 20 minute shifts.
After 65 hours, they managed to get a stretcher to Diver, carving a hole large enough to hoist him out. He was passed down a line towards the ambulance, eventually emerging into the light. It was a feeling of “absolute elation,” he says. “I felt really good because obviously adrenaline is pumping through your body and I thought: ‘Great, I’ll just go down to the pub and have a beer.’”
But it wasn’t going to be that way. “When they finally got to me, they reckoned that, by the physical state I was in, I only had a few hours to live. My energy was completely depleted. I had nothing left. I’d lost 15kg during that 65 hours,” he says. “I was very, very close to the end.”
Diver was airlifted to a hospital in Canberra, where he spent a week recovering. He still has some issues with his left foot – the frostbite had affected his circulation and the muscles were wasted, making it ache – but overall he made a complete and speedy recovery. It wasn’t until four days later that he found out he was the sole survivor. “There were 18 people who died, so you can’t just go, ‘Yeah, I’m the survivor!’” he says. “I already had my own loss with Sally but when you magnify that with all the other people that was a big burden.”
His rescue made him a nationwide celebrity overnight. The landslide had been one of the first incidents where the aftermath was broadcast live for the world to see and a media circus quickly began. “That first six months definitely took a toll on my mental health,” he says. “I never got a chance to grieve properly.”
At the time, Diver was criticised for coming across as cold and unemotional when he was talking about the accident because his voice never wavered nor did he cry. He says now that he was trying to be positive in the name of those that had died. “For me, that emotional side, at that point, was very much a personal thing. If I wanted to cry, that was for me to cry.” And that’s exactly what he did – the minute he got home, he would break down.
In those early days, Diver self-medicated with alcohol. “I was a 27-year-old man and I was going to do it all myself,” he says. “When you drink and you have a really bad hangover, the only thing you need to think about the next day is the hangover. I joke about it now but you know that’s the cycle some people get into and never get out. Luckily, I had enough good people around me.”
One of those good people was Rosanna Cossettini, who had been part of Thredbo’s tightknit community for a decade, and who Diver started dating two years after the landslide. She was strong and “in some ways my protector”, going through the emotional struggles of that period with him. “How long are you meant to grieve is always the question,” he says. “It’s farcical. Some people can grieve for two weeks and some people grieve for ever. I think you do grieve forever, it’s just on levels and scales. But I was lucky enough to meet Rosanna.”
They married three years later, but, in 2004, shortly after they returned from an extended honeymoon that took them to the UK, Europe and Thailand, Rosanna was diagnosed with breast cancer. There were operations, chemotherapy and three months of radiation, then five years of hormone therapy before she went into remission. The harsh drugs sent her body into early menopause. Rosanna had always wanted a child but a family didn’t seem to be on the cards for the couple.
Miraculously, she did fall pregnant, but at the 10-and-a-half-week scan the baby had no heartbeat. “That was really devastating.” Diver gave up on the idea of having children but six months later Rosanna became pregnant again and this time they had Alessia.
Soon after, Rosanna received a metastatic cancer diagnosis that had no chance of survival. “Surviving the landslide definitely gave me a lot more compassion for others. It gave me a better understanding of people who are going through pain,” Diver writes in his book. “I think the best way to describe it is that it matured me.”
“With Sally, I went through a hugely traumatic death, where I wasn’t able to say goodbye to someone,” he says. With Rosanna, he had “a whole different experience.” It was slow, caring for her for 11 years through the treatment, but there was time. Together, they were able to prepare for her death. “There was only one night that Rosanna and Alessia weren’t together.”
Diver says the landslide does not define him, and he doesn’t want Rosanna’s death to define Alessia. He tells his daughter: “We’re going to live our lives as loving, caring, strong people so that we can keep mum’s memory alive.” He is thankful to have experienced so much love from Sally and Rosanna; and 14-year-old Alessia is his greatest joy. “The great opportunity of my life – coming through these multiple traumas – is that they’ve all taught me so much.”
He is a huge advocate for men’s mental health and seeking help from professionals. “Everyone wants to be resilient, it’s the buzzword.” But Diver wants people to know that it takes hard work to be able to adapt to change, and the process is always individual.
It might come as a surprise that Diver has chosen to stay in Thredbo after so much pain but the community and the mountains he grew up in are his “spiritual place”. It’s where he goes to clear his mind, and he believes that this environment has been fundamental to his recovery. “Everything that you do in the mountains, whether it’s physical activity, whether it’s the extremes of weather, just adds to a place that brings me a lot of calmness,” he says. “When you look at the mountains, there are just so many possibilities.”